How Politicians Distort Language

 

George Orwell's Politics and the English Language is one of the best essays ever written on how the distortion and abuse of language in politics helps politicians get away with bad ideas that would be more obviously bad if the language was simplified. Cunning political language is designed to "make lies sound truthful", Orwell said - and that truth has become more and more evident, and has reached a new nadir since the Blair years and beyond.

Take many political policies or ideas, and translate the language into the most truthful and simplistic form, and you'll see all sorts of things about them that seem far less attractive. Consider the absurd initiative politicians call "Levelling Up". The Department of ‘Levelling Up’ is one of the most disingenuous things the government has ever created – so it’s probably fitting that Michael Gove is the Minister for Levelling Up, as his character almost perfectly fits the profile. Here is how the government describes it:

"Levelling Up supports communities across the UK to thrive, making them great places to live and work, and aims to reduce the imbalances, primarily economic, between areas and social groups across the United Kingdom".

And here is a less attractive but more truthful way we could describe it. Levelling Up distorts the more prudent use of capital, where instead of investors risking their own money in areas they think will get the most fruitful returns, politicians spend other people's money where they believe it will be beneficial for securing votes and popularity. Whether people like the Levelling Up policy or not, we should at least ensure that it is described correctly.

The same with small business subsidies. Taxpayers are forced to give money to business owners the politicians choose to favour instead of spending their own money on businesses they prefer. A lot of the most elusive policymaking is sold with shadowy language that evades this core truth - that the government claims an entitlement to the fruits of other people's labour in order to spend it in ways that will make politicians more popular (or less unpopular), and further their own careers by continually increasing the size of the state beyond our approval.

Political language is full of making lies and half-truths sound palatable. Things that are costs are routinely referred to by politicians as 'investments'; initiatives that are sold as benefits are really only benefits for a small subset of the population, where the costs are greater and spread thinly across the nation; rules, regulations and redistributive measures routinely throw up negative unintended consequences and costly spillover effects that are habitually ignored in the discourse; policies purported to be introduced to help the wages of the poor actually end up costing the poor more at the point of consuming goods and services; political ideas sold for our benefit or for some pretext of moral good almost never get backed up by evidence, and never come with a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of both sides of the argument - the list goes on.

Ambiguity and spin are woven into the prose of politicians, because when ideas and policies are stated in plain English, the things we might like less about them become more transparent.

Sunday Faith Series: God On Trial Again - Atheists’ Psychological Tricks

The only people who go on about religious faith more than believers are the unbelievers who seem utterly obsessed with convincing everyone else that God doesn’t exist. Of course, the arguments against Christianity have been so weak or so ill-conceived for so long that even the atheists themselves have probably lost confidence in them deep down. But they can’t let it lie, so they had to find a way to carry on dismissing Christianity while carrying the internal burden of not being persuaded by the strength of their arguments.

If you’re no longer persuaded by your own arguments, and you’re honest enough to not be in denial about how weak they are, and you want to carry on having the conversations, then you have two options: you can either come up with better arguments, or you can employ some psychological trickery to conceal the inadequacy of your position. The first one hasn’t happened – the arguments are ages old, and despite contemporary online atheist keyboard warriors speaking as though they have interesting and original contributions to make to the debate, the reality is, they are only rehashing old arguments that have long ago been shown to be deficient. This leaves the option of psychological trickery, which I’ve noticed is the approach most contemporary atheists have chosen, and it usually comes in one of two forms.

The first and the most squalid psychological trick is to simply dismiss anything to do with religious faith and the believers who have it as idiotic, thoughtless and without reason – thereby rendering it unworthy of any further consideration, and only deserving of mockery and hostility. That way, the atheist who employs this method gets to conceal all their own insufficiencies, intellectual defects, and personal ethical shortcomings, and erects the walls and places themselves captive in their own cognitive prison cell, never having to seriously engage with anything profound or meaningful.

The second kind of psychological trick is a level above the first, and does at least involve some superficial engagement, and even occasionally some thoughtful attempts to undermine Christianity - but it is to arraign God on the grounds that if He existed He would be morally inferior to the person condemning Him. Whether it’s God’s character in the Bible, the concept of hell, or the evil and suffering in the world, the psychological trick is to declare that He is consequently not worthy of praise and worship, but of moral judgement and condemnation, and therefore probably doesn’t exist.

Now, for the Christian, I do think there are elements to this line of thought that deserve honest consideration and deep contemplation, but it’s not like Christians haven’t been doing this for centuries, and it’s not like the atheists are coming up with anything new with this ‘God in the dock’ mentality. Dismiss God as cruel, tyrannical and unjust, and as being moral inferior to yourself, and you never have to engage with proper consideration regarding the profundity of the subject.

