A Now Defunct Political Salad Analogy

 

For much of my life, my salad analogy view of political parties has been that Tory politicians are a bit like tomatoes. They are mostly ok, you get some occasional bad ones, and sometimes a sweet juicy one that's really good. Whereas Labour politicians are more like celery. Most of them aren't very good when compared to tomatoes, but occasionally there's a half decent one that you still wouldn't choose over a decent tomato, but you might if the tomatoes were out of stock or had gone bad. 

But I don’t think my salad analogy can be proffered these days, because when elections come around, we are really being asked to choose between several varieties of celery.

This is the least friendly to the market, least conservative Conservative Party this country has ever had. They deserve to lose the election, not because Labour would be any better (they’ll be even worse), but because of how shamelessly the Conservatives have betrayed the principles for which they once stood. You may recall, in Dante's conceived foray through the circles of hell, he saw treachery as the lowest place of all. A party that has been so consistently treacherous towards its own values is the most dishonourable of all.

Addressing The Best Argument Against Free Will To Show How We Do Have Free Will

 

In the article on my side bar (link here), I laid out my thesis on free will and determinism - and I expanded on it even more comprehensively in a chapter in my book The Genius of the Invisible God (which isn’t yet available). In that book, I explain why part of the genius of God’s creation is that we do have free will but in a deterministic universe – although that’s too involved for this post, so you might have to buy the book when it comes out to see why. 😊

Below is some leftover material that I thought I’d turn into an article, as there’s lots of interesting stuff still there.

In most cases, three quarters of a problem is solved when concepts are defined clearly, so let me start by defining free will as the ability to make choices in a way in which you could have made different choices. Under that definition, perhaps the best argument against free will, would be as follows. There are only two types of decision you can make in life - a decision based on your desire to do something, or a decision based on being forced to do something. Every single decision you make falls into one of those categories; you either desired to do it or you were forced to do it against your natural desire. Your desire to do something means you wanted to do it because you still preferred to do it when considered against all other alternatives.

To avoid a possible misunderstanding here, your desire to do something doesn't just mean doing the things you enjoy doing or are glad you are doing. You might say, for example, I had my Covid vaccine, but I didn't really desire to do it - I hate needles, and felt compelled to do it to protect myself and others from Covid. But that doesn't mean you didn't desire to do it. You still weighed up the other options and decided that having the vaccine was the decision that provided the preferred utility amongst competing preferences. You may not have enjoyed your Covid vaccine, and you may wish you lived in a world where you didn't need it, but in having it when no one forced you to have it, you desired to have it. When you do something you wouldn't ordinarily choose to do with enthusiasm, it's still because your desire to do it is stronger than competing desires, because the benefits to you outweigh the costs.

Having hopefully convinced you that every decision is either something you desire or something you are forced to do, an argument is then put forward to suggest that this means we don't have free will. The reasoning goes that if you are forced to do something that you didn't desire, then that isn't free will, but if you did desire it, that isn't free will either because we don't control or choose what we desire. Suppose one evening I fancy watching either Frasier or Seinfeld, and I can't choose which I prefer. I desire either Frasier or Seinfeld, but I didn't control my desire to narrow it down to those two options. Suppose I think about it for another couple of minutes, and then opt for Frasier - I did so because my desire for Frasier was slightly greater than my desire for Seinfeld. But I can't choose to desire Frasier more than Seinfeld - it occurred within my internal cognitive machinery. We can't control any of our desires, it seems - they happen to us within our subconscious, based on all our experiences over a lifetime. Think of something you don't desire right now. You probably don't desire that you will fall over and break your pelvis this evening. And if you tried your hardest to desire it, you still wouldn't be able to.

You may be thinking, hang on, suppose I had a slight preference for Frasier, but I chose to override that desire and watch Seinfeld instead - doesn't that demonstrate that I have free will? Alas, no, that doesn't solve the problem, because all it shows is that your desire to demonstrate your belief in free will and watch Seinfeld was stronger than your desire to watch Frasier - you still didn't choose or have any control over the desire. We can't change something we desire into something we don't desire, or vice versa, without desiring to change the desire. At any point, the desire comes upon us, we don't come upon it.

This is perhaps the most persuasive argument against free will; we either do things we are forced to do, in which case it's not free will; or we to something we desire to do, but we can't control our desires, in which case it's not free will either. And to take it further, if we don't have free will, then how can Christianity make sense, given that it's predicated on our being sinners who must freely chose to repent and accept the price Jesus paid for our forgiveness on the cross? How can God punish us for not repenting if we have no desire to repent, and no control over our desire to repent, or our desire to desire to repent? Taken at face value, it seems to put us in an unenviable position that potentially undermines the framework of Christianity.

Yet even that argument, as well made as it appears to be, doesn't convince me - because it doesn't seem to be speaking about the reality we know and experience. Even if we don't fully understand all the conditions and antecedent causes for our decisions, our desires and our will, we still live as though we have the ability to make choices in a way in which we could have made different choices – and that is what I will now unpack.

When you make an ethical statement - "Jack should put back on the shelf that laptop he has just picked up to steal" you are making a statement as though Jack has a choice. Even if you think it's an illusion, you still think as though Jack is as agent of choices with other alternatives. If Jack goes through with the theft, you might feel angry with him - which suggests there is a sense in which you feel like he made the wrong choice. Under hard determinism, for those who say our sense of free will is illusory, are they really just angry at the universe’s deterministic algorithms? Perhaps they think you are, but it doesn't really feel like they are - it feels more like they are angry with Jack, in this instance.

Whichever way we cut the cloth, we act as though people are responsible for their actions. Suppose your son comes home from school, happy that he got top marks in his exam - you would feel a sense of pride in is achievements. But this feeling suggests he got top marks by efforts that could have produced alternative outcomes. Feeling a sense of pride feels like an emotional response to a set of choices that someone you love has made. Would you feel pride if you really felt like your son's achievements were all just part of the universe's pre-programmed determinism, over which he had no control? I have my doubts. Other things we do, like offer advice and guidance, or think hard about what course of action we should take against several alternatives, are done with our minds presupposing that agency and will are fundamental elements in the equation.

