Showdown With A Swindler

You know how I like every day to be an adventure – well, here’s a strange case. I received a friend request from a Sandra Knight Sr, which I immediately identified as a con artist who has cloned my mother’s Facebook account. So, I decided that the most adventurous thing to do would be to try to strike up a conversation with the would-be scammer that he’d hopefully never forget, and then document it in pictures on my blog.

(The image is enlarged off the page template so the text is readable) 

The Three Types Of Atheists To Avoid Debating

Atheists can make good contributions to religious debates, but there are 3 types who are generally not worth engaging with, as attempted dialogue will usually be futile. 

1)     The spiteful detractors of faith who lurk parasitically in the comments section of other people’s writings in order to stir up trouble. 

2)     The commentators who just cannot stop banging on about how strongly they disbelieve in God and dislike religion. 

3)     Those who lack any willingness to concede anything good about that which they criticise. 

Group no 1 are the worst of all; they are people on whom you should waste absolutely none of your time discussing your faith. Leave them be, in the hope that, in ignoring them, they will learn to seek the rewards of proper engagement. Group 2 are usually people with an ex-church background, and an axe to grind, and are looking to seek attention and draw it on themselves, not to seriously engage in the matter. Group 3* can seem willing to engage at a superficial level, but if they are unwilling to acknowledge anything positive or persuasive about Christianity or the counter position, it should arouse suspicion.

* On the third group, I remember C.S Lewis once said "In order to pronounce a book bad, it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault." James Joyce has lots of streams of consciousness in Ulysses that say something similar about our response to human beings themselves, and how we might be indicted if we can’t extract the interesting from the apparent mundane. And as we’ve seen so often, the most tremendous minds aren't just operating at a great height themselves, they help others reach a great height too by meeting people where they are at and aiding them in climbing higher. A quality similarly expressed about Falstaff’s wit (a subset of intelligence) in Henry IV:

"Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me. The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent, or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men."

It’s The Dark Spirit That Desecrates The Sacred

 

To elaborate on a point I made earlier on social media about how the shame of people who are willing to desecrate the sacred. The reason we view things as sacred is that they are human expressions of reality’s majestic phenomena that are too profound to fully capture – like the sense of the numinous and the ineffable wonder that drifts in and amongst physical reality. Sacred art is our attempt to capture hints of Divine things. It is also an outward expression of an inner will to transcend the everyday routines and convey a sense of awe and appreciation for grander, metaphysical conceptions that offer the deepest sense of gratitude for how astounding reality can be. 

Sacred art, literature, poetry and architecture are like portals into transcendent realms that present ideals to which we should all aspire. That’s why goodness, beauty, and awe are some of the few things in life that can unite us across political and ideological divides. When you have a sense of wonder for a profound act of goodness, or for a thing of genuine beauty in the natural world, it unites in a shared experience and speaks at a level far beyond your political leanings or ideological standpoints.

Consequently, when you see the horrid Just Stop Oil cult members spoiling sacred artefacts and historical works of art, these aren’t just anti-oil or anti-capitalism protests, they are invocations of the most base and incorrigible spirits of darkness known to humankind. To desecrate the sacred is to exclaim to the world that your heart is corrupt and your mind is poisoned; it is to place yourself in opposition to humanity’s most profound attempts to reflect the Divine. And when an individual sinks that low, that means hostility to love, goodness, grace, forgiveness, and even Divinity itself.

These egomaniacal acts of narcissism come straight from the pit of hell; acts of vandalism not just against physical objects, but against the highest ideals of all that is worthy, precious and beautiful. And slowly, day by day, all these selfish, entitled, thoughtless proponents of this idiotic cult are turning into little devils.

Richard Dawkins: A Strange Secular Icon

 

I’ve always found it strange that Richard Dawkins became the leading poster boy for atheism in popular culture. While there’s no question that his works on biology are tremendous contributions to science, and terrifically written – especially The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow – there is little to recommend about Dawkins on the subject of God, Biblical exegesis, philosophy or religious faith. His book The God Delusion is a very weak attempt to undermine religious faith, his arguments against Christianity are woeful, his attempts at philosophical engagement are sub-standard, he’s fairly rigid in his thinking and in his ability to explore ideas openly, and he’s not especially witty or charismatic. 