Besides, it just won’t do to write off God in this way, because the idea that He is unworthy or morally inferior to us doesn’t stack up. Some will tell us that the God in the Old Testament seems like a barbaric God. But yet in the New Testament we see God in the form of Jesus - as someone all-loving who takes our sins to the cross, and while suffering the most intense agony, asks God the Father for their forgiveness. That is not just a stupendous act of love and goodness, it is also a stupendous act of grace and mercy. The kind of God who did that for us, and who treated people as well as Jesus did (and encouraged everyone else to do the same) is clearly demonstrating the qualities of a God of supreme love and benevolence, in spite of some of the difficult things we experience in the Old Testament and in the hardships experienced in creation.

It would also be foolish to hold on to any idea that God somehow changes during the time from Old Testament to New. If we are to consider God under the terms He asks to be considered, then we must think only in terms of His being a perfect and good God. Therefore, understanding Him through the lens of the New Testament accounts of Jesus only increases the likelihood that those callow impressions of His being 'barbaric', 'genocidal' and 'maniacal' are examples of erroneous human-constructed conceptions of Him.

The Salvation Christ bought for us on the cross is intended to be a joy that offers hope to rescue the hopeless. But the atheist trickery is to turn it on its head and claim it to be immorally absolvent. Instead, they treat the cross as being morally repugnant, and as something that should elicit our disapproval, not our grateful response. At this point, the greatest act of love the world has ever seen, and the greatest evidence of God’s goodness that we have, is one of the main things being used against God.

 

Socialists Are As Capitalist As Capitalists

One of the preposterous things about the anti-capitalist brigade is that, whatever form of leftism is being espoused, they still get to enjoy all the benefits of capitalism that the capitalists enjoy. The anti-capitalists are capitalists in virtually every way imaginable, except, ironically, when they tell us they want to help kill the capitalism that has bestowed such an enriched way of life upon them. Leftists who claim to hate capitalism are like swimmers who claim to hate buoyancy.

So, on what basis do I claim that leftists are really capitalists? Partly on the observation that the incentives and the rules of growth and progress that govern the free market also govern their consumption habits, their value structure, their logic and their revealed preferences. Partly on the basis that they strive to make their lives better and more secure and more materially prosperous in the way that resembles the market system. Partly on the basis that they seem more content being better off than worse off. Partly on the basis that they act in ways that make their lives better off in the same way that capitalism is the aggregation of people acting in ways that make their lives better off. Partly because most of them bemoan the wealth of the rich, yet exhibit consumption habits that increase the wealth of the rich. Partly because almost no leftist has ever protested against the rich capitalist country they live in by leaving and moving to a poorer socialist country. The list goes on.

When I see people working hard, trying to provide for their families, tying to innovate, trying to beat the competition (for jobs, for goods, for services), enjoying the fruits of their labour, undertaking mutually beneficial transactions with people of different skills, knowledge, backgrounds, ethnicity, culture and education - all of which reflect the fundamental benefits of capitalism over the past few thousand years, and especially the past few hundred - I can feel pretty confident that we can take their actions as indication of their values and their priorities. However, when I see people shouting in the streets with leftist placards, or blocking the roads, or spilling orange paint during sports events, it's much less obvious whether they are motivated by a genuine desire to do good, or by perverse incentives, personal malice, or as victims of a mass social contagion that brainwashes their young minds.

Moreover, the person actively engaged in the realities of the market is much more likely to have a balanced view of the arguments than the person who just sees bad in capitalism wherever they go. And the person with the greater stake in the success of the market's qualities is likely to have more self-determination than the person who just wants to protest its existence from the outside - and is therefore far more likely to have weighed up the realities of trade and competition. The anti-capitalists want to have their cake while telling everyone else how much they hate cake; whereas the capitalists know that if they eat a slice of cake, producers in the market will have to work to produce more cake, and consumers will have to work hard to purchase that cake. I know which group I'd trust to offer a reliable critique of the situation.

Not only are socialists way more capitalist than they are socialist - in fact, they are only socialist because they are capitalist (because capitalism provides all the resources for socialism).

Why Vegetarianism Might Be More Problematic Than Meat-Eating & Veganism

I have a lot of respect and admiration for vegans. In fact, if you oppose the meat industry on ethical grounds, then as far as I can see, you should be a vegan, not a vegetarian. Being a vegetarian doesn't appear to satisfy the dual aim of opposing the meat industry on ethical grounds and avoiding hypocrisy. This analysis, of course, precludes people who are vegetarian on non-ethical grounds, but merely on the grounds that they do not like the taste of meat. This analysis also assumes that it is right to keep and kill animals humanely to cause the least amount of pain and discomfort.

Generally, then, as far as I can tell, there are two contrasting positions that one can take on this matter.