As I said at the start, I actually do think the universe is ultimately deterministic in the hard sense, it’s just that our free will is of a different and more complex nature to what most people think. But even if we take the standard free will vs. determinism debate on the free-will-denier’s terms - when we try to decide which we accept out of free will or determinism, we actually rationalise as though there is some free will, but yet in accepting determinism over free will, our reasoning process is behaving as though determinism is false.

Furthermore, we act as though there is a point to doing things, and a purpose too. Think of your wife and children, you home life, your job; you act as though these things are important - to you, to your family, to the wider society - but you don't act as though you presuppose you had to do action x, or that it was impossible to not do x. There's not a good reason to do something if you are inevitably going to do it, and can't not do it - yet you act as though there is a good reason to do it. In a purely deterministic, free-will-denying world, everything is either inevitable or impossible - and even hard determinists don't think, speak and act as though that's true. If you don't think, speak and act in accordance with what you claim to believe, that the belief is somewhat undermined by a stronger interpretation of reality that you, the determinist, lives by - this potentially defeats the foundation of the belief.

A deeper dive
Now we need to go deeper. Existence is a complex subject, and things exist in a diverse range of ways. Ditto the nature of being 'free' and having 'will'. Consequently, the notion of free will existing is a spectrum, not merely a binary proposition, bound up in the complex dynamic between first and third person phenomenology. Reality comes in the first person and third person perspectives - that is, one's view of oneself, and the third person perspective of that self. It's a hasty presumption to discount the concepts of 'free' and 'will' merely through the lens of the highly deterministic particulate third person account of human beings. Just because we believe we have got to grips with mental activity from a third person perspective, I don't think it means we can use that as a viable basis for ruling out degrees of free will from the first person perspective.

The first person perspective is a different category of consideration from the outside third person perspective - there are aspects of first person cognition that transcend the elemental measurements of third-person empirical analysis, even though third person manipulations of the brain can throw up some quite bizarre altered states of consciousness. Despite those bizarre anomalies, the fact remains that freedom from the first person perspective has a category of intrapersonal depth and fecundity that is beyond the lower resolution third person exploration (remember the famous 'king of infinite space' observation in Hamlet). This kind of freedom may well belong more in the arts than the sciences (although it can quite easily belong in both).

Under the first person perspective, there is a complex multidimensional spectrum of freedom, conditioned by a whole range of tenets of personality and character qualities: truthseeking, intelligence, authenticity, temperament, psychology, discipline, aspiration, conscientiousness, goodness, ethics, and so on. If you take the positive elements of the above, juxtaposed with the negative (good better than bad, truth better than falsehood, intelligence better than stupidity, etc) then you'll find that the individual self can enjoy a greater kind of freedom by wedding themselves to the positive values, and a more constricting life by wedding themselves to the negative values. Love the truth, and the world expands beyond your wildest dreams; love goodness and your reality opens up into a joy not previously anticipated, that sort of thing.

Given the primary facet of reality is phenomenological, I think it is the case that these tenets of what we might call 'freedom' and 'will' do exist. The first person reality in which they are experienced differs from the third person deterministic reality measured from the outside, but we enter very shaky grounds if we use that pretext to say it doesn't exist. I think there is also Biblical truth in this notion, which St. Augustine taps into when he says that serving God is greater freedom for us. We read from Christ that ‘Everyone who sins is a slave to sin’ (John 8:34), but in the next breath that "‘If the Son sets you free you will be free indeed’ (John 8:36). That seems to me to hint at a connection between greater freedom and a greater life if we embrace Divine things and die to those old habits.

People ensnared by naïve scientism often just can’t get to grips with the fact that there is a complex set of phenomenological first person experiential testimonies that not only transcend the third person perspective of mind, they actually transcend the third person’s suite of knowledge on how physical reality actually operates. Moreover, we need an up and running first person mental structure that integrates our experiential qualia into coherent patterns before we can even begin to discuss the third person ordinances of physics, so to suggest that the latter has a more primary existence in terms of free will over the former is quite a dodgy place to go. As soon as we become a responsible agent, and think and act as though progress can be made, and that some things have a higher value than other things, we live as though free choices are an integral part of that state of being.

If we can review the past, contemplate the present, and make forecasts about the future in relation to our decisions and values, then we operate as though free will is part of the intellectual and emotional substrate of our life. If as a result we get to partake in the world and relate to each other, then phenomenologically there are no real grounds for denying that choice and agency are fundamental to first person selfhood.

Bogus Communities

 

A method people often use in socio-politics when they want to deceive you is to distort language in the hope that it will act as an emotional sleight of hand trick to get you on side. An example of this is when they insert the word ‘community’ after an adjective, acronym or slogan to fraudulently impute shared views and beliefs among a group of people who are only tenuously connected by having the thing in common under observation.

You can’t even put the cat out these days without hearing about the LGBTQ community, the black community, the trans community, the incel community, the even more absurdly entitled BAME community, and so on. To suggest that these groups of people resemble a community, with common attitudes, a shared viewpoint and a collective vision is preposterous.

Communities do exist, and they are important, and provide lots of value. But cases like the aforementioned do not have the typical properties of a community, and almost certainly never will. Most of the things they have in common have very little to do with their skin colour, sexuality, etc – these so called ‘communities’ are so diverse in views, beliefs, character, age, ethnicity, backroad, experiences, intelligence and education that it’s absurd and demeaning to lump them all together with a faux-communitarian identity just to score cheap social or political points, or to further the agendas of misjudged and extremist ideologies.

Sunday Faith Series: Counterintuitive Christianity - When It's Like The Monty Hall Problem

 

You may have heard of the famous Monty Hall problem:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

 

The answer is counterintuitive, but you actually have a better chance of winning by switching. The stick or switch scenario produces surprise and objection, with complaint from those who cannot see that switching increases one’s chances of winning (you can play here and see why switching is the best strategy). The main thing to understand about the Monty Hall problem is that it shows intuitive notions cannot always accept conditional probabilities very easily.