And my surprise doesn’t end there. Given his supposed love of reason, he employs surprisingly inadequate reasoning in his atheistic arguments. And given his dislike of religious fundamentalism, which is the main target of his diatribe, it has probably slipped his notice that he resembles those fundamentalist traits in his own atheistic stridency. Is it really the case that his excellent works in biology have justified his place as the most popular spokesperson in atheism? I highly doubt it. Given the kind of people who were so easily talked out of their professed faith by Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I suspect that, as Tolstoy observed in his Confession, it was often merely "the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight."

But perhaps the defining inadequacy is this. Like most atheists, Richard Dawkins states that he thinks God does not exist – but his strawman caricatures are so clumsy that most Christians do not believe in the god that Dawkins denies. This points to one of my long-standing rules of thumb; the God one accepts or denies is only likely to be as intellectually tenable as the intellectual tenability of the person holding those ideas. 

And this leads to a point that I think reveals an incisive truth, but one that isn't necessarily obvious at first glance. To see what I mean, imagine that for Richard Dawkins’ next book, he decides to write a project called “The Flying Spaghetti Monster Delusion” – in which he explains in about 200 pages why there is no such thing as The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I am pretty certain there would be no demand for it. because nobody believes in The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Therefore, not only would the refutations be pointless, it would be a book replete with misrepresentations of what people actually believe. 

Yet the absurd truth is, Richard Dawkins has done more or less the same thing with his book The God Delusion. He has written a book replete with misrepresentations of a belief system, only this time it is not The Flying Spaghetti Monster, but Christianity, I know this because I know Christianity, and no Christian really believes in the things Dawkins spends 200 odd pages trying to refute.  At best, he may have counter-argued against a few ideas held by the most extremist religious fundamentalists, who are both unlearned and unworldly - but in doing so, he has written a diatribe against a set of ideas that most people don’t believe in and never have. That is the essence of this strange secular icon.

The Base Rate Errors of Young Earth Creationism

 

The basic logic from any propositional statement is that the conclusion must follow from the premises, and that an argument must be both valid and sound. An argument is valid if its logical structure ensures that the conclusion follows from the premises, but an argument is only sound if it is valid, and all its premises are true. Consequently, an argument can be valid but not sound, but if sound, it is valid too. For example:

P1: All gorillas are yellow

P2: Bruce is a gorilla

C:  Therefore Bruce is yellow

This argument is valid, but not sound. It has a valid structure (the conclusion logically follows from the premises), but the premise that all gorillas are yellow is, of course, false.

A sound argument would be:

P1: All gorillas are mammals

P2: Bruce is a gorilla

C:  Therefore, Bruce is a mammal

When making arguments that purport to be valid and sound, you have to make sure all your base rates are properly examined, and you also have to ensure you have the right number of premises to reach the right conclusion. The optimum number of premises would be a number sufficient to provide enough information to support the conclusion, but contain no extraneous premises that are redundant to the process. There are lots of premises we could add that give additional information about Bruce, which are unnecessary in determining whether Bruce is a mammal (“Bruce lives in a zoo”, “Bruce likes to eat fruit”, etc) ; but equally, the removal of one premise (“Bruce is a gorilla”) undermines the argument, as there are now too few premises to reach the conclusion.

Turning now to young earth creationism - pretty much all of their erroneous conclusions are defective because of initial base rate errors. Remember, if you have a base rate error, your subsequent probabilities and propositions will be faulty, while still seeming internally consistent to you. From much experience in dialogue with them, here are the primary base rate errors that I’ve noticed young earth creationists make, and the problems they cause.

Base rate error 1: Biblical literalism without context, nuance, or proper interpretation.
This is the primary base rate error that influences the majority of their other errors. Once you fail initially to discern the proper depth of meaning in texts like early Genesis, and later Biblical references to them, then you’ve just laid the foundation for a litany of basic errors in reasoning, and numerous faulty conclusions.

