All High Things Lead To God

 

The deeper we delve into reality on any positive epistemological or ontological path, the closer we get to the answer being God. We take things to their furthest conclusion, and the enquiry reaches a terminus where God is the most natural stopping place (this is the nature of what’s called Aseity). Here are four examples of what I mean, with obvious overlap between them –Truth, Morality Mathematics and Facts: 

1)     Truth: Any propositional statement that is true, leads to a further, more primary propositional statement that is true, and so on, until eventually we arrive at the most primary truth that explains all truths – which is God. 

2)     Morality: Any moral proposition leads to a further moral proposition about the truth of that moral proposition, and so on, until we eventually arrive at the concept of the highest of all morality – a goodness that is so high it comes to its natural origin in God, who is the ultimate good, and from whose goodness all other moral propositions find their metric. 

3)     Mathematics: Any mathematical statement can be superseded by a further higher mathematical statement, with seemingly no halting point, even at the uppermost end of the complexity spectrum. This leads us into a realm of cognitive complexity that can only reside in a Mind of sufficient higher order complexity – which is God. 

4)     Facts: Any factual statement about reality is causally linked to a more primary factual statement that explains the preceding fact, and so on, until we reach the fact that explains the existence of all other facts – which is God.

In summary, everything that is true, good, mathematical, rational, logical and factual, when pursued to its highest end, leads us to God as the ultimate explanation.

Why Comedy Is Probably The Hardest Genre To Write Well

 

There are certain genres that are harder to write than others, because a creative examination of life is not the same for all parts of our earthly living. Comedy, for instance, is particularly hard to write well, and easy to write poorly. As much skill as it takes to write good dramas, tragedies, thrillers and romances (and it takes a lot), the one advantage the writer has in choosing those genres over comedy is that those genres more easily express their quality with the intrinsic nature of the story.

For example, if you're writing a tragedy about the death of a child, one thing in your favour is that the occurrence of death naturally devastates those engaged in the narrative, so at least some of your work is done for you, because child death is a tragic thing, and most of us can elicit deep sympathy as we share in each other's suffering. Similarly, a woman being stalked by a serial killer is a chilling thing, so, as with tragedy, some of the work is already done for you if you're writing a thriller intending to unsettle the reader. 

But when it comes to the writing of comedy, we have a slightly different situation to the aforementioned - because when setting out to write a comedy, almost every scene won't naturally be funny or witty. We all know how discomforting it is to be in a room or a theatre or a comedy club in the presence of someone trying desperately hard but failing to be funny. The writer has a harder job constructing the right setting, plot and (in particular) the right dialogue to make things funny, as well as choose the right literary characters to deliver those lines.

That is why, in my submission, comedy is the hardest genre to write well.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 4: Just Stop Idiocy

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 4 – taken from Letter 20: Just Stop Idiocy

In an old blog post from about 10 years ago, about the costs of terrorism, I once calculated the less obvious but still significant associative costs in terms the millions of hours of time robbed from innocent citizens having to have extra security checks, extra queuing, etc. And this should be brought to mind with the Just Stop Oil lunatics right now. It’s not just the mere inconvenience and stupidity of holding up sports events for a few minutes – it’s that event organisers will respond by imposing much more rigorous checks on spectators/customers on entrance.

Once you calculate how many thousands of wasted hours and robbed time that will amount to every year for innocent citizens (on top of all the other costs associated with blocking roads, destroying property, wasting police resources, court time, and so forth), it becomes obvious to me that these stupid, destructive acts should incur a mandatory prison sentence for the offenders. The only way to stop it is to properly disincentivise with punishments commensurate with the costs.

Just Stop Oil members, especially the under 25s, think of themselves as rebels, engaging in freedom fighting to win a climate war against the bogeymen of capitalism. In reality, they are doing nothing new - their absurd behaviour resembles every other former cult and lunatic fringe group that has ever existed, and its members have fallen for the same old con tricks, skewed narratives and suppression of intellect that has bedevilled every cult group that preceded it.

As someone who has listened to their arguments, observed their behaviour, and even spent time with them, it's easy to recognise the same patterns as we see in just about every other crazy sect. You see the inadequate ways they present their arguments, the underlying incentives, the need for attention and to be accepted and listened to, the psychopathology that underwrites their paranoid mindset, and the credulity with which they uncritically swallow up any old nonsense. Once you've seen one of them, you've seen most of them; and once you've seen most of them, it's easy to spot the next one.

But these Just Stop Oil chumps don't just emerge from a vacuum - they are the natural result of a world in which the majority of the most powerful and influential people are so power hungry, self-interested, narcissistic, narrow-minded and short-termist that you can't actually believe they get away with it, and elicit such widespread support for their actions. On top of that, the media drives the continuation of the elite's top down influence, and social media and our education system ensures that young people are caught in the net from the earliest age possible. This is the birthing pool for insane groups like Just Sop Oil, and numerous others like them - the world has been so misdirected by the magician's sleight of hand tricks that they have missed what the hand does while focusing on the deck of cards.

Climate alarmism is another of the conjurer's classic misdirection tricks - by averting your eyes towards the distraction, they make you lose sight of what's fully happening. The tactics are the same as ever; they get you fixed on costs while ignoring benefits; they stir you up with virtue signalling and guilt-trip with bogus ethical proclamations; they grossly exaggerate the negatives and ignore the positives - while all the time many of the most powerful organisations and political establishments continually lodge supporting information in their brains to the point where the truth becomes so abstruse that few know how to find it, and where to even start looking. You'll have noticed how the biased mainstream media and social commentators get everyone focused on images of floods, wildfires, struggling animals in the wild, as though that's the whole picture. This is the magician's sleight of hand again; he wants you to be distracted by the small picture so you miss the bigger picture.

The behaviour and misjudgements of groups like Just Stop Oil are not original or unique, and the provenance of the misguided rhetoric they spew out is easy to analyse once you realise that what they do typifies the same patterns seen in countless other groups just like them, in a world that is run by people who readily implant this stuff into their minds for their own personal gain. It would be quite boring pattern recognition, were it not such a damn nuisance.