 

There are a lot of counterintuitive things about this world. We know from quantum mechanics and relativity that the very small and the very fast give us counterintuitive conditions that confound our expectations. We know that in the past a functional eye or a planetary system seemed too improbable to have evolved by nature's mathematical and physical laws. Furthermore, when one considers things like monotonic voting systems, 0.999 denoting a real number that can be shown to be 1, water being heavier in liquid form than in solid form due to the latter's reduction in density, or water vapour being lighter than air, our expectations seem confounded – particularly at a young age. The world is full of facts that confound our expectations.

 

We see the same thing in economics, when people frequently don’t understand at first glance why having safer cars causes more accidents, and why contraception actually increases unwanted pregnancies, and why stronger filtered cigarettes could lead to a higher incidence of lung cancer, and why lower percentage alcohol could result in more drunkenness, and why banning the transportation of animals for testing may well increase animal suffering, not reduce it.

 

I believe Christianity to be the world's most powerful and important truth, but it is quite a counterintuitive truth, which is a part of what St Paul is getting at when he says that no one can say "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3).

 

When I was exploring the faith in my late teens and early twenties, I was struck by the apparent chicken and egg problem of belief: that one cannot know the truth of Christianity without a direct relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, but one doesn't have a direct relationship with God through the Holy Spirit except by knowing the truth of Christianity.

 

I would say that Christianity is the most counterintuitive truth with which we interface, not just because theology is the most complex subject in the world, but because the central essence of its grace is so outrageous and underserved that it can easily confound expectations, particularly for those who are primed to think of life in terms of a personal moral compass of meritocracy. Anyone who thinks morality is the be all and end all of human progress is going to find a faith based on a free gift of undeserved grace rather alien to the intuition.

 

By way of an analogy, Christianity is fairly similar to a riddle: that is, a riddle in prospect is often tricky, but in retrospect, once one understands how it is solved - it is obvious and transparent. Once one solves the riddle of Christianity and looks back in retrospect at their own journey of exploration (which can take weeks, months or years), one sees that part of the complexity was because consideration of the central essence of grace was absent from the riddle while it was still in prospect. Don't get me wrong, I am not comparing the Divine message to some sort of cryptic message He has set for us to solve – I use the term ‘riddle’ only with respect to how complex subjects seem at first obscure and counterintuitive, and clearer and more obvious once the logic trail induces clarity.

 

I contend that in Christianity we are being asked to consider something more counterintuitively profound than anything else the world has ever known - that of outrageous Divine grace. It appears to be contrary to every metric we value: we study hard, we get our rewards with good exam results; we work hard, we get paid and possibly promotion; we strive for moral probity, and we become a good person; we commit a crime, we go to prison - the list goes on. The commonality with these metrics is that the rewards outputted are roughly commensurate with the efforts inputted. Christianity radically departs from this worldly perspective, offering an outrageous offer of grace that makes perfect sense from the inside but beggars belief from the outside (I have personal experience of both perspectives).

 

To be a Christian you have to suspend all thoughts of getting better on your own merits, and accept a free gift of grace as a framework for becoming that better person. To fully live we have to die to self; to gain in abundance we must sacrifice; when we suffer we are to consider it 'pure joy'; and to lead a church congregation involves serving humbly bottom up not top down. No wonder it seems strange from the outside.

Forgiving our enemies is another aspect of grace where the world is often off kilter with Christianity. Humanity has a voracious appetite for justice and righting wrongs - yet when something amazing happens, like a mother forgives her son's killer, and victims of war torture become reconciled with their torturers through a grace-abundant reconciliation, we get a little sense of what it's like when God's goodness is working inside people, and why millions of highly intelligent and educated and worldly people have accepted Christ as Lord based on the fact that He did the same thing as Creator Himself on the cross.

 

And there is perhaps no greater image of the continuativeness of Christianity than the Lord Jesus, Creator of the universe, washing the feet of His disciples. It's only when one accepts Him as Lord and Saviour that that action makes more sense. And that is probably because in discovering that our God came to serve, we uncover that other very counterintuitive thing about forgiving our enemies and those who have done us most harm.

 

The Algorithmic Nature of Christianity

 

Christianity has many cases whereby if you don't experience the primary truth, you cannot know all the other truths that emerge from it. I call this the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity. An algorithm is a set of instructions or rules to solve a specific problem or perform a particular task. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones (starting from 0 and 1). The algorithm involves defining the first two numbers and then generating subsequent Fibonacci numbers based on the sum of the last two. So, the sequence begins: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Cooking is another example of something that's algorithmic, in that the recipe provides step-by-step instructions on how to make a meal. If you don't know the recipe for a dish, you can't know how to cook it.

Even more profoundly, the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity provides us with some incisive wisdom, especially regarding what atheists can't possibly see if they don't have or know certain things, and how Christians might bring this to their attention. This is important because Christians can spend inordinate amounts of time debating numerous topics surrounding God's existence, convincing and unconvincing evidence for the Christian faith, reliability of scripture, whether the world looks like God created it, philosophical, moral and ethical propositions around God's existence, and so forth. But while those discussions are interesting and worthwhile for augmenting our understanding, they are not what's fundamentally at play here when Christians and non-Christians discuss the truth of the faith. Because the Bible shows in several places that if non-Christians lack the algorithmic base for discovery and revelation, they cannot possibly arrive at the truths at which they claim they want to arrive.

Here are some examples. The issue with which the majority of atheists are preoccupied is why God seems invisible to them, and why, according to them, He's never given them the kind of personal appearance they crave. But Jesus declares in John 14:8-9 that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father. He then reproaches Philip with the question "How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?". Atheists who utter the demand 'show me God' are making the same error. Additionally, in 1 John 2:23 we hear Jesus' truth restated "No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also". The algorithm here is basically "If you want to know God, you have to recognise that Jesus is Lord". That is, it's impossible to know God exists without having revelation that Jesus is God and the Saviour of the world (see also, John 14:6, where Jesus says, "No one comes to the father except through me"). All the time that unbelievers are arguing about the many things they argue about, they are merely formulating artificial distractions that are averting their attention from the crux of the matter.