Base rate error 2: God’s word is perfect and without error, therefore if I think it says something, it can’t be questioned.
This base rate error underwrites so many of their associative errors, and works in conjunction with number 1. Because YECs read these key verses without context, nuance, or proper interpretation, they just see ‘God’s word’ without any critical analysis, and therefore if God’s word can’t be wrong, they must be right, and evolution must be false.

Base rate error 3: Failure to understand that the Bible is not a book that informs on scientific facts.
If your base rate error leads you to believe that scripture is making scientific claims, then these misinterpretations will lead to all kinds of faulty conclusions in contradiction to known scientific facts. Every pseudo-scientific claim YECs make is based on this base rate fallacy, and bootstrapped by base rate errors 1 and 2.

Base rate error 4: The evolution = no God fallacy.
Once base rate errors 1-3 have got under their skin, then this one naturally gets embedded too. YECs think evolution over millions of years means just random naturalism and no need for God (to them, it sounds too much like atheism), so any established scientific facts that support evolution are ignored or dismissed because they threaten the concept of ‘creation’ (and from which, the whole bogus institution of ‘creation science’ takes root and spreads its weeds).

Base rate error 5: If it doesn’t support a young earth, it must be false.
By now, the YECs are so conditioned by numbers 1-4 that the final base rate error to embed itself with all the others is that any Biblical interpretation, scientific propositions or rational argument that doesn’t support young earth creationism must be false. At this point, their brains will be so disordered that they will only be able to conclude that a) You’re not really a Christian; b) You’re a Christian who doesn’t take God’s word seriously enough; c) You’re a Christian who has fallen for an atheist deception; or d) You’re a Christian who is contributing to the secular decay of Christianity.

These bate rate errors form the bedrock of almost all the Biblical, interpretive, scientific and historical mistakes that comprise young earth creationism. All their monomaniacal scriptural fundamentalism, their pseudo-science, their ill-informed books, articles and videos – they are driven by the above base rate errors that start them off on the wrong track.

I hope that’s a useful account that will help you engage with young earth creationists (if you are not one), and help you to fix the faulty thinking (if you are one).

Why Socialism Is Irresponsible

It's a shame that all the main parties competing for your vote are socialist, because to understand human beings is to understand that socialism doesn’t work; and the reason it doesn’t work is because it gets its fundamentals wrong. Just so we’re clear, socialism is the view that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or heavily regulated by the state. Of course, it has morphed into something that purports to be friendlier towards the individual, taking the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and using it as a conceptual lever to usher in state ownership and radical redistributive measures. But spraying perfume on raw sewage still doesn’t make it smell much better.

I’ve written for years about the fundamental problems with socialism (see side bar) – namely the way that capitalism is superior in the vast majority of ways, the perennial problem with top-down as being mostly inferior to bottom up, the fact that the people socialists purport to want to help are the ones hurt hardest by their policies, and the fact that the price system is better than the state at allocating resources.

But perhaps the even bigger issue is that socialism has a big contradiction at the heart of it, which goes largely unnoticed by the socialists. It encourages those behaving in a way that socialism claims to be against, and it penalises those behaving in a way that socialism claims to advocate.

To see why, let’s break down socialism’s most fundamental principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Unfortunately, the big flaw is that the system rewards those who are behaving badly according to the values of the socialists themselves, and punishes those who are behaving rightly according to those same values. The “From each according to his ability” part means society functions best when people contribute to society in accordance with their ability to do so. This is a good thing; no quibbles there. The “to each according to his needs” part means people should receive help from society in accordance with how much they need it”. Most of us would agree that this is a good template for society – and one in which we do our best to help the first group thrive as much as possible, and the second group become part of the first group wherever possible.

The core problem at the heart of society, though, is that people are active agents with their own incentives, and people’s ‘according to their need’ is not simply a product of their environment as the socialist narrative holds - it is a lot to do with the decisions they make and the way they behave. By failing to acknowledge that people should be given credit for their positive contributions to society, and that people should also take responsibility and be accountable for their failure to contribute, the socialist model gets both things backwards. The socialist narrative treats those who contribute most as the enemy, and those who contribute least as the victim.