 

Information, Reality & Mind At A Deep Level

 

Let’s talk about information, mind and reality at a deep level. Consider pi - the irrational number 3.14159… and so on. Not only is pi the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, it's a pattern that appears regularly throughout nature in many other ways; for example, in the equations governing the wave function in quantum mechanics, in the time period of a pendulum's swing, and in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to name but three. Nature has various physical constants (the speed of light, gravitational constant, Boltzmann constant, etc) that are mathematically consistent, and pi also runs right through physics in the form of constants, such as the forces that knit matter together, like the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs the behaviour between electrons and photons.

So, pi appears in nature in the physical substrate, but it also appears as a number with an infinite series. That is to say, if you tracked the decimal digits of pi beyond the sequence 3.14159, you'd find the number series would carry on infinitely. Humans currently have the computational ability to calculate pi to over 13 trillion decimal places - which is impressive - but that is only a minuscule number compared with the actual n sequence in its entirety. What this points to is that when it comes to human perception of reality, there is a logical discontinuity between the actual and the theoretical. In mathematics, we have a clear conception of infinity. We can conceive countable sets, which are sets with the same cardinality (number of elements) as some subset of the set of natural numbers where every element of a set will eventually be associated with a natural number. We can also conceive uncountable sets, which are sets that contain too many elements to be counted.

Once we step back and have a reality check, we are entitled to find infinite sets a bit peculiar. What does it mean for finite physical human minds locked into a finite physical nature to be able to deal with infinities? Consider a simple illustration to show what's particularly strange here; if you were able to step outside the universe and drop in a grain of sand for every digit in pi, you would run out of space in the universe long before you ran out of sand. That's an astounding thing to grapple with, and leads to other interesting questions, like what does the ability to abstractly conceive an infinite pi representation mean, and what does it mean that a computer can calculate to 13 trillion decimal places? It appears to mean that theoretically if the computer kept on calculating, then the computation can map to a size greater than every particle in the universe and still be far short of the whole pattern. In other words, as far as human perception goes, we are contemplating the logical discontinuity between the actual and the theoretical, and finding that that is most likely because the physical aspect of reality is only a tiny fraction of the far broader and complex mathematical reality.

Physicists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind once proposed a theory of a pixelated universe: a theoretical model of the universe as being comparable to how a newspaper dissolves into tiny dots as one zooms in on the fine detail, as if nature is ‘pixelated’. We know in our attempts to resolve general relativity with quantum mechanics that the more we dig down granularly the harder things are to measure or even detect, and the less like macroscopic reality things apear.

A few years ago, I wrote some material of my own on how the pixelated universe idea is a good illustration for how we humans deal with information theory, and how the universe itself is a mathematical object that is ultimately reducible to lots of single bits of information. The logical corollary of ‘t Hooft and Susskind’s pixelated universe model is that the universe is a physical 2 dimensional set of patterns that are brought to 3 dimensions when light bounces off them (much like what happens with the holograms on credit cards). In terms of the universe, we are thought to be experiencing holographic projects (our 3D world), that without minds would be a 2D series of pattern storage. Actually, the newspaper illustration is a particularly good one with a deeper meaning. Technically a newspaper can be expressed as millions of single bits of information that come together as an aggregate whole in the form of words and pictures that then take on newly invested meaning. Both the newspaper and the universe have something important in common here - there is a necessary relationship between information and sentience. A newspaper is merely paper and ink without a mind able to expend its resources on interpretation of the content of the paper and ink.

Or take something like DNA, which clearly contains a lot of information. As we increase our knowledge of the human genome, the surprises it contains become fewer. Now of course we can be quirky and conflate observer and observed - the ribosomes that construct proteins do not know the system informationally like we do, but they receive messages from the nucleus where DNA resides. So, if you were a ribosome, you'd contend that the quota of information in DNA is always complete.

To expand the model from DNA to the universe, as far as we are concerned, when we conflate observer and observed, we find we are in a universe that in theory can be informationally complete with full knowledge of the physical system. But once we start to think in terms of measurement and possibility, we find that the information content goes into infinite realms again. So if the nexus between the physical and the theoretical is "information", then the physical is dwarfed by the theoretical, making information more like a canvas and the physical more like a painting that the canvas hosts. But then we go round again, because information is the observed only relative to an observer.

Or think of thermal energy and how in the form of heat it always flows spontaneously from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. This heat flow reduces the state of order of the initial systems, and this process is an expression of increased disorder. Here’s an analogy to express how information flow has commensurability with what we’ve been discussing. Although the universe is one interconnected whole, our abilities for computation are reduced to regional capacities (known as horizons). We are causally attached to a horizon because light emitted from our vicinity of the cosmos at the point of the big bang has only reached a distant surface in space, so as far as our endeavours for computation apply, information flow limited to that region has a correlative computation system with the same limitations.

This is also commensurate with our modelling disorder in the cosmos. If you imagine the horizon expanding with time as light moves outward into space, you’ll infer the fairly obvious corollary that that region would have had less capacity for computational resources in the past. This is because each horizon contains a finite number of particles, and quite naturally the computational capabilities reflect this, where fewer particles equals more parsimonious computation. If one thinks of the horizon at the point of Planck time just after the big bang, then the computational scope would have been essentially non-existent, because increase in computability increases with increase in disorder. Using the stretched rubber band model – which is that, as the rubber band expands, the distance between any two points on its surface increases - we actually find that the universe is already reflecting this model in how the distance between galaxies in the universe increases as space itself expands.

At a fundamental level, the universe is a mathematical object of information - and this can give us profound insight into the deeper nature of reality, because whether we are talking about information in Shannon terms, or even as a more generalised concept, information can't reasonably be treated as some kind of vitalistic property lurking in the system itself. It's essential that information is seen as an extrinsic property of a system. That is to say, a system contains information by virtue of its relation to another agent or system capable of perceiving, interpreting and responding to that information. For example, a computer program, a set of songs, or a bunch of holiday snaps shared on social media is information only inasmuch as it consists of patterns that can be used by that computer as instructions to be perceived by sentient minds. Likewise, a universe only contains information by virtue of its relation to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the patterns though cognitive instructions. Ostensibly we have a universe of patterns awaiting their informational content when interpreted by minds.