The same is true with loving God; "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" 1 John 4:8. The algorithm here is basically "To know God is to love Him, and to love Him is to recognise Jesus as Lord." If an individual does not know who Jesus is, they can't love God; and if they can't love God, it's impossible to know Him. This is confirmed further in 1 John 4:15 "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God."

Another example connected to 1 John 4:15 is that in order to know God, an individual has to have the Holy Spirit living inside them. St. Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit. The algorithm here is basically "If you don't have the Holy Spirit, you can't know God". That is, without recognising Jesus as Lord and without the Holy Spirit living inside of you, it's not possible to be aware of God's existence in any intimate way, because the personal encounter only comes from the Holy Spirit.

Now a third example, about the concept of sin; there is an algorithmic truth expressed in 1 John 1, which says, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." And right after, "If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us". The algorithm here is basically "To have the truth in us, and to apprehend the Bible as the word of truth, we must recognise the nature of our sin". If you don't acknowledge the truth of sin in the world, then you cannot recognise your own sin, and therefore, you cannot recognise the grace that saves us from sin. And not being able to recognise sin and grace means we cannot accept Jesus as Lord, and we cannot receive the Holy Spirit.

Just the above components of the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity already speak an awful lot about the barrier unbelievers have in recognising who God is. They will not find it possible to believe in God if they do not know who He is. Another algorithmic consideration is brought to bear in the quality of humility. Without humility, I do not believe we can have the door opened to knowing God (Road to Damascus encounters like St. Paul’s may provide the odd exception, but the rule generally holds). Proverbs 22:4 says, "The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honour and life", and in James 4:10 each of us is told "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you". The algorithm here is basically "If you want revelation and exaltation from God, you must seek with humility".

We can see already how all the above is connected algorithmically, where humility is what leads us to understand sin; and understanding sin is what leads us to understand the need for the grace of our Saviour; and recognising Jesus as our Saviour leads us to understand the price He paid for us on the cross; and from that we know God's truth through revelation imparted by our being in receipt of the Holy Spirit.

For the atheist, then, who persistently argues against the Christian faith with claims of not enough evidence or feeling devoid of any person revelation, the algorithmic considerations above are of paramount importance, because it is not possible for them to have their demands for God's existence and revelation satisfied if, algorithmically, they do not yet have the recipe required.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 2: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy

 

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them of the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 2 – taken from Letter 17: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy

“Let's go back to basics in economics. For any quantity of a good or service, there is a demand price and a supply price. The demand price is the price at which consumers want to consume, and the supply price is the price at which suppliers want to sell. There is only one quantity for which the demand price and the supply price are in equilibrium. If external forces are acting so that consumers are paying less than the demand price, competition among consumers will bid up the price; or if suppliers are receiving more than the supply price, competition among suppliers will push down the price. For that one quantity of good or service whereby the demand price and the supply price are in equilibrium, competitive forces must be acting optimally with no external interference in the price system. When the quantity is lower than equal, the demand price will be higher than the supply price; when the quantity is higher than equal, the demand price will be lower than the supply price.

Lots of external factors contribute to or act upon the price system to offset the logic outlined above - taxes, price controls, subsidies, queues, shortages, over-consumption, social costs, product waste, and so forth -  and it is only a relatively free trade and competitive forces that ensure that suppliers receive the desired supply price and demanders pay the desired demand price (remember, this optimal measurement is measured at the margin). The important corollary here is that when the above conditions are met, the quantity is the only unique quantity at which the demand and supply prices are optimally set at the equilibrium.

If you understand the logic behind why optimal prices are contingent upon supply and demand, you also understand that prices act as vital information signals, and that they are all inextricably connected to each other. The price of chocolate biscuits for supplier A is driven by what suppliers B, C and D sell them for, but also by the price of jam doughnuts, cream cakes, fruit and cereal. The price of your cinema ticket, your railway ticket, your blue suit, your Asus laptop, and so forth, is driven by the millions of substitutes (of the same kind and different alternatives) available in the marketplace. And if you understand all those things, you can apply the same logic to other areas of human incentives and behaviour.

If all the above is making sense, we can turn this on to the subject of climate change. For the past 150 years, humans have seen a progression-explosion in terms of material wealth and increased living standards, and that has been primarily driven by capitalism and science. The engine that has fuelled this great enrichment has been the harnessing of cheap, affordable energy. Globally, the predominant cheap, affordable energy has been fossil fuels, and it still will be for the foreseeable future. Pretty much everything that drives the economy and helps prices stay close to equilibrium involves fossil fuels (either directly or indirectly). It will be good when we have found alternatives to fossil fuels (or offsetting techniques) that meet all the criteria for optimality I laid out earlier, and we are doing that, and will do it at an even more expansive rate in the future - but right now, we are not advanced enough to dispense with all fossil fuels or reach the point of so-called 'net zero'.

Given that climate change agendas never involve the kind of language, logic or arguments I've outlined above, it should be evident for any who still need convincing that the climate 'net zero' project is miles short of the requisite level of sound reasoning or understanding of the full complexity of the reality - it is a socio-political project driven by narrow self-interest, fear and tribalism. If we can't yet do without fossil fuels, and if a significant proportion of the world's population still requires them to a) continue to build up their industry and advance further on their journey of progression to higher living standards, b) purchase them most optimally in accordance with the price system's information signals, and c) not have the price of their most demanded natural resources bid up artificially by self-serving, narrow-minded politicians, then what the climate extremists are imposing is absurd, unrealistic, selfish, harmful and immoral. Anyone can oversimplify the world and make ridiculous demands on politicians that sadly seem all-too keen to accede to the madness - but it has very little basis in reality, and pays almost no proper regard for how the world actually works and the complex considerations attached to these propositions.”