1) Meat-Eating
One is to eat meat, on the basis of several arguments one could make in favour of it using a cost-benefit analysis. Everyone knows the costs of meat-eating, but those costs can be measured up against the benefits - the strongest of which are, in my view; that we've evolved for hundreds of thousands of years on a meat-based diet, meaning there are likely to be some physical optimisations based on such a diet; that the meat industry provides lots of social utility in terms of pleasure, jobs and many other associative benefits; and that most animals wouldn't get the chance to be born at all without the meat industry (that's a complex philosophical consideration that is too large in scope for this post, but you get the gist). Whether you agree with these arguments or not, these (and other arguments) are generally put forward by those who choose to eat meat.

2) Veganism
Vegans have an almost opposite approach; they not only refuse to eat meat, they also refuse to eat anything related to animal products at all. Their argument for doing so is to oppose the animal industry on ethical grounds, due to the amount of animal suffering caused by the practice of meat eating.

As far as I'm concerned, both positions deserve respect, and it's up to the individual's conscience and reasoning in deciding their position. Perhaps with Omniscience we'd be able to comprehensively justify the meat-eating industry by weighing up all the benefits against the costs. On the other hand, perhaps the vegans are the only ones making the most profound moral advancements, especially in the context of contemporary innovation and viable alternatives. I'm open to both propositions.

However, what does seem to me to be problematic is the vegetarian position - it seems like a weak and inadequate objection to the ethics of the meat industry. Vegetarians reason that in not eating meat directly, but still enjoying animal products (like eggs, milk, etc), they are trying to take an ethical position, but not going as far as denying themselves many of the foods that vegans are forgoing. They appear to me to be trying to have their free-range-egg-cake and eat it. But here's the problem; continuing the example with eggs, the egg industry isn't just about not eating meat - around 7 billion male chicks are culled each year worldwide, because obviously only female chicks are beneficial in the egg-laying industry, and because these male chicks are a different breed to the ones used for chicken meat.

Even so-called ethical egg consumption involves the killing of billions of new born chicks - so, as far as I can see, there are only two reasonable positions to take. One is to renounce the whole industry of animal products, and become a vegan; the other is to accept that animal consumption comes with both costs and benefits, and make a case for meat-eating when weighing up everything positive and negative about the industry. I just cannot make an ethical case for vegetarianism - it seems morally inferior to veganism, and only a half-hearted attempt to make an ethical stand against the animal industry.

Perhaps the vegetarian would argue that their food consumption policy is based on a matter of gradation, in that there are some actions they won't justify and some they will. Perhaps they reason that killing cattle is not acceptable, but culling chicks is permissible, in order to enable egg consumption. Clearly vegetarians must endorse some animal products that vegans wouldn't, otherwise those vegetarians would presumably also be vegans. But I don't think most vegetarians would consider that culling chicks is permissible, which may mean there is some inconsistency and ethical defect in vegetarianism that isn't found in meat-eating or veganism.

 

Science Like Never Before

If my book The Genius of the Invisible God ever gets published, and if you ever acquire a copy, you’ll come across a section about what I call ‘cognitive effigies’, which amount to:

“A repertoire of mental activity we use to orient ourselves in a world too complex for simple apprehensions, but in which we can distil higher meaning and purpose than we can find in its material constituent parts.”

I go into detail in the book about how the physical world out there resembles a useful fiction, and note in this passage:

“Take any of the following ideas; volume, heat, texture, fast, slow, particle, wave and light – each of these is a mental simulation of something related to external nature, but equally, each is human-centred too, and remains only a partially accurate simulacrum of reality ‘out there’. This is the 'cognitive effigy'. This book may be the first time you’ve considered the idea of the brilliant illusion of the 'cognitive effigy', and it must in some way shock, because the thought that things like gravity and weight and mass and energy are simulacra based on a kind of anthropocentric fiction of ideas seems alien to many.”

Once we apprehend reality out there in more depth, we understand that science is also a kind of useful fiction too. The main difference between science and other useful fictions is that science has the most practical (and predictive) empirical utility, but ultimately it still only relates to one kind of relation to reality, namely an implicitly physical one. 

Consider for example Newton's law of gravity and Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy – they are both observations in physics, whereby the latter superseded the former. But from this standpoint, we do not say that Einstein showed Newton to be false, rather that Einstein's selected system of geometry, Riemannian Geometry, describes the observed phenomenon better than the Euclidean system employed by Newton, but neither is considered singularly true and neither is anything like a full explanation either - they are only one prong on Hume's fork.

I think this taps into the idea of scientific disciplines as a kind of useful fiction, and how our minds relate to reality. Even though mathematics has an existence more primary than physics, the mathematical symbols we use for deciphering laws in physics are very much part of the language we create. But if we could get a proper sense of the true reality, we’d actually understand that it’s the physics we use as a map to decipher the landscape of mathematical reality. And that is a big part of why we have to embody these cognitive effigies – there is no proper sense of the world except by way of symbolising, analogising, metaphorising, allegorising and narrativising those discrete packages of information to create meaning and purpose from our physical map reading. 