So, to recap; it's best to talk of what we habitually call 'information' as pattern, and those patterns as being 'information' only when related to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the patterns. And the informational property of the universe's patterns is not intrinsic to the pattern itself; it exists extrinsically by virtue of its relation to agents of perception and conception.

We've also seen that nature probably is pixelated, and that every part of physical reality is amenable to be described in informational terms, where its constituent parts can be broken down to n single bits of information, where n is as large as its informational content goes. But given that the n of the informational content of even the whole physical universe is dwarfed by the informational content of just the pi sequence, the only reasonable conclusion, I think, is that mathematics belongs to a reality far broader and more complex than the physical reality we physical beings inhabit. It’s almost certainly the case, then, that the conceptual and the physical aren't at odds with one another - the conceptual infinites are examples of our interfacing with the fact that mathematical realty is much more primary and grander than physical reality, and that mind is even more primary than mathematical reality.

All this is to say, at a deep and profound level, there is good indication that nature only reveals the topographical secrets with which we are created to interface. I believe it might be like T.S Eliot conveys in his Burnt Norton, especially:

 Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility.

And.....

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

And given that mathematics and rules of numbers seem to be contingent on sentience perceiving them, combined with the fact that the universe consists of patterns with evident mathematical constraints imposed on the system (see here for a far more detailed analysis of that observation), I think we can fairly safely conclude that we are perceiving patterns generated by a Cosmic Mind capable of orchestrating highly unrepresentative constraints, to which the attribution of God’s genius is wholly appropriate.

This seems to be one of the ways where human minds and God's mind meet - in engaging with the patterns and mathematical raw material, and bringing them to life, a bit like how an artistic genius might exhibit his craft to a nascent audience. And that we can view those patterns through so many lenses (mathematical, poetical, imaginative, artistic, scientific, psychological, philosophical, theological, etc) highlights that even the entirety of physics is simply one lens of reality among many. Hence, it makes sense that if God is the Creator and observer of this information, we would expect the fundamental asymmetry between the physical and the theoretical, because mind is more expansive than its physical properties (as even a human mind shows).

Bayesian Apologetics

What Christians should be mindful of when presenting truthful apologetics (providing a competent defence of the Christian faith) is that, even though what we say is the truth, there will usually be a presentable counter-argument available to the atheists that sounds just as convincing to them from their perspective. At first glance, that may sound obvious – it is nearly always possible to provide some kind of counter-argument to nearly all propositions. But it may strike some Christians as strange, and perhaps disconcerting, that we can churn out strong Christian perspectives that speak truth to the world, but find that atheists always have contrasting perspectives, and often seem impervious to the strength of our apologetics. But I think that just says more about the nature of the discussion, and underscores the complexity of God’s created world, that even truths about Christianity presented in rich and elegant propositional prose are not often compelling enough to convince most objectors and bring closure to the debate.

I suppose, although strange in the sense just implied, it shouldn’t be that surprising really; a good Christian apologist might reasonably expect to be able to present their own hypothetical counter-arguments to their work - in a steel-manning, ideological Turing test-kind of manner – and in being able to do so, resolve to understand the strength of their own position with even more confidence. And if we can do it to our own offerings, it is perhaps to be expected that others will too, even if what we say is the truth.

It’s also important to recognise in Christian apologetics that what we are doing, and what the atheist is doing too, is employing a Bayesian framework, which is a combination of probabilistic reasoning, statistical modelling and though provocation, in order to build a coherent and internally consistent worldview based on numerous subset propositions. To that end, the debate about every proposition is a threefold; 1) the base rate in terms of the probability of a proposition being true regarding the information or data contained; 2) the probability that the evidence can be explained with the affirmative hypothesis; 3) the probability that the evidence could be explained better with an alternative hypothesis.

That is to say, the fundamental starting question concerns assessment of prior probability, and the following questions concern whether the claim is more likely to be true or false given the evidence presented. From that we try to ascertain the strength of the opening position, and whether further consideration of the evidence strengthens the initial claim or weakens it. Whether or not the participants are aware of it, this kind of Bayesian analysis is at the heart of every matter under discussion.

And I think this is the answer to the little conundrum stated at the top. Yes, there are always possible counter-arguments that can be offered, but the more strictly we adhere to the principles outlined above, and the more stringent way we can be in weeding out bad and extraneous arguments, the stronger the dialogue will be. The point is, having acknowledged that it’s always fairly easy to offer a counter argument - even to the most truthful statements – there is individual responsibility to ensure that you are not just making bad contributions and being fooled by their merit on account of your being able to make them so readily. Just because it’s always easy to conjure up a counter-argument, it doesn’t mean those counter-arguments are proficient or accurate rebuttals.

Let’s Face It, Maybe Atheism Just Isn’t Very Interesting Anymore

Atheism, like many other beliefs, undergoes social and cultural selection pressure in a way that resembles biological evolution. If atheism is taken to simply mean a lack of belief in God, then there is little about it to hold external interest. So, a slightly more interesting version developed into a positive view that there is no God, and with all of the subsidiary counter-apologetics and Promethean fantasies about a semi-utopian post-faith world of science, reason and rationality (especially in the past 50 years, where technological advancements have given rise to unprecedented, improved living standards, and greater global connectivity).

But these are superficial anticipations based on shallow considerations – nothing of the sort has happened or will happen. Quite the opposite, in fact; the attempted erosion of the Christian faith has created a deeply unsatisfactory void; a kind of spiritual vacuum that has left people discontent and spiritually hungry, where substitutes brought in to fill the void have shown themselves to be intellectually hollow, spiritually empty, morally inadequate, and an assault on many of the long-standing metaphysical qualities (like truth, facts, knowledge, freedom, purpose, meaning and wisdom) that form the bedrock of our Judaeo-Christian-Aristotelian culture.