The Relationship Between Science & Christianity

 

First published today on Network Norfolk:

In this age, the most science-friendly, progressive and technologically enriched age, many people believe that the world has little room for Christianity anymore. There are two false premises here: first, that science can ever act as some kind of substitute for Christianity; and second, that science is like our mother, and Christianity is like an annoying cousin that will soon pass away and only live on in the ashes of our memory.

Both premises get this wrong: Christianity is more like our parent, and science is more like its daughter. Christianity helped give birth to science - it laid down the truth-seeking, fact-finding qualities that would eventually help usher in empirical science, which began its infancy in about the 12th century, and has taken the shape of an upwards curve ever since.

Now, given what I've just said, this next part may seem counterintuitive - but that does not mean that we needed Christianity, or any religion, for science to come along. Science would have demonstrated its utility on our progress whether we were religious nor not. The fundamental reason for this is because science is only a tiny subset of how we interface with the world - it is like a daughter because it comes along after to explain things we've already partially discovered. It is like putting on a pair of glasses to give focus to an otherwise blurry vision.

Given that Christianity is explaining something outside of the purlieus of science, yet also heavily reliant on science as its canvas or substrate, it can only be enriched by science in the same way that other things in life are enriched by science - through explanatory methods. And we mustn't therefore put the cart of science before the horse of initial probing, because we usually find the causality is the other way around. Biblical accounts of salt preserving food from decay happened long before we understood how the preservation works. The same is true of canned food - we were putting food in cans long before we knew about how germs operated to food's detriment. We knew that penicillin kills bacteria long before we learned how it destroys the cell walls of bacteria during gestation.

But just as scientists were more the beneficiaries of new technology than the benefactors (and not the other way around as so many think), so too was science a beneficiary of Christianity, not a rival to it. There's no doubt that extremist religiosity has retarded the progress of science over years too, and that is a shame, because the rewards of Christianity and the rewards of science, while different in scope, are part of the same goal - improvement and transformation.

Whether science helps you cure a disease, travel to Africa as a missionary, print Bibles, speak the gospel through a microphone in an auditorium, feed the hungry or shelter the homeless, it is not a rival or a substitute for other human progressions. Similarly, the methods of science, such as empirical enquiry, logic, analysing data, and interpreting facts and test-based evidence are very much part of the domain of interpreting the truth of Christianity too. Even Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder.

Religious language sits on the border between the revealed truths and the truths still shrouded in mystery. It exists at the gateway between what is revealed and what remains mysterious. Theological language, such as that found in the stories, metaphors and allegories in scripture, opens the gate so that that which was too profound and complex to be fully expressed, could be partially expressed in hints of what is to come. This process is also central to the Incarnation, where God became a man in Christ in order that we could know Him and know the true depth of His love for us.

Why Anselm's Ontological Argument Is Better Than You Think

Anselm’s ontological argument basically goes like this:

1) God is defined as the absolute greatest conceivable being.

2) Something that must exist is inherently greater than something that might not exist.

3) If we entertain the idea that the greatest conceivable being (God) might not exist, we open the door to imagining something even greater.

4) However, it becomes illogical to think that there could be something greater than the greatest conceivable being.

5) Therefore, the conclusion is that the greatest conceivable being, God, cannot be thought not to exist and, consequently, must exist.

It’s an argument that’s been widely dismissed by those who don’t know what it’s like to know God, and perhaps even widely misunderstood by those who do. Let me assure you that if you think Anselm’s argument simply means thinking about certain concepts in a way that argues them into existence, then you’re not giving this kind of thinking its due gravitas.

It’s not that the “absolute greatest conceivable being” is conceived, and therefore, because it’s conceived it must exist in the form of God. It’s that the absolute greatest conceivable being, if such a thing exists, has to be something that we mean when we talk about God, because God is the absolute greatest conceivable thing, and His absolute greatness is a property of His being, rather like how oxygen is a property of combustion. If you begin to think what good, better and great mean in relation to an objective standard, we can make progress. In a maths exam, good might be getting all your arithmetic right; better might be getting your algebra right too; and great might mean solving a complex problem that no one else has solved. A plugged-in microwave is better for cooking than one that is unplugged. A chair with four legs is steadier than a chair with one leg missing. A better maths paper, microwave or chair is one that is close to the optimal properties and functions of the object than one that is defective. Good, better and great are part of the thought process that leads us all the way to greatest.

God is not only what we mean when we talk about the absolute greatest conceivable being, we also mean that the absolute greatest conceivable being is a fundamental property of God. The difference is subtle, but essential in examining our morality, our philosophy and our psychology, where there is a hierarchical value structure of better or worse, until we hypothetically conceive of the highest. To conceive of the highest means acknowledging the reality of God at the top, it doesn’t mean we understand it – just as we can conceive of the size of our universe in terms of light years, without being able to comprehend it on such a scale. The “absolute greatest conceivable being” is where we arrive conceptually when we keep trying to climb up higher on our hierarchical value structure, and the three person God is who we meet when we understand that He is at the top of it as the “absolute greatest conceivable being”.

Anselm is more correct than even perhaps he himself realised (although that might be doing him a disservice) – in that, in the hierarchical value structure, there does exist a higher and higher standard that, if we keep going upwards, leads eventually to the notion of perfection – the very quality we understand about God Himself. You may be tempted to say that perfection is an idea we can conceive, but that it doesn’t actually exist in real terms. But this presents a problem of limited vision rather than limited ontological scope – because we know the hierarchical value structure exists in an objective sense, so we are on shaky grounds if we deny that the thing at the very top of it exists.

We can now apply this to existence itself. In the hierarchy of ontological reality, the highest form of existence is something that has a necessary existence, not a contingent existence. A thing that has a necessary existence is also something that we speak of in terms of one of the fundamental properties of God (called Aseity), in that God cannot ‘not’ exist. In our own conceived hierarchical structure, being perfect has a higher objective standing than the set of all imperfect things, and having a necessary existence has a higher objective standing than the set of all contingent things. Both of those attributes are properties of the God who has made Himself known in Christ (as per Psalm 18:30, Psalm 90:2 and Colossians 1:17). To know God is to know He exists; but if we knew Him fully, we’d know why He cannot possibly not exist. 