Consider the geometry allusion above, by way of illustration. Geometries change according to which map of physical reality we are using. Euclidean geometry maps the base of geometry (lines, flat space), whereas hyperbolic geometry and elliptic geometry go beyond the Euclidian base, into the realms of curved space, geodesics, differentiable manifolds, and what have you. Riemann's geometry moves us into the field of geodesics, differentiable manifolds and the generalised principle of dealing with higher dimensions (Einstein's General Relativity emerges from Riemannian geometry, for example).

If you consider any space of dimension N, you can select a curvature giving it a Euclidean, elliptic or hyperbolic nature - just upping the number of dimensions doesn't make any fundamental difference at all. But a Euclidian shape is still an ideal shape, which means it falls within the category of ideation (an idea). But Euclidian geometry and Riemannian geometry are not at odds, of course - just different lenses through which we map physical reality. Our future science will probably consist of maps that go beyond Euclidian and Riemannian geometry - it's just that we need further experience and discovery before we can say what lies ahead.

This taps into Kant's conditions for understanding things (such as an awareness of space and time - that he called "forms of intuition" in his Critique of Pure Reason) and how they are derived from the structure of the mind itself. In other words, they are phenomenal, and transcendentally ideal because they are presupposed by our experience as concepts of our mind (recall his distinction too in the same work between phenomena, the world as it appears to us, and noumena, the world as it is in itself).

Here's another example. When Maxwell proved that light consists of electromagnet waves, we might picture the analogous image of water waves or sound waves when trying to apprehend this. Well, bearing in mind that waves are really a physical metaphor expressed as an equation, something very interesting followed. Einstein analogised the situation with two models – one of ideal gas, and one of a black body. The former had bouncing molecules and the latter had bouncing light waves – and he returned the same equations for each, except for one difference. With the ideal gas, the exponent was the number of molecules, whereas with the black body was the total energy divided by n energy, where n is a fraction of the total. From these equations, Einstein forecasted that the energy of the molecules of light would be analogically linked to the number of gas molecules, and he turned out to be right, and it was from this that our concept of the photon (a quantum of light) emerged. 

These are interesting examples of how humans, often without thinking of reality this way, extract from physical observations, and use symbolism and metaphor to describe reality in a way that draws a map-like representation of the territory of mathematics, and feeds into a narrative that enables us to link our segments together to make a giant, complex three dimensional story of physical reality – a story that only exists in that way because of the cognitive effigies we construct by virtue of being physical beings.

That is the ultimate useful fiction of science - our cognitive effigies provide utility because they enable us to tap into a system of pattern deciphering related to the physical world. And I think the only reason why anyone would confuse the map (physics) and the territory (mathematics) is because, being physical beings in a physical universe, we cannot easily escape the first person physical perspective and conceive of more primary realities beyond the physical – a bit like if the characters in Hamlet could come alive enough to realise they are confined to the acts and scenes on the pages, but also that their creator lives in Shakespeare-land, in a higher dimension of reality than the one in which their plots and dialogue exist.

On The Christian Dating Scene

I’ve been observing the Christian dating scene, and one thing led to another blog post about the dating market in general. Our long evolutionary story has optimised us for reproductive success, which means (among other things) that males try to outcompete each other for a mate and for resources, and females select suitable males on that basis. Females do the selecting, by inviting males to compete amongst each other to be selected. That is why males are, on average, more interested in status than females are – it is status that gives indications of good genes, and signals to females that males with high status might make good mates.

In the modern age, humans have developed a socio-cultural sophistication that enables them to be driven by things other than genetic biological stimulus - but status is here to stay, and probably always will be. Status doesn't dominate your chances of passing on your genes as it once did in animal hierarchies, but it does play a key part in assortative mating. Because women generally desire socio-economically upwards pursuits in the men with whom they wish to have children, status is a much more important thing for men than it is for women, which is why men are generally far more competitive than women, and why this plays out in workplace statistics too.

In fact, someone (I forget who, possibly a character in a movie) made an interesting observation whilst standing by the Hudson River looking over at the Manhattan skyline - he said that pretty much the whole thing has been designed, bit by bit, by the driving force of the male pursuit of sex and genetic propagation: that it's one big agglomeration of peacocks' tails.

As some of you may know, in the Gaussian distribution of male and female intelligence, male intelligence has a wider curve than the female curve. This means that over the population there is very little difference on average between male and female intelligence, but that men appear slightly more at the extreme ends of each tail. In other words, there are slightly fewer female geniuses but also slightly fewer females who are at the extreme end of low intelligence. 