Consequently, because atheism fails to provide the solution to the deepest and most profound human needs and desires, it becomes less and less interesting the more it persists - to the point where, for most of its loudest and most strident commentators, it’s really become an ideological and spiritual wasteland left in the hands of cynical, myopic individuals who seek attention and validation, and whose primary way of making atheism seem compelling is to lash out at religious belief with dismissive resentment, mockery and scorn. And the more the atheists sense in desperation that what they have to offer is not very interesting anymore, the more resentful, mocking and scornful their comments become in order to grab the attention and conceal the mediocrity of their arguments, all in the service of trying to stay relevant and interesting.

Why Otherwise Intelligent People Believe Nutty Things

I watched this fascinating discussion between James Delingpole (who I really like) and David Icke (who seems so far in his own crazy world that it's easy to write him off as a nutter). David Icke is one of these people who is clearly intelligent; and who is probably right about some things that a lot of people are wrong about. But in the stuff that he's wrong about, he is wrong in ways that make him look like a crazed conspiracy theorist wacko.

I find the same issue surrounding David Icke that I find about many people like him - why do intelligent, thoughtful individuals believe absurd things that make them look so foolish and ridiculous? It's not much of a mystery why so many young people are confused and hysterical about some of the more complex things in life (economics, politics, the environment, religious belief) - they've been severely led astray by what the surrounding deceitful forces have pathogenically implanted into their minds. But once people make it into greater maturity with more life experience, why do they still swallow some of the absurd beliefs they hold alongside an otherwise fairly competent mental artillery?

It ought to strike us as strange that, say, mature Christians with lots of life experience and thoughtful, intelligent minds swallow things like young earth creationism. And equally strange that academics, with similar life experience and thoughtful, intelligent minds, would succumb to the delusion that men can become women (or vice-versa) - or that they would block the traffic to protest about climate change because they believe in some kind of preposterous end time cult of doom. No one would have any trouble thinking of many other examples. But I don't think it's necessarily that obvious why these folk adopt such rash views, and are so blind to how thoughtless and daft they appear in doing so.

It's clear, then, believing nutty things doesn't necessarily make you a nutter, because smart people believe nutty things. So, what's really at play here? Well, commonalities often help draw clues - so what do they all have in common? One thing is that in virtually every case these people don't believe the absurd thing as an expert in the subject, or with any degree of competence - they believe it because others have told them that's what they should believe (although, strangely, this isn't self-evidently the case with David Icke). They've formulated those opinions by trusting others too much, and not applying enough of their own unique perspective and critical thinking to the matter. And this leads nicely to the second commonality; virtually none of them could incisively defend their nutty views against an intelligent critic who adequately understood the subject matter.

So, even intelligent, thoughtful people believe absurd things - and they seem to do so because it's what they've been told, and because they are not equipped to defend their position under intellectual scrutiny. Add to that the very powerful quadripartite driving forces of tribal affiliation, self-preservation, courting status and seeking attention, and it becomes even less of a mystery.

And, of course, this combination manifests itself differently among individuals. Some people prefer to keep their nutty beliefs close to their chest, and will deflect to avoid conflict; whereas others (like David Icke) will unabashedly parade them for everyone to see, risking mockery and ridicule as they do so. It's a funny old world, but at least it's never dull.

Intelligent Conversations About God

 

The following propositions are true.

P1: There are a lot of highly intelligent Christians.

P2: There are a lot of highly intelligent atheists.

P3: There are a lot of low intelligence Christians

P4: There are a lot of low intelligence atheists.

P5: Given P1 and P2, we know from experience that there are a lot of high quality conversations going on between highly intelligent Christians and highly intelligent atheists, where each party has given the matter serious depth of thought, and is capable of contributing to highly intelligent dialogue on the subject.

Conclusion: Given P1-5, any atheist out there disrespectfully rubbishing Christianity, not taking it seriously, and saying it’s only believed by foolish people, is usually just signalling to everyone that they are either a low intelligence atheist, or that they are too emotionally immature/damaged to apply the necessary intelligence and competence to the subject.  

The Benefits Of Making Listening An Art Form

There are some well known imperatives for couples to adhere to in optimal marital communication – such as; ensure you connect beforehand if what you’re saying is important and requires attention; make contact with each other to establish mutual attention and deeper connectivity; allow each other to speak uninterrupted; whenever possible, use ‘I’ statements to express your thoughts, not “you” statement; avoid generalisations “You never”, “You always”, etc; and after your beloved has spoken, reflect back what your heard (this has the mutual benefit of confirming you have understood what was said, and helping you remember it too).

In addition to the basics, the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a fine book called The Art of Listening, in which he lays out more psychologically profound methods to achieve an optimal listening relationship. The key principles he outlines are roughly this: 

1)    Listening is an art form that requires our full attention, in order to be present and empathetic. It is practicing the art of profound engagement, where you can connect with the speaker’s emotions and the subtext of their words. 

2)    Genuine attention, empathy, and presence. It involves much more than just hearing words; it's about deeply engaging with the person speaking and understanding their emotions and underlying messages. 

3)    Doing your best to engage with the words you hear in an open, non-judgemental way, to ensure your own critical faculties are optimally attuned. 

4)    Paying attention to the context, tone and body language, as well as what is being said. 

5)    Encouraging the speaker to feel safe to express whatever they feel they need to. 

6)    Use the listening experience as a path to self-discovery, where you can gain insights into your own motivations, desires, and fears.

Art is perhaps the highest of all human creations, and I think we can profoundly enhance ourselves and our marriage if we treat the ability to listen and engage as an art form, in which the union of love is treated like an exciting adventure, ready to reveal more and more of its topographical secrets to those who pay close attention to its maps and landscapes.