Further Reading: Exploring The Ontological Argument For God's Existence

Edit to add:  Some critics argue that a definition alone cannot bring something into existence - and they are right. We cannot define unicorns or perfect chairs into being. But Anselm's insight is not simply definitional. Rather, he points us to the structure of our value-laden reality, where the concept of “the greatest” is not arbitrary but embedded in how we understand good, better, and best - not just morally, but metaphysically. The argument becomes not that God exists because we define Him, but that the very possibility of objective greatness presupposes a grounding being at the top - one whose existence is necessary, not contingent.                   

The Self's Internal Litmus Test Of Credibility

 

A combination of psychological literature and an honest appraisal of our inner self make it pretty clear that we don’t easily think things through with careful consideration, using rigorous logical and empirical analysis as tools to arrive at our views and then respond with the appropriate behaviour. We actually become driven by our emotional needs and utilitarian enticements in establishing what we want to believe, and then we employ the confirmation bias in looking to justify those beliefs. That is, we put the cart of incentives before the horse of truthseeking and the reins of reason, when it should be the other way around.

That doesn’t mean this method is always wrong; emotions and will are great signposts towards many profound discovered truths and artistic expressions, and should not be gainsaid or trivialised complacently. But with matters involving complex considerations, dynamical reasoning and important facts, then this cart-before-the-horse tendency is a malady on the human condition.  

In a world which seems to have gone a bit mad, and is overrun with climate loonies, the triggered wokerati, snowflakes, extreme political ideologues (both left and right), religious crackpots, conspiracy theorists and journalistic snake oil salespeople, here’s what you should do to check if you’re on the right side of the empirical propositions in question. Make a list of the political, religious, socio-cultural, economic and scientific beliefs that are important to you, and rank them regarding how certain you feel about your position on them. Then take all the ones you feel less certain about, and even have inner doubts about (don’t worry, you’ll know which ones they are – your gut will tell you and it won’t lie to you).

And then take each one and search yourself inwardly, with as much honesty as you can summon, to distil how these beliefs make you feel. What do those views do to you when no one is looking; do they make you feel strong or weak, proud or ashamed, comfortable or uncomfortable, confident or doubtful? This authenticity is what you need to be measuring. You’ll ask yourself; am I really giving this my best shot? Have I really got a good grasp of the situation? Am I being overly-simplistic? Have I given this the proper investigation or just been too easily convinced by someone else? And if the latter, what do I think of those people – do I really trust them, and do I think their motives are good?

There’s not a person who can fail to benefit from this examination, and it’s just about certain that if you do this with a passion for knowing the truth, and are prepared for the full consequences of the adventure and journey on which you’ll find yourself, you will be greatly enriched.

TV Drama: The Dreaded Second Season

I saw an article in The Spectator by a contributor called Sam Leith, and this excerpt very well echoes my own general issues with TV dramas in the contemporary age:

“Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. One thing I knew is, it was confusing. There was a bloke in, yes, Australia, who had had a bump on the head and didn’t know who he was, except he was Jamie Dornan. I remember there was a bit with some LSD, and recalling the plot was quite like that too. Someone was trying to blow him up (or maybe he was trying to blow someone else up). He made friends with a sensible but troubled policewoman and a sexy waitress who seems to have known him in a past life. There was a vicious gangster who had a brother who didn’t exist but then did, or something. And a suitcase. Was that important? There was someone called Lena Pascal, who was very important but I had no idea why. And at the end: did Jamie Dornan…turn out to be a baddie? Or was he dead? Nope, it’s gone. All I have is a selection of random images and half-connections.”

Yes, I think Mr. Leith has hit on a very pertinent issue with modern television – with so much choice available, and so much money floating around with which to make second, third and fourth seasons – it is proving practically difficult to keep picking up the thread with every new season of the shows we enjoyed in season 1. As I said on social media last year, “Generally, I don’t want a second series of TV drama shows - I mostly wish they didn’t exist. I know all the financial incentives behind making second and third series, but I usually want the writers and producers to show the skill and creative efficiency to wrap things up in one series.”

I enjoyed The Tourist, but like Sam Leith, so much has happened in life since then, with so many shows, films, books, people, creative projects, etc competing for our time and our short-term memory capacity, I really wish the show could have been wrapped up neatly in one season. Naturally, it’s a difficult balance to strike. Some shows (This is England, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Line of Duty, Black Mirror) are so good that I never mind a new series coming out. But the majority of shows – even the good ones – become burdensome if the producers don’t know when to stop, especially given the plethora of other competing shows, and the commitment costs to viewers of an overcrowded market.

There are other downsides too, like diminishing marginal utility derived from an overabundance of episodes or seasons. And alongside the decline of these incremental gains, there are opportunity costs, both in terms of what the audience could be watching/doing instead, and what the writers, producers and actors could be creating instead. Great screenwriters adhere to the mantra “Enter Late, Exit Early”, which means entering a scene at the latest possible moment, and exiting at the earliest possible moment. This rids the script of extraneous dialogue, and keeps the pace of the story relentless.

The art of good storytelling is knowing when to start and when to stop, and ensuring a balance between creative integrity and economic profitability. Sadly, too many producers of TV dramas and movie franchises know when to start but not when to stop – where what could have been a neat, nicely wrapped up single TV series (like Broadchurch, Westworld, Yellowjackets, Killing Eve, Big Little Lies, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc) goes on for one or more seasons too many.

The Mystery, Wonder & Existence of Santa Claus

I know a couple who refused to introduce the concept of Santa Claus to their 2 young children. They believed this went against their much-valued scientific principles of only teaching their children facts. I think this is unfortunate. Even aside from the sense of fun, it’s good to do the Santa thing with your kids when they are very young – it introduces them to a sense of wonder, and it teaches them that sometimes their everyday experiences are connected to a meta-reality that won’t reveal all its mysteries and secrets at once.