Accepting that intelligence is heritable, it’s likely that this distribution of male and female intelligence has some causal relation to the evolutionary drive for reproductive sense. In terms of supply and demand, the female womb is a scarcer commodity than the sperm of males, which means that successful men can pass on more of their genes than successful women, but also that the success of passing on genes is overall more consistent in women than men. A greater proportion of unsuccessful women are more likely to have children than unsuccessful men, which probably has a bearing on the distribution of male and female intelligence. The slightly higher risk of being male in terms of reproductive success is likely to play out in the fact that men are at the highest and lowest end of the intelligence spectrum, rather like how the biggest risk takers in the casino are likely to make up both the richest and the poorest gamblers on the night, with the steadier gamblers making up the peak of the curve.

Given the foregoing, a few things hold. People in the dating pool are in competition to find a successful union. Men are in competition with each other far more than women (because men are competing to be chosen, remember), but women are in competition too. Furthermore, men and women are in competition with other men and women who are closest to them in the assortative mating hierarchy (which really comprises multiple hierarchies). Take any example – income, looks, intelligence – and the same varying levels of competition will occur. In terms of financial attraction, quite rich Roger is in closer competition with quite rich Roy than he is with quite poor Pete. In terms of physical attraction, gorgeous George is in closer competition with gorgeous Gary than he is with not-so-gorgeous Gavin.

Across these multiple hierarchies, which are subsets of the overarching assortative mating hierarchy, different males will have different advantages in different areas. Gavin may lose out to George on looks, but win on financial allure. If Gary is both gorgeous and rich, he may be even more of an attractive proposition to females than Gavin or George, but not as attractive proposition as Greg, who is gorgeous, rich and highly intelligent. We evolved in a system where reproductive success is driven by status in multiple hierarchies, and the dating market reflects this.

The Christian dating market is certainly a distinct form of the generalised principles in other dating markets - and there are many other complex driving factors connected to the spiritual and theological elements of pair-bonding - but the underlying engine that drives monogamous and reproductive incentives is as present in the Christian dating market as it is most others.

One factor in the Christian dating market is likely to be that status is not thought of in quite the same way, as Christians understand their transformative state in relation to their identity in Christ, and should no longer be under the thrall of powerful worldly influences in the way they would be if they were not Christians. But not only will Christians not escape the status elements of the world, to a great degree, they will also be part of a Christian subsection hierarchy in which the aforementioned attractive qualities remain a significant factor in status for those doing the choosing, and will also have other kinds of discernment in terms of what they desire in a husband or wife. They will also be doing their best to determine God's will in their selection process, as the Lord may well have other considerations in their choosing that work alongside conventional strategies in assortative mating.

You see, like everyone else, Christians are evolutionarily hardwired to pay attention to status in order to attain reproductive success - but what the Christian knows that no other group of people can possibly know is that all of the worldly things combined are astronomically surpassed by a relationship with Jesus. That is, even when all the worldly things are sought and attained - status, wealth, material luxury, etc - they do not come close to giving us the purpose, contentment and fulfilment we've always longed for, because only in our relationship with Christ do we find these things. To that end, the Christian dating market is on a different level altogether, because it comprises all of the biological and social elements of the standard dating markets, and all the Biblical and spiritual elements working alongside them.

Half An Orphan: In Loving Memory

Today marks a year since my dear dad passed away. They always talk of the deep tragedy of a parent losing their child - and that is, of course, the most devastating thing. But losing a parent is an absolute tragedy too, especially for an only child; the yearning for what you once had - but perhaps worst of all, the fact that they are absent from everything that happens and will happen for those they’ve left behind. We celebrate a lived past with more comfort than we do grieving the loss of a future snatched away. For me, the poignant void of the first parental loss evokes a sense of being half an orphan, if such a notion can be imagined.

Yet as one future was seized, so too a new one begun, as the reflection period thereafter saw my dear mum come to know the Lord for the first time. It serves as a timely reminder that, as C.S. Lewis points out in A Grief Observed: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape."

And may that be a source of encouragement for those friends and loved ones I know are suffering at present. For you may have noticed in your life that it’s usually not in the midst of suffering that God feels most present and palpable; it is usually when we are positive and upbeat because things are going well that He feels most tangible. Wake up and leave the house on a sunny day, with a sense of joy about the hours ahead, and God seems to be everywhere – in the neighbours, in the smooth running of the bicycle wheels, in the warm gentle breeze, in the birds singing– it feels the easiest and most natural thing in the world to offer Him praise even for the mundane and the predictable. But wake up and leave the house with the chill of the day ahead, with the almost despairing quail of every task, every engagement and every foreboding sense of hopelessness that pervades the cold, destitute corridors of the inner soul, and frequently He seems nowhere to be found.

But perhaps in most cases it has to be that way; He will reveal new landscapes more often in our time of hardship because that is when our hearts are most open to fresh horizons, and our soul most acutely aware of what needs confronting. Paradoxically, it may be in those mournful states where we can best discover "the joy of the Lord is our strength", and where, as Psalm 28:7 declares:

 The Lord is my strength and my shield;
My heart trusts in Him, and He helps me.
My heart leaps for joy,
And with my song I praise Him.