Rational Irrationality

 

The economist Bryan Caplan popularised the idea of rational irrationality, based on two types of rationality; epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality means doing your best to seek the truth and assent to facts, and instrumental rationality means adopting a strategy to achieve certain goals (some of which may make truthseeking appear inconvenient). Caplan’s rational irrationality posits the idea that an individual could be epistemologically irrational to achieve instrumental rationality. If holding a particular belief is convenient for your aims - perhaps for tribal, social, or cultural reasons, or for mere personal expedience - and the marginal cost of falsehood is low to you in this case, then you may have an incentive to be irrational on so-called rational grounds.

There is a demand curve for rationality and irrationality, and ascertaining the steepness of the demand curve is like asking whether incurring a cost for being wrong will be sufficiently bad to engender deeper personal negativity. Measuring the slope of the demand curve for irrationality is equivalent to measuring the deterrent effect of the cost of wrongness – and when the cost of wrongness is low, the individual has higher demand for it. If, for whatever personal reason, the cost of being wrong is especially low, then you can find yourself with an absurd demand for irrationality if it provides a social incentive or a cushion for areas of discomfort in your life.

There are many areas of life where rational irrationality is prominent, especially in some political and some religious beliefs. It appears so frequently in political and religious beliefs because they are the beliefs that often come with the most familial, cultural and tribal duress, and that impose the fewest costs on the individual if they lower their truthseeking and cognitive standards in order to minimise conflict and retain favour and acceptance in the in-group.

Let me be clear, I am explaining the cause of rational irrationality – I am certainly not advocating it, nor suggesting we let ourselves off lightly if we compromise truthseeking with decreased cognitive standards. In most cases, it will do us no good in the end.

Perhaps the viewpoint that best appeals to individuals for reasons other than epistemic rationality is socialism. I think it’s principally for three reasons:

1) Economics takes a lot of effort to learn and understand, and not putting in the time and effort to learn it is a much easier path, especially as being ignorant about it does not stem the flow of people’s willingness to opine about it. It is not really possible to become competent at economics, strive to tell the truth, and still say the things most of our politicians say on a daily basis.

2) Socialism enables people to channel their resentment of the rich into a virtue signalling charade to express consternation for the poor, and make themselves feel just, noble and virtuous. I suspect most socialists do not really care deeply about the poor, because if they did, they would not espouse so much ill-informed economics that makes the poor worst off of all (this is one of the big contradictions at the heart of socialism).

3) Being on the left tends to create deeper social bonds than on the right, because the proposed fight for justice and inequality, and being spokespeople for the underdog, is often quite a unifying phenomenon.

Consequently, then, I believe that being a socialist isn't really about championing redistributionist policies for the poor (if it were, the socialists would be espousing more market-friendliness) - it is about tribal affiliations and virtue signalling and envy against those who have qualities that the socialists lack.

It’s also the case, I think, that people don't tend to work out what they believe and join the political party that most closely identifies with those beliefs - the causality is usually the opposite of what people think: that is, the cart of party politics usually gets there before the horse of political beliefs. We do not live in a society full of ultra-rational agents. People prefer to believe what they think will enable them to fit into the particular group that will benefit them most.  

Two Kinds Of Miracle

 

When it comes to miracles, an open-minded agnostic has two sets of propositions to consider.

Here is the first set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.

P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.

P3: Christians claim to have experienced miracles.

C: Therefore, there's a reasonable chance that miracles occur.

Here is the second set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.

P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.

P3: Atheists claim to have experienced no miracles.

C: Therefore, there's a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur.

In my view, set 1 ought to seem more reasonable to an open-minded agnostic than set 2. Here's why. If miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then you'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, Christians are the most frequent people to have experienced miracles in terms of God's providence. But equally, if miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then it is to be expected that most atheists have not experienced a miracle that would convince them God exists. 

Therefore, given the astronomically high number of claims of the miraculous in the world, you'd expect set 1 to have a higher probability of being the right set of propositions than set 2. Much like, if there were a group of people in the world who couldn't see the colour red, you'd expect them to be the people claiming there are no such things as red experiences, even though a lot of other people are claiming to have had them.

The Good Cop, Bad Cop Post-Covid Analysis

 

In 1963, a psychologist called Bob Rosenthal conducted an experiment in which his assistants placed rats in mazes, and then timed how long it takes the rats to find the exit. They were housed in two pens: one for the smartest rats and one for the ordinary rats - and when released, the assistants thought that the smartest rats found the exit more quickly than the ordinary rats. In reality, there was no difference between the two groups of rats – it was the assistants’ expectations that tricked them into believing smart rats solve mazes more quickly.

This plays out in many walks of life – we are surrounded by self-fulfilling prophecies in the making. A teacher who treats his pupils as though they are smarter than they are probably will observe them doing better than expected. A teacher who treats his pupils as though they are hopeless will likely see the opposite effect. If you treat your husband or wife as though they are the most valuable person in your life, you will see more of the value in them than if you treat them as though they are not your priority.

This is known in psychology as The Pygmalion Effect, after Ovid’s Greek myth, where a sculptor called Pygmalion regards his own statue as beautiful, falls in love with it, and it comes alive. When we have high standards and high expectations of others, we get better results; when we have low standards and low expectations, we get poorer results. People are inspired or uninspired by how we value them.

Similarly, placebos (positive) and nocebos (negative) become self-fulfilling prophecies too. If you believe you’ve taken a pill that has a positive effect on your well-being, you might act as though it has. If you believe a pill has negative side effects, you may feel those side effects based more on your belief than on any real side effects. If you believe your bank is going to collapse, you might bring about a bank run, which then causes the bank to collapse. If the Prime Minister forewarns a recession, he might engender a recession, as people could become nervous about spending money, and be reluctant to invest in others.

Applying all that to Covid - over the past 4 years, just about everyone has wondered whether the government's policies to tackle Covid have been worth the cost. Those who say that Covid hasn’t been that serious for most people so we didn’t need all those government restrictions may be missing the point that it might be because of government restrictions that Covid hasn’t been that serious for most people. It could be fallacious to use the successes of the restrictions as an argument against the restrictions, just as it might be foolish to argue that the lack of nuclear warfare in the past 50 years is a good argument as to why we don’t need nuclear weapons (it may be that it’s because of nuclear weapons, and the deterrent effect, that there hasn’t been nuclear warfare in the past 50 years). 