The idea of Santa Claus helps kids learn about deeper curiosity, and about propositions bigger than themselves that they can’t quite understand. And in some small way, to young budding minds, it teaches them some of their first deep considerations about existence itself. As any who have seen the marvellous film Miracle on 34th Street will know, the ontology of Santa Claus is a rather complex set of considerations, especially on top of the propositions about existence contained in the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant and Russell. 

As a young boy, I was told about Santa Claus, who supposedly visits every house on Christmas Eve, leaving presents and indulging in mince pies and alcoholic beverages left for him. Having observed the logistical challenge of visiting millions of homes in a short time, I questioned how Santa could accomplish this feat. Realising my parents were unprepared to answer, I decided to investigate by hiding in a cupboard. This prompted more anxiety, especially since the surprise gift they bought for me was also concealed there. Attempting to divert my curiosity, my dad warned that Santa would only come if I had been good, leading to an unwanted discussion about the nature of goodness. "Come on now, bedtime, son," he urged.

I’m not surprised my agitated father tried to rush me off to bed. The question 'what is good?' is just as profound now as it was then, but it’s easy to see today why, back then, my father had difficulty satisfying my curiosity. The truth is, goodness in its primary form resides in the person of God; all earthly goodness, wonderful in itself, is but a pale reflection of Divinity.

And this is what I think we see in the meaning of Christmas. We celebrate the birth of Jesus, and we share in those celebrations with our family and friends by trying to bring goodness, happiness and love into their lives. I fancy that Christmas is so widely seen as the most special time of the year because it’s the time when we more Christ-like in our goodwill to others, and in our desire to bless those we love.

As an adult, thinking about Santa Claus, it makes me ponder the qualities children have that Jesus encourages for us in discipleship. G.K. Chesterton once made a good point about children and stories:

"We all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door."

I think that's a salient observation that can be connected to the wisdom of Christ in Matthew 18 too ("unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"), and how the child still sees what the adult has learned to unsee. Like Blake's 'Doors of Perception', that have been cleansed in childhood, only to have been closed up through age, till all is seen through the "narrow chinks of the cavern". One of the great features of childhood innocence is the willingness to embrace real life as an exciting and enchanting story, without the embellishments demanded from youth and adulthood. The youth and adults are enthralled by the romance, thrillers and drama mixed into their stories, taking the extraneous as boring. But the young child finds nothing extraneous - it is all, in a sense, romance, thriller and drama, because it hasn't yet been uncharmed by the prosaic breath of fiction or stunted by the cold chill of reason.

I recall C.S. Lewis saying he found children's books the hardest to write. But he also made the great point that a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a very good children's story - which I guess is why it takes great skill to write a good one. I think even the child would see through a writer’s attempt to tailor too specifically to children, and an adult certainly would. It’s like the wisdom about originality – you can never try to create an original work for originality’s sake, just like you can’t try to be happy for happiness’ sake.

Similarly, the great children’s works are good simulacra to children-adult conversations. An adult becomes creatively childlike when taking an interest in the child, and a child becomes more adult-like through talking seriously to an adult. That’s probably why children tend to advance more quickly when adults speak to them with unaffected adult communication. So, a children’s book is similarly good for adults in the way that a garden is beneficial when we are tending to it, as well as when we are enjoying it in relaxation. A garden that could only be enjoyed during relaxation would not be a garden that gives the full experience that gardens elicit.

Returning to the opening line of enquiry - my advice would be this; Don’t be afraid to allow your kids to enjoy the idea of Santa Claus. The chances are, it will open their mind to metaphysical horizons that will hopefully bear fruit later on, when they think about who Jesus is, and the gift of salvation He brings to us all.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 1: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them towards the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 1 – taken from Letter 18: Low Calibre Leaders & Low Calibre Environmentalism:

“I think the only genuinely realistic hope of awakening the modern folk from their sleep is for them to fall in love with the truth that good ideas and interconnectedness are the most vital of combinations for progressive problem-solving. Because the reality is, ideas come together in an exchange, and they evolve and mutate far faster than any physical limitation that can retard them. The combinatorial search space of ideas is far vaster, broader and deeper than any other combinatorial system in the physical world (certainly in the Newtonian world). 

The global population is like one big problem-solving collective - it does not go about its business as though the world is going to stay the same; it works on the basis that problems, like climate ones, usually (though not always) work on steady arithmetical ratios, whereas the human ability to solve these problems usually works on geometrical ratios. That is why progression tends to work at an exponential rate - it's the exchange of ideas at an increasing pace, and the more people there are to exchange those ideas, the more readily we can combine to create this explosion of problem-solving relative to problems themselves. But that involves a kind of freedom that so many are keen to retard.

The reason that politicians are of such low intellectual calibre is because they are selected to represent an electorate of low intellectual calibre. For example, extreme left wing voters tend to be of a lower intellectual calibre than more central left wing voters, which is why extreme left wing politicians are more likely to be of an extraordinarily low intellectual calibre (think Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Cabinet as prime examples). But why is the electorate of such low intellectual calibre when it comes to understanding politics well enough to vote in better politicians? Oh, that’s easy too – it’s because being highly competent and well-informed comes at a cost – you have to put in a lot of time and effort to understand any subject well. With politics, the cost incurred for being politically astute confers only a tiny benefit in terms of election outcomes, because only a fraction of the benefit of good political policies goes to you. Just as you wouldn’t spend £500 of costs to gain £2 of benefit, similarly, you won’t see much personal benefit in becoming a well-informed member of the electorate. That’s not a reason not to become well-informed – there are many other benefits to it – but it’s a reason why the vast majority of people do not become politically well informed; the costs are just not worth it to them.

The above also extends into other more specific socio-political areas. For example, this has particularly detrimental societal effects when it comes to things like climate change. There has been a systematic attempt by politicians, the establishment and the media to have the population believe that we are in a climate crisis. They do this in three primary ways: by appealing to our desire for drama, by appealing to our desire to congratulate ourselves, and by appealing to our desire to belong in mutually affiliated tribal groups. The proposition that we will use our collective ingenuity to solve climate problems is not as dramatic or as interesting as the spectre of climate catastrophe. It is the latter that generates sales, subscriptions and clicks. So-called climate justice makes the adherents feel good about themselves, because they get to indulge in moral posturing and sententious mutual back-slapping. And climate alarmism brings people together for a common cause that satisfies their social need to be accepted and validated within a tribal group.