The promise of Christianity is, of course, that it is true, not that it is without suffering. For that is the point, that truth is always more powerful than mere consolation – and we go into this faith for the truth, not for the consolation. The consolation comes only as a result of truth, like how overcoming fear only comes as a result of courage, because it’s with truth that we need not fear our suffering, and that we have fruit of the Holy Spirit (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.)

Finally, be encouraged, especially in the tough times, that we can do ALL things through Christ who strengthens us (Philippians 4:13), and that when the light doesn’t seem visible in the present darkness, it’s often because God is shining it on a new landscape in readiness to guide us there.  

 

Ideas Vs. Characters

The two main divisions in the world are to do with perceived ideas and perceived characters. Most of the issues people debate are battles of ideas, but quite often they become battles of perceived character too, which militates against concord. If you think the person you're debating comes from a group you think is morally repugnant, then you are less likely to give proper consideration to their arguments. But quite often, the opponent you think is of bad character just simply disagrees with you in terms of ideas. Therefore, it's good to focus on battles of ideas, and leave out character judgements as much as possible, because it's a lot easier to make a proper character assessment when you've treated your opponent as an individual first, and jointly run the full gamut of exchanges in a battle of ideas together.

For example, on the subject of economics, I think Owen Jones has a lot of bad ideas, and is simply wrong, but I don't think he's morally repugnant. He's just ill-informed (and very biased). One could argue that it's unethical to remain that confused when he has plenty of opportunity to apply better reasoning and correct his mistakes, but that's a hard judgement to make. Perhaps Owen Jones is doing the best he can with the set of life experiences he's undergone so far - I'm not sure, having never met him.

On the subject of theology, I think Richard Dawkins has a lot of bad ideas, and is simply wrong, but I don't think he's morally repugnant either, just ill-informed (and very biased).

On the subject of climate change, I think Greta Thunberg has a lot of bad ideas, and hasn't got a proper perspective on the subject, but again, I don't think she's morally repugnant, just ill-informed (and very biased).

Consequently, with the above individuals, I am challenging them in a battle of ideas, where I just think they haven't thought things through well enough - I do not believe that I'm on the side that represents good and they are on the side who represents evil. But that might not be true in all possible scenarios. Owen Jones might think of capitalism an unjust and morally questionable force in the world, and believe that in the battle of ideas between socialism and capitalism, he is partaking in a battle of right vs. wrong (or good vs. evil). A young earth creationist like Ken Ham might think of Richard Dawkins as a leading spokesperson in enemy territory, and consider fundamentalist Christianity vs. fundamentalist atheism to also be a battle of good vs. evil. And if Greta Thunberg thinks climate change means doom for future generations, she also probably sees the battle of ideas in terms of good vs. evil too.

Here is where it's essential to recognise these conflicts as being mostly battles of ideas, not matters of good and evil. Firstly, in the large set of all beliefs held, Owen Jones, Richard Dawkins, Greta Thunberg and I agree on most things - the places where we disagree make up only a tiny fraction of the whole set of beliefs we hold. Secondly, in our own way, we all want to get to the truth of these matters, and we largely agree on the desired final outcomes - it's the 'how we get there' part we disagree on. Owen Jones and I both agree that lifting people out of extreme poverty is a good thing, even though we champion different economic processes as a means of achieving that aim. When it comes to Richard Dawkins' atheism, I too am an atheist regarding the caricatured, strawman god (with a small g) in which Richard Dawkins claims not to believe. And in terms of climate action, Greta and I would agree that if climate change is going to wipe out hundreds of millions of people in the next few decades, then we probably need to act urgently. I just don't agree with her assessment of the facts.

If Owen Jones could see the free market the way I see it, I doubt he'd be so resistant to its outcomes. If Richard Dawkins understood the God I believe in, he would see his atheism differently. If Ken Ham understood biological evolution as well as Richard Dawkins, he probably wouldn't be a young earth creationist. If Greta Thunberg had more knowledge and confidence, she perhaps would not see me as an enemy on the subject of climate change.

It's difficult to know whether your opponent is an enemy or a friend until you have both mastered the ideas that are being put forward from each side. In a recent debate about my blog posts on gender (see here and here), a challenger of mine thought I was morally wrong to suggest the word 'gender' serves no real utility. I saw my blogs as pushing the conversation forward into better territory, and bringing about more clarity on a matter that has become so muddied in recent years. It emerged that a strong influencer in her resistance was having a family member who believes they are transgender. But having a family member who believes they are transgender does nothing to address the definitional problems put forward in my blog posts - which means that, even if my challenger sees this in terms of friends and enemies, she hasn't scrutinised the ideas strongly enough to know whether I'm her enemy or not. Similarly, a socialist who genuinely cares about helping the poor out of poverty usually thinks of the capitalist as their enemy - when, the reality is, if they knew as much as the capitalist, they'd probably find them more of an ally than most of their fellow socialists.