But that said, there has been a book recently published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, containing research by Johns Hopkins and Lund University that casts quite a few aspersions on the efficacy of the lockdowns during Covid. The lockdowns appear to have reduced Covid deaths by a lot less than one might have hoped, given their astronomical costs.

Now, I’m not going to state the obvious cases for and against the government’s Covid policies. Anyone can work these out for themselves, and decide how they feel about the decisions based on their own personal preferences. But many people rightly insist that individuals are better equipped than the government to know their own individual risk calculi, and how much they value things like going to work, seeing family, socialising with friends, going to school, attending weddings and funerals, etc. For this reason, they argue that the government had no business making such life-changing decisions on the nation’s behalf. Many others seem quite glad that the government took control and made such bold decisions, and feel that things could have been a lot worse without the strict policies imposed on us. The best argument for the government’s decision seems to be that the NHS couldn’t have coped if everyone had remained free to undertake their own risk calculi.

On that basis, an argument that could be made in favour of that proposition is that we could be living an even more dismal reality had we not have lived through this strict regime. An argument against the proposition is that the reason we aren’t living an even more dismal reality is because we adjusted our behaviour accordingly to compensate for the increased risks, and could have done so without the government’s decision to impose such a massive financial and social cost to the nation. There’s no question that, for Britain, the NHS factor makes the matter much harder to resolve.

Aside from the stability of the NHS argument (which isn’t trivial), I really can’t think of a good argument that trumps the argument for the liberty of individual choices on how they behave during a pandemic. One counterpoint is that we didn’t know just how bad the virus was and how great the risks, so we needed the government to make that decision for us. But it’s not a very convincing argument. If your car has a squeaking sound on the morning you are about to drive across the country to see your family, you don’t know for sure whether you should risk the trip, stay at home, or pay extra and go on the train. It might not be an easy decision, but it certainly won’t be the case that outsourcing the problem to the government will make them better equipped to decide for you. No politician knows enough of the factors to act on your behalf on this matter.

This logic also applies in response to the other common objection - that without the government to impose restrictions, then by socialising you may well infect people who didn't want to be infected. But in the vast majority of cases, that argument doesn't hold. It's true that if I went to church, or to Frank's 60th birthday party, or to the snooker club, I might have infected others. But the people at those events also knew the risks of attending, but did so anyway, presumably because they took the benefit of attendance as being worth the risk in terms of their own personal utility. Besides, if your argument is that socialising during the pandemic is reckless because those who socialise do not bear all the costs of their decisions to socialise, then it may have slipped your notice that the politicians imposing all the restrictions on us, and decimating the UK economy in the process, bear virtually zero costs for their actions. When those politicians were caught breaking the rules they imposed on the rest of us, their actions suggested that they weren't especially bothered about the risks of catching Covid, and that they had little respect for the efficacy of the laws they imposed on everyone else.

The Wrong Adam: Why Stories Are The Deepest Part Of The Text

 

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for young earth creationists is the fact that St. Paul refers to Adam by name - so their reasoning goes something like this:

P1: Paul refers to Adam, so Adam must be a real historical figure.

P2: If Adam is a real historical figure, then he must be the first person.

P3: If Adam is the first person, then Genesis 1-3 must be taken as literal history.

P4: If Genesis 1-3 is taken as literal history, then the world must be about 6,000 years old.

C: Given premises 1-4, evolution over millions of years must be false.

Naturally, there are a lot of further things wrong with their reasoning, but we can preclude them by cutting to the chase and focusing on the base error, which is failing to understand that Paul referring to Adam is not merely a refence to a historical figure, it is a more powerful archetypical reference to Adam at a much deeper level (this may be why Jesus never referred to the name Adam at all, only to the Genesis account for its symbolic content on the template for marriage).

What you have to remember is that the story (or narrative) of almost any account is frequently the most powerful part of the text (where text here means anything that can be interpreted or analysed). When you think of the most profound teachings or events in history - whether that's one of Christ's parables, a Dostoevsky novel, the Battle of Waterloo, the death of Martin Luther King, the Cold War, the building of St. Paul's Cathedral, the painting of The Last Supper, and so on - the most powerful parts are the parts that are conveyed and analysed in narrative or symbolic form. What affects us most deeply is; what happened, the context and background, the cultural analysis, the characters (real or fiction) in the account, the message(s) being conveyed, the moral lessons, the impact it had thereafter, the symbols and imagery that carry deeper meanings within the account, and any other subtext that can be brought to bear on a deeper historical, ethical, psychological, philosophical and theological narrative, and applied to a present consideration.

When we apply this wisdom to Genesis 1-3, we ought to see it as folly to try to smuggle in a wholly literal, historical interpretation, at the expense of all other deeper elements I outlined above. In fact, it's actually impossible to read a text like Genesis 1-3 (or any Bible text for that matter) and not engage with it through the above mechanisms, even if one tries to deny them. The majority of the power is found in the story, because stories are the most powerful mode of communication we have. Some texts, like great works of literature, would contain almost no deeper power by being literal, historical events. Some texts, like the great works of poetry, would even be impoverished with an imposed literal interpretation. Some texts, like historical records, are accounts of real events, but their descriptive nature is expressed in narrative form to document what happened during the period, and some of the wider elements outlined above, that can be distilled from the studies.

All this should start to have more of a bearing on interpretations of texts like Genesis 1-3, and on the name Adam, under consideration. Once we engage with any text like this by giving it its due depth of consideration, we then uncover the pathways to its more powerful and profound meanings, like understanding how Adam refers to humanity in a general sense - and how, by tuning in to the allegorical or metaphorical representation of humanity, we can decipher the full suite of edification from the texts.