Don’t get me wrong – there are many vulnerable people who through no real fault of their own can’t contribute as much as others to society – and they should, of course, be the ones for whom the quality “to each according to his needs” should be most sympathetically administered. But, alas, there are many people who, through perverse incentives, bad decisions and wrong behaviour have made themselves part of the “to each according to his needs” group when they should be part of the “From each according to his ability” group. Socialism blindly treats this group as victims of a societal injustice, instead of as people who create greater dependency for themselves by their own behaviour.

Moreover, in the system that the socialist ideology ought to support – that those who can contribute more to society should be rewarded – the socialists then bemoan the natural outcome of this, which is that inequality increases, so they then claim an injustice based on the very principles their Marxist systems claims to advocate - that those who can contribute do so according ‘to their ability’. Socialism rewards those who are willing to be a burden to the economy, by treating them as the oppressed and taking money off others to give to them; and it penalises those who are willing to work hardest to make the most contributions to society by stigmatising them as oppressors who owe a debt to society in the form of supporting those who are willing to be a burden to society. It is a belief system with a big contradiction at the heart.

Why The Truth Is Always The Greatest Story

 

First published on my Network Norfolk page:

Many people ask, if God wanted us all to know the truth of His love for us, why did He demonstrate it in such a brief, one-off earthly visitation 2000 years ago with Christ’s incarnation? “Couldn’t He have stayed longer, or returned more often, or made it more obvious for each new generation?”, they ask. But I think this line of enquiry misses something profound about a) why the truth is always the greatest story, and b) why the greatest stories have the biggest impact because of how they are told.

Consider a literary analogue. There are some highly useful rules of thumb to apply to your writing techniques in telling stories. One is to only include sentences that either advance the plot of the story or the development of the character. A second is to enter a scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. A third is, show, don't tell - sometimes referred to as working out what you want to say and then doing your best not to say it. These methods will help a writer with parsimony and style - trimming the fat until the body of the story contains only the essential and most compelling parts.

Another key thing a good story needs is drama and suspense, and this is best manifested in the reader having empathy for the characters. For your story to advance, your characters need to be relatable, and have goals and challenges. They must have a want that they are working to satisfy: whether that's love for another person, a battle against the enemy, a journey, a hunt for treasure, or overcoming a monster – devices that create conditions under which the protagonist is in pursuit of something, and the reader really cares about the outcome.

Characters that do not have needs are of no interest to the reader - there is nothing for them to engage with. Imagine a novel about a perfect character who was wholly satisfied in his perfection - a kind of distant, unattainable, omniscient, omnipotent Divine figure but who felt no pain, never empathised or suffered, felt no danger, and had no involvement in creation because all his needs were satisfied merely by the essence of his being. A reader would find that character quite boring, because there is very little for imperfect humans to relate to or engage with.

Given the foregoing considerations, I think this is a good inroad to understanding why Christianity uniquely differs from the other religious belief systems, in that it is the only one in which God takes an active interest in His creation, in which He shows us the full range of His character, and the one in which Christ’s incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection demonstrates why the truth is always the greatest story, and why the greatest stories have the biggest impact because of how they are told.

In the deepest sense, Christ’s brief time on earth told the greatest story because it reflected how all the best stories are told; it involved the most powerful way for God to relate to His creation; it displayed the most personal way for Him to show His love for the world, in the most exhilarating plot and development of character; it contained the perfect of balance of the ‘show, don't tell’ maxim; and it employed the “enter a scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible” device to enable us to become fully immersed in the drama, and carry on His story and His truth in our own lives in relationship with Him.

There is no greater story in all of history; firstly, because it is told perfectly; and secondly, because it is perfectly true

Baby Reindeer: The Drama That Keeps Unfolding

The Baby Reindeer saga is a Netflix drama that has evolved into an equally interesting, headline-grabbing meta-drama, where every party seems to have made mistakes. What seems apparent at this stage is this. Fiona Harvey appears to be an unpleasant, unstable woman, who has caused plenty of suffering and anxiety to, at minimum, Laura Wray and Richard Gadd. Richard Gadd seems to have lacked a proper handle on the truth claims of his drama, and we know at least one or two of the principal claims in the drama were false (for example, it appears that Fiona Harvey never served a custodial sentence, as portrayed in the drama). And Netflix appears to have seriously messed up in allowing a ‘This is a true story’ drama to be aired that wasn’t wholly a true story.