In conclusion, my advice would be along the following three lines. One, if you're thinking too much in terms of good vs. evil or them vs. us, you're probably not paying enough regard for the ideas being debated. Two, if you're not paying enough regard to the ideas being debated, you're probably not well positioned to know if the person challenging you is your opponent or your ally on this matter. And Three, the first two points ought to be considered alongside the notion that if one of the participants in the debate could see the situation as clearly as the other one, and vice-versa, with some kind of hypothetically ideal perspective, then it would be clear to both that that would have been a useful aspiration to have endeavoured from the start.

New-New-Wave-Atheism: The Rise of Promethean Ego Apostates

 

The incompetencies of the so-called new-wave atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens exposed them as being intellectual lightweights in the subjects of faith, theology and philosophy, where only the desperate special-pleaders took the arguments in their anti-God books seriously. In recent years, there has been an emergence of what I'm calling the new-new-wave atheists - folk like Graham Oppy, Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier and John Loftus (with whom I met up for a YouTube discussion) - who purport to be making more sophisticated contributions to the debate than their forerunners.

Even if they've raised the bar slightly, at most it looks to have gone up from ankle height to knee height - not because these aren't fairly bright individuals, but because the case against Christianity only ever emanates from these faithless vainglorians by severely under-representing the quality of what the faith has to offer.

Perhaps one of the great unrealised pieces of wisdom or most neglected truths in the world is that the reason there are no defeaters for Christianity - intellectually, emotionally, morally, philosophically, psychologically - is because you can only attempt to defeat Christianity by not understanding it sufficiently; and to begin to understand it sufficiently is to begin to see that it is the truth, and the right path to the one true God. By analogy, it's rather like trying to undermine the virtues of generosity, honesty and kindness - you can only do so with an ungenerous, dishonest, unkind attempt to subvert them.

The main defect of the new-wave-atheists, the new-new-wave-atheists, and the countless sanctimonious unbelievers who flaunt their cognitive ineptitude on their online comments pages (avoid engaging with them – it is almost always a waste of time), is that they are so thoroughly and confidently satisfied with their own sub-standard grasp of the subjects, and that they pay such scant regard to the real complexity and gravitas of the matters on which they so frivolously wax lyrical.

On top of that, there is an even subtler observation I've made about these folk, of a more psychological nature - it's that almost all of these sceptics would refer to themselves as ex-Christian (or from a church background), and I think that has real relevance in how they conduct themselves, and on how they yearn to be perceived by outsiders. Reading between the lines - and John Loftus is a classic case of this, I would say - what these new-new-wave atheists are really expressing is emotional disappointment in how their church life played out, disenchantment in their experience of other Christians, dissatisfaction that they didn't have the attention, status and prestige they craved, and in many cases an anti-fundamentalist resistance in the teeth of mainstream empirical human achievements to which their former religious affiliates would have no assent.

And I think if we drilled down deeper, we'd find at the root that the emotional disappointment in how their church life played out, and the disenchantment in their experience of other Christians, were both the result of their deepfelt dissatisfaction that they didn't have the attention, status and prestige they craved. This condition is a phenomenon I've called Promethean Ego Apostasy (or PEA for short). PEA is the turning away from the disappointment of not having their ego stroked enough by the Christian faith, and its honest appraisal of our true humanly flawed and fallen state, and rebelling against it with a desire for personal empowerment and ego enhancement. Just like Prometheus, who defied the gods to steal fire to bring to humanity, PEA syndrome is an act of defiance against the Christian faith in an attempt to court attention, status and reputation by placing oneself as the head of one's life, overrule God, and attempt to enjoy all the perceived transitory perks that come from an egocentric, narcissistic dissent.

Perhaps the most transparent case of PEA syndrome I've seen is with the ex-pastor and now atheist writer John Loftus, who I spoke with on my show for over 2 hours, and whose Facebook posts I see on a regular basis. I quite liked John, but he is perhaps the epitome of new-new-wave atheist PEA syndrome: what I discerned through the subtext of our conversation was a man for whom his life in the Christian church had not brought him the admiration and recognition he desired. Whenever I tried to gently probe into his past life, he clammed up and wouldn't go there. Perhaps the past is too painful or embarrassing for him - but I suspect the real reason he clammed up is because he feared that a more open and honest discussion would have exposed the weaknesses and insecurities he tries so hard to hide - especially around the regard he has so fervently sought, and that he believes he can acquire from his atheist apologetics.