Footnote: I wrote this blog in part as a response to a friend who critiqued my last blog post with the following: "I still think you don't need to ditch the real person of Adam, as I pointed out before the recorded genealogy implies, whether you think the preceding stages were based on evolution or not, that at some point the person of Adam was real and selected by God as the 'first man". But if Adam is a symbolism for (hu)mankind, then he doesn't have to literally historically real, because the allegory is making a hyper-textual claim, a bit like how Paul's concept of Adam in Romans 5:12, as a representative figure whose sin had consequences for all humanity, is a hyper-textual claim. While the Biblical genealogies are incomplete, and are not structured like modern genealogies, it is still possible to decipher why Adam might appear in the historical lineage, especially if these genealogies were known by the Jewish scribes to represent a theological connection between original humanity and God's sovereignty and covenantal promises. In keeping with the rest of the allegory of early Genesis, the Adam archetype who is later referenced, can quite understandably be referenced through the same allegorical literary devices, that weave together a patterned Biblical structure that guides the reader through the coherent narrative of creation, fallenness, sin, redemption and salvation through Christ.

There's No Greater Abuse Of Knowledge In Christianity Than Young Earth Creationism

 

Excluding miraculous events that occur in the Bible, which are never claimed to be amenable to scientific examination, the following holds:

P1: If Christianity is true, then every verse of the Bible is true when interpreted correctly.

P2: Science is the only reliable tool we have for understanding facts about the physical world.

P3: Some Christians interpret the Bible in a way that their interpretation contradicts known scientific facts.

C: Biblical interpretations that contradict known scientific facts are incorrect interpretations.

Young earth creationists (YECs) of course distort this and get into a muddle, but how does their muddle materialise? They accept Premise 1 (although be careful, some YECs don’t even acknowledge that scripture needs interpreting). They accept Premise 2, because they depend on the scientific understanding of the world like everyone else. It’s Premise 3 where they stumble, because they assume that if scientific facts contradict their interpretation of scripture, then it must be the scientific facts that are wrong, not their interpretation of scripture.

There has probably never been a more conceited, deluded infestation in the whole of modern Christianity than the group that maintains that the prodigious hard work and achievements of the tens of thousands of scientists all over the world, in hundreds of diverse but mutually interconnected fields, across several centuries, are the ones that are wrong and can’t be trusted, and not themselves, with their empirical denialism and univariate focus on poorly executed Biblical exegesis.

From The Archives: Writing From 2002 - My First Non-Christian Defence Of Christianity

 

I was intrigued to stumble upon this old piece of mine from 2002, from a folder I hadn’t opened in a very long time. I don’t recall much about its composition, but I do remember the road analogy, and I remember that it was written just before I became a Christian. In fact, I think this writing was a monumental point in my life - it's the point at which I argued theoretically for the truth of Christianity for the first time, while not quite being a Christian yet. Here it is:

“One of the long-standing roadblocks for atheists is that, before one adopts a belief in God, there needs to be some kind of reason to believe that the world we live in is created by a God, and some way of knowing which God. Unlike, say, a burglary, I have the sufficient experience to catalogue the empirical evidence it presents to me. I know the difference between a house that has been burgled and one that hasn't, and I can check for evidence of a break in and evidence that theft has occurred. 

But I cannot do this in quite the same way when it comes to God’s creative dispensation, because, at first glance, I have no way of distinguishing between a part of nature that is designed by God and a part of nature that is brought about by nature's physical laws. This is compounded by the fact that if God is the Creator, He no doubt uses the physical laws to do at least some of His creating - so for human beings not privy to the Divine blueprint, there really is no easy way to look at the material substate and distinguish between designed and not-designed by God. If all of creation is designed by God, then trying to look for design from within that nature is a bit like fishes swimming deep in the ocean all their lives looking for a thing called 'wetness'. For all we know, a universe that is designed by God would look exactly as this one does, and a universe that is not designed by God might also look exactly like this one does.

And from the outside, it may also seem that when religious man A tells religious man B that his religion has the wrong beliefs about God, there is not an easy way to justify the claim of rightness. If you give me two sets of items from the empirical world, and tell me one of those items is the authentic one, and the other is a fake, we have a theoretical and a practical way of knowing which is which. A fake gold watch can be distinguished from a real gold watch; a single glazed window can be distinguished from a double glazed window; an imposter of the UK Prime Minister can be distinguished from the real UK Prime Minister. We can do all this because we have real knowledge against which to measure the genuine objects of study from the fakes. 

With concepts of God, things are trickier. We only have experiences of others, and consequent opinions constructed by those people and passed on to other people throughout the centuries. That’s why third person perspectives of first person’s revelatory experiences of God have limited appeal to the intellect, because they remain rooted in the proprietary subjectivism of human construct. A Muslim’s claim that the Qur’an is the word of Allah has no more of a strong appeal to me than a man’s claim that Nostradamus visited him in a dream. If a holy book or revelation is from God, it could only be compelling to the sceptic if it purports to bring in something that does not depend solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains. That would be the only way to demonstrate that mere men probably couldn’t have invented it.

Let us think of religious belief systems by using an analogy of a set of complex, interweaving road networks. We can begin by separating aspects of belief into length of the road, width of the road and depth of the road. By length of the road, I mean the part of the belief systems which provide direction in moral, theological, philosophical, empirical and experiential analyses, and the universal search for purpose and meaning. By width of the road, I mean the parts of the belief systems which have rituals, traditions, artistic expressions and cultural attachments that cement themselves into the bedrock of any society in which that belief is influential. And by depth of the road, I mean the strength and solidity of its primary truth foundations - a belief system that has centre points in history around which the power of these truth claims are firmly representative. 

If one religion is going to claim itself to be the right one, it must have all three road qualities in abundance. It must be long enough, wide enough and deep enough to stand out as the only road on which we should be travelling if we are to know God. The belief system’s road must show itself to be long enough to offer a consistent route for guidance in moral, theological, philosophical, empirical and experiential examinations, as well as continual enlightenment in the universal quest for purpose and meaning. It must be wide enough to cement itself into the bedrock of any society that enables its influence, and expect to emerge and impact through its rituals, traditions, artistic expressions and cultural attachments. And finally, and most importantly, it must have enough depth and firmness of foundation to support everything that travels on it, by being based on truthful propositions.