Both Richard Gadd and Netflix may have been irresponsible in enabling the real Fiona Harvey to have been identified so easily (by using real Tweets in the show, Internet sleuths had no trouble tracking her down). And Laura Wray appears to be very credible, and seems to be telling the truth about her dreadful experience, after having the severe misfortune of encountering Fiona Harvey several years ago. Fiona Harvey and her legal team have apparently now filed a lawsuit against Netflix to the tune of $170 million in damages. 

Now, there are still some unknowns yet to materialise, but given how culpable Fiona Harvey is in her historical behaviour, I don’t like to think of her making a fortune off her own historically bad conduct. The extent to which she is now a victim of the Baby Reindeer show’s popularity is hard to separate from the notion that there wouldn’t have been a Baby Reindeer drama if she hadn’t allegedly conducted herself so badly towards Richard Gadd and Laura Wray in the first place. Equally, given the false claims in the drama, combined with the mistake in calling it a true story, both Richard Gadd and Netflix have errors to account for as well.

I watched Baby Reindeer on its first week of release. I think it’s a brilliant drama, and the sensitive subject matter was handled with aplomb. But it seems like this whole meta-drama saga could have been avoided if only they’d begun with the disclaimer: “This is based on a true story, but some scenes have been changed for dramatic effect.” 

Although, all that said, it might transpire that the famous aphorism from Oscar Wilde, “There's only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”, may turn out to be the case for all the main parties involved in this saga.

Probing The Answers In Genesis Cult

 You may have noticed recently I’ve been criticising young earth creationism more than usual. This is working towards creating a single Blog page - a kind of comprehensive YEC critical page - which contains all the hyperlinks to all the different rebuttals, both articles and videos. Then I can just share that one source when it's pertinent, and it should be like a portal that leads to all the material.

Given how extraordinarily wrong young earth creationism is, one of my lifelong puzzles about YECs is whether they really believe this stuff or not - and to what extent is it pride, ignorance, deception or self-deception at the heart of their misapprehensions (probably a mix of all four).

I've engaged on the Answers in Genesis Facebook page a bit in the last few weeks, and we've got in to a bit of a rinse and repeat cycle. So, I asked this genuine question: How many times are we going to go around like this, where you present an article that's wrong, I tell you what's wrong with it, you ignore it, and then just carry on posting more articles that make exactly the same or similar kinds of mistakes? How long can you keep presenting dishonest falsehoods before you start to develop a conscience and question yourselves and the material you're producing?

As expected, the question has been totally ignored by AIG, as have most of other critiques of their pseudo-science. As I said, I suspect there's a heady mix of pride, ignorance, deception or self-deception at the heart of it - but it's the deception and self-deception parts that interest me most, because we are all ignorant of many things, and all susceptible to pride - but we do not all deliberately deceive and suffer the consequences of self-deception in the teeth of deliberate external deceit.

Normally, when you believe something genuinely and honestly, you know why you believe that thing, and you justify the belief by drawing out the empirical, rational and logical consequences of that belief. But when you're mired in self-deception by being outwardly deceptive, you obviously don't do that. If you tell a lie, you don't try to explain why it's true, because you know it isn't - you either stay quiet and hope no one questions it, or you distort the picture to make the lie more believable.

So, from experience of AIG, I think the shadow sits somewhere between deception and self-deception. Because if you observe what they say, and how they operate, they never draw out the empirical, rational and logical consequences of their own beliefs. They perpetuate the deception by staying quiet on the things they are omitting, and they spend most of their time criticising evolution to distort the picture in an attempt to make the lie of young earth creationism more believable.

How Cults Are Formed

Are the qualities required to become a good cult leader rare? Chief execs are relatively rare, compared to the workplace size. Very high wages are a reflection of a job that requires skills that are scarcer than most other skills. If the skills required to be chief exec were common, then competition would be greater, and it would bid down the wages for being chief exec. 

An increased demand for chief execs may benefit less good chief execs by increasing the pool size, or it may bid up wages if the supply stayed the same. An increased demand for guitar bands won’t necessarily benefit individual guitar bands, because it will probably bring many new aspiring guitar bans into the music scene. But an increased demand for Radiohead will benefit Radiohead because there’s only one of them. 