The upshot is, irrespective of whether these views are based on truth and facts or not - what people claim to believe, how they conduct themselves, and the actions they take are largely driven by narratives that give meaning and purpose to their life, motivations that help them feel good about themselves, and causes that make them feel part of a tribal group and give them a sense of belonging. Climate alarmism has replaced Christianity as the national religion, which is why, apart from a few exceptional cases, most climate alarmists are not Christians.

The other thing about extreme environmentalism – or climate lunacy in some cases - is that it is what large parts of economic socialism has morphed into; especially now that only the economically uninformed have any belief in socialism as a viable form of politics, and history has repeatedly shown its failings and its culpability in the cause of human suffering. Deep down I think virtually all socialists always knew how foolish socialism is – they advocated it like those in the Asch conformity tests, being swayed by the wrong answer even though they suspected it wasn’t right. Most extreme environmentalists are still socialists, of course - but extreme environmentalism enables red socialists to turn green, and espouse a cause that is still relatively contemporary in human history, and not as widely and historically discredited as socialism has been.

What extreme environmentalism lacks in terms of a balanced, intelligent set of considerations, it gains in the form of a sense of group identity and belonging, a perceived ethical cause, self-congratulation and a Gaia-type idol to act as a religious substitute. Without those four things, it is hard to fathom how anyone could adopt such foolish beliefs and behave in such a selfish, narrow-minded and intellectually bankrupt way – but those four substitutes for reason and critical thinking have always proved powerfully seductive for leftists, and that will likely remain the case whether the colour is red or green.”

Getting Religion & Science Wrong

I saw this comment about religion from economist David Friedman the other day, and I thought it worth commenting on, as it often typifies people's misconception of religion.

"Religions serve at least two purposes, both important to humans. One is to help make sense of physical reality, explain, for instance, why living things appear to be brilliantly engineered creations. The other is to make sense of life, to answer questions about what we ought to be doing and why. The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth."

I think there's so much wrong with this set of statements, it needs several correctives. Regarding religion (by which we should mean Christianity here, as it's the only true religion), I think David Friedman has both definitions slightly misjudged; I don't think religion is primarily to help us make sense of physical reality, nor to tell us what we 'ought' to be doing in the sense of morality. Of course, religion can inform us about both, through the right lens of interpretation, but that is not religion's primary purpose.

Religion's primary purpose is to help us to know God and enter into and sustain a relationship with Him. Science is the primary tool to help us make sense of physical reality, and morality is an evolved phenomenon that helps us construct value judgements in line with what our conscience tells us about right and wrong. God uses those things, and many more things too, to point us towards the higher standards found in Him, and to the adventure we can undertake in order to find the full meaning and purpose of the creation story.

This is why David Friedman's conclusion, that "The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth." is wrong in a twofold sense. In the first place, science was never a strong rival to religion, because both were always asking different questions; and therefore, in the second place, it did not come up with stronger evidence for its truth.

The main problems regarding religion and science are to do with people's misconceptions of the purpose of both. As a Christian, I can tell you that if you perceive a conflict or contradiction between Christianity and science, then you're either getting one of them or both of them wrong in terms of your individual interpretation. There are big costs on the integrity of your worldview when this happens. If you retain your Christianity but compromise science, you end up believing absurd things about physical reality that belong in the realm of counterfactual religious fundamentalism. If you retain your science and give up or reject Christianity, then you become mired in the quagmire of narrow scientism. And if you refuse both Christianity and science, you'll very likely end up in one hell of a mess, where instead you'll probably let in and embrace all kinds of low-grade substitutes, like extreme politics, environmentalism, and countless other idols, superstitions and forms of egocentric, narcissistic expressions.

Banks Could Only Dream Of Being Like Casinos

 

I happened upon this article in The Banker, which expressed concerns that the government’s attempt to enable more competitive banking to boost London’s growth might lead us towards the dangers of ‘casino capitalism’.

The casino metaphor is flawed, because it misunderstands both how banks work and how casinos work (see my blog tab ‘Banking/Financial Risk’ on the side bar for more on this subject). Both deal with probabilities, but in different ways. Probability theory tells us that in n number of incidences, we expect certain values as a result. The more incidences of n, the closer we expect to get to our predicted value. So, for example, in coin tossing, the greater the number of trials, the closer we expect the heads-tails ratio to be 50-50. 

Casinos operate in this way – they cannot predict the precise outcome of every gambling event, but they predict stability in the long term, which means a high probability of turning a profit. Your big win at the casino one Saturday night will be cancelled out by the broader probability landscape, where net losses for the totality of customers secure the solvency of the casino.

To see why banks are not like casinos, we have to understand the distinction between risk and uncertainty. A risk involves an incident where we are not sure of the outcome, but we know the probability. Uncertainly means we don’t even know the probability. Gambling £100 on a coin toss is risky, because there is a 50% chance you could win and a 50% chance you could lose. Whether your mortgage will increase after your next fixed-term ends, and if so, by how much, is a matter of uncertainty. 

Casinos operate under a risk model where the known probabilities guarantee a stable income; banks operate under a model that is a small mix of probability and a larger mix of uncertainty. Government guarantees aside, it would be much harder for a casino to go bust than a bank. If the banking sector had operated like casinos in the past 15 years, an awful lot more would need to have gone wrong to have brought about a similar crash to the ones the banking sector endured.

The reference to banks being in danger of ‘casino capitalism’ was a quite unfortunate and misjudged comparison. If banks had the same long term model as casinos, their risk portfolio would be a lot healthier. But then they wouldn’t be banks in the way we know them – just as oranges would no longer be oranges if they were yellow, bent and grew on banana trees.