The one true God would be expected to be found on the only road that met these preconditions. And if we are to have a relationship with Him, He must be accessible through the prism of our daily phenomenological experiences, and His revelations must be explicable and receivable in the cognisance of everyone, irrespective of their background, their nationality, their status, their heredity, their culture, and their physical and mental abilities.

I believe that Christianity is the only religion that gives us a road of sufficient length, width and depth to claim itself to be the one true religion. The roads of some of the most influential belief systems are long and wide but shallow in depth (Hinduism, Islam), whereas Judaism is deep and wide, but its natural path turns the road into Christianity at the beginning of the first century, as Christ is the fulfilment of the Old Testament laws and prophecies. The pantheistic religions (of which Hinduism is the strongest) fail to solve the problem of Aseity; Islam (along with its superfluous subsidiaries) is only the most propagated of the Christian heresies (of which there are many); and Buddhism (along with its many subsidiaries) is only the most propagated of the Eastern heresies (of which there are many). Authentic Paganism has long since ceased to exist, and all that pertains to truth in Judaism and Greek Philosophy survives in Christianity.

The only revelations with God being a tangible presence beyond ordinary human ideas are the ones found in Christ: He went beyond mere private and subjective ideas about Divinity – He actually showed us God Himself. The Incarnation is not just about God bringing Himself to us to die for mankind’s salvation; it is also the response to a genuine epistemological problem that humankind could never solve without some help; without God becoming the focal point in our earthly existence, we would have no hope of knowing we are on the right road towards Him, and we would only be left with humankind’s distant conjectures about the true nature of God ("If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him." says Jesus in John 14:7)

Here we are beginning to understand a bit more of what Christ is in relation to other religions. His specialness is as far above the other religions as man is above the other apes. His truth is the one found in the Christian gospel, and all the false religions grow by virtue of the truths they borrow from Christianity, and the falsehoods they rivet on to their doctrines. To quote Chesterton “A novel in which a number of separate characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a sensational novel” – well, what Christianity does to the other religions is rather like what an author would do with those characters. Christ shows that all the previous religions (and ones not even founded yet) are all separate characters that, when stripped of all their false and extraneous bits, will be seen to have been Christ all along – the need to worship, to be loved, to communicate with the Divine – they are all human traits that too comfortably find their way into spurious belief systems

Here is where the length, width and depth of the strongest road combines in force to reveal the one true God; the power of grace takes an evil man and tells Him that if accepts the living God he can have salvation and be washed and cleansed. It takes an African tribesman, whose mind has been inculcated with spurious local customs about sea gods and animal worshipping, and it tells him seek revelation in Jesus Christ. It tells an oppressed woman in Iran or North Korea or Syria whose distressed mind has been impressed upon with fanatical teaching that the situation is not hopeless - that Christ is the way, the truth and the life - that hope can be found in Him because God chose to take a personal sharing in the human condition. It tells lost souls scattered all over the world - from Devon to Darfur, from South Yemen to South Korea, from East Brooklyn to East Timor - that their lives can have direction and meaning because the one and only God, the Creator of the universe, loves us enough to be born a man so that He could die on the cross and wipe out all our sins to bring us salvation.” 

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 3: 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 3 - taken from Letter 17: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy:

“My definition of a climate extremist is someone who doesn’t understand the straightforward cost-benefit analyses associated with climate change. These days there are probably more climate extremists than not. My definition of a climate alarmist is someone who does the selfish, immoral and ridiculous things we see associated with groups like Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil. Under the above definitions, all climate alarmists are climate extremists, but not all climate extremists are climate alarmists.

The cost-benefit analyses associated with climate change are easy to comprehend from an economist’s perspective. There are costs and benefits to our industrial activity, and there are costs of both action and inaction to climate change. It’s only by assessing these costs and benefits that we should decide the right balance between action and inaction. Alas, as far as I can see, almost nobody in politics, in the media or in the general populace is doing this properly.

What makes this neglect even worse is that, a lot of the time, people calling for climate action seem to confuse costs with benefits and benefits with costs. For example, cheap energy should be seen as a benefit, not as cost; and green jobs should be seen as a cost not a benefit. Green taxes are more of a cost than a benefit, and most of our use of carbon energy up to the present day has been a benefit not a cost. Virtually all taxpayer-funded or public climate action is a cost not a benefit, and virtually all climate inaction is a benefit not a cost. In economics, calling something a cost does not mean we think it shouldn’t happen. But confusing a cost with a benefit (and vice-versa) only confuses the problems we are attempting to solve – a problem that’s exacerbated when groups involved in the discussion begin with perverse and skewed incentives.

I’ve never believed that the majority of people who are extremists on a particular matter really care about that matter deep down; the cause, I believe, is merely a proxy for other incentives around group identity, a sense of purpose and belonging, and the self-congratulation associated with virtue signalling. For example, proclaimed socialists tend to overlook the economic principles that do most for poor people; proclaimed feminists tend to remain silent on things in society (like Islam) that oppress women most strongly; and climate extremists are uninterested in almost everything that doesn’t involve the absurd train wreck of net zero.

If climate extremists really did care about reducing carbon emissions in a way that wasn’t catastrophic for the global economy, they would have much more regard for the rapidly expanding technological innovations (like AI, digital, carbon capturing, ambient air capture, ocean fertilisation, afforestation, space reflectors, etc) that are helping solve carbon problems, more regard for current alternative energy options (like nuclear and gas), and more concern about the carbon footprint of the renewable technologies they purport to advocate. Geoengineering is still in its relative infancy, and that, and numerous other technological and scientific advancements, are going to do more to solve the problems of climate change than any of us can currently foresee.

People who are willing to cause harm and misery to citizens going about their business on a daily basis, but who are wholly uninterested in the above, show you everything you need to know about their real motives, I would humbly suggest.”