In other words, it often pays to be unique and different, especially if those qualities stimulate high demand. If your music school has twelve pianists, ten guitar players, and only one drummer – the lone drummer has a greater chance of being in the band.

Leaders of cults (political, religious, environmentalist, social justice, etc) follow a similar pattern, even if what they are selling is almost always garbage. Cult groups are started by a few individuals scattered about in the annals of time. Irrespective of how ubiquitous they become, all cults can be traced back to an inceptive founder who had the charisma and socio-personal skills to acquire the initial following. 

These leaders must have rare characteristics, because if their contributions were not unique, there probably would be many more cults than there are. But yet, on the other hand, the intellect, rational persuasion and likeability of cult leaders is usually of dubious integrity. Which leads me to believe that cults are formed when groups of pliable individuals are (often independently) looking for a leader with rare qualities, and someone steps up and takes advantage of the demand.

 

Sunday Faith Series: Two Observations About Suffering

 

Some sceptics say the world is too cruel and unjust and too full of suffering for there to be an all-loving God as Creator. I have two brief observations to make, which are somewhat whimsical, but only somewhat, as I think there are several grains of truth attached to them: 

1)     Those who have the above objection but still choose to have children (which is probably a great majority of them) clearly believe that the world is not too cruel and unjust and too full of suffering to bring children into. If they thought that, on balance, the world was good enough, purposeful enough and interesting enough to bring new life into the world, knowing this new life would be subjected to everything the world throws at them, they perhaps shouldn’t be so sure that God didn’t feel the same about creation as a whole. 

2)     Suppose you were offered the chance to push a button, after which you get 5 seconds of awful pain, misery and suffering, and then the rest of your life consists of a continuous state of blissful, heavenly joy and contentment. I think most people would push the button. Now, consider a life span of 80 years on earth, comprising the entirety of human experiences, both positive and negative, as a ratio to the timescale of eternal heavenly bliss with God for those who choose it. Even though 5 seconds is but a mere blip in an 80 year timescale, as a ratio, 5 seconds compared with 80 years is an astronomically higher ratio than 80 years of earth compared with eternal bliss in Heaven.

Those grains of truth are, I contend, both indicative and evocative. And, sure, I can already anticipate what some objections might be, as they ought to be considered. I’d say the primary challenge to number 1 would be; yes, but there are many other factors (both conscious and subconscious) that drive the desire to have children (biological, psychological emotional, selfish, socio-cultural), and couples may rationally choose to do so in spite of believing the world is not the creation of an all-loving God. To which, I say, true – but a) It still doesn’t stack up well alongside your contention that God shouldn’t have created such a world; and b) Some of the psychological, emotional, selfish and socio-cultural factors driving your desire to have children in spite of your view about God’s creation are likely to be some of the same factors driving your belief that it feels convenient in the short-term if those desires influence your argument against God being the Creator.

And if we move to number 2, it may cross your mind that the primary objection to 2 actually seems like an ironic supporting statement of number 1. That is, the biggest challenge to number 2 seems to be that, even if you accept the proposition that the world is too cruel and unjust and too full of suffering, there is, at least, a great deal of goodness, purpose and interest that works alongside it. This shows me that they think life is sufficiently worth living that they would willingly allow their own children into the world to experience it. Once they do that, it becomes hard to accept that they really do believe that there is too much badness and suffering in the world for them to believe in God. If the world is sufficiently worth living in (in their view) that they'd happily bring new life into it, then it's not such a big step to accept that God feels the same about the world and all the lives in it. After all, life on earth is both hard and easy, it's both joyous and dreadful, it's both simple and complex, and it's both pleasing and frustrating - but it never fails to be interesting, exhilarating and enriching for those who want to throw themselves into the adventure. 

The Christian, of course, would add that those challenges and struggles are a necessary part of the journey of growth, progress and fulfilment, and therefore hold deep inherent value in the creation story – which is the same line of thinking that seems to make it worthwhile bringing new life into the world, in spite of those challenges and struggles.

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.