On top of that, perhaps he faced shame in his pastoral position, and found the only psychological resource was to claim the whole belief system to be false rather than seek forgiveness and reconciliation with God. His wiki page says "In light of an extramarital affair, Loftus had a crisis of faith and eventually rejected Christianity" - and I don't know if it's true, but if it's false, surely Loftus would have had it taken down by now. If it's true, Loftus no doubt felt feelings of guilt and shame, probably leading him to question his worthiness within his church community, to feel hypocritical and lack the moral authority to lead others in matters of spirituality and ethics, and to feel isolated and therefore distance himself from the faith and his pastoral responsibilities. And given the foregoing, a likely comfort blanket would have been to repudiate the belief system itself, in an attempt to relinquish responsibility and let himself off more lightly.

Even if the extramarital affair wiki entry is false, those same temptations probably would have come to the fore if the matter was egocentric conciliation and the hankering for admiration and esteem. John Loftus' current atheistic apologetics, his book sales, and his following on Facebook give him the much longed for approval and validation that the call to humility and servility in pastoral ministry never provided, because in the Christian faith, the primary praise, worship and sovereignty goes to God, not us.

More than most other groups of people, John Loftus, Richard Carrier, and the majority of their fellow new-new-wave-atheists I've observed, desperately seek praise and endorsement from every post they share - the kind of self-absorbed praise and endorsement they never could have found in the Christian life, because Christian living won't stroke their ego enough, or provide the psychological comfort, or the ethical flexibility, or the lax responsibility they think they get with their Promethean Ego Apostasy.

I do not, of course, mean to evoke PEA as a character assassination - for in many ways, it is one of the more modest conceits of humanity; not being secure enough in oneself that one has to solicit it in the consent of others by turning upside down the noble Christian virtues like humility, grace, sacrifice and responsibility in knowing oneself truthfully in relation to God's power, His love and His goodness. But, then again, we shouldn't be surprised; the primary sin has always been the one in which we choose self ahead of God, and deny Him the place in our lives as Lord, Creator and Saviour.  

Remember, Paradise is a Walled Garden

 

"Isn't Christianity just a lot of rules?", I was asked recently. "No", I said, "It has some rules; but those rules are given so that we might understand something even greater - just as a map, if followed carefully, will lead us to our desired destination."

In considering rules, let's start with what I call the triangle of wrongdoing. There are generally three kinds of wrongdoing in the world - there is the kind that we willingly do in spite of knowing the wrongness; there is the kind that ensnares us despite our often futile attempts at resistance; and there is the kind that we convince ourselves is actually not wrongdoing at all. An example of the first kind would be breaking the speed limit because we want to get somewhere quicker. An example of the second kind would be failing to control our bad temper in an argument despite a hearty effort. And an example of the third kind would be believing that our extreme causes for social justice justifies an attack on a rival group because it is thought to be for the greater good.

In all of those cases, there is a notable commonality - our conscience, beliefs and reasoning help us manage our ethics, but they are no guarantee of our swerving wrongdoing. Because we change our ethics to accord with our behaviour, we can easily make up rules to suit ourselves and create justification for breaking them whenever we choose, or forgive ourselves very easily when we fail at keeping our own rules. This is the big failing of a rule-based system that has no other mechanism other than rules to sustain it.

Some groups even respond to this problem by creating systems of dogma containing rules within rules. For example, Islam has a set of rules to live by in order to justify the status of being a Muslim, but some tenets of Islam also have rules about not following rules - some of which can lead to loss of Muslim status (a term they call 'apostasy').

Rules do have a part to play in our Christian faith, of course - Jesus gave us plenty of commandments to follow (the sermon on the mount is full of them). But rules need something more primary above them in order to bootstrap their utility, otherwise they fall foul of a kind of variation of Munchausen's trilemma, where:

1) Rules are merely circular - the rules are right because they are necessary, and they are necessary because they are the right rules.

2) Rules regress infinitely - rule 1 is supported by rule 2, which is supported by rule 3, and so on

3) Rules are axiomatic - rules are supported without further explanation because they are the rules.

The upshot here is that rules exist not as ends in themselves, but as means to achieve some other aim. Rules of a board game do not exist to see who is good at following rules, they exist to create level boundaries in which one player can show themselves to be the winner. Rules of law do not exist to make us better at following laws - they exist as a substrate in order that society can flourish within a stable legal framework.

What strikes me most about Jesus' commandments is that He gave us many instructions that were impossible to live up to - the obvious one being 'Be perfect'. But they are given, not to set us up to fail, but to set us up to succeed. It’s a very profound thing we are contemplating here – that God gives us an impossible task because it’s the only way we can ultimately succeed. All the time, those laws, ethics and moral instructions are, by themselves, inadequate to the task of giving us what God really want to give us; He wants to give us the freedom to enjoy more of Himself, and more of His love and grace.

The commandments are given to liberate us into a full life, not to restrict us. Sensible laws can inhibit us, but they benefit us more. A law that makes it difficult for you to drink and drive also makes it less likely that a drunk driver will harm you. A law that means you can be sued for a breach of contract also frees you up to do things like get a mortgage or obtain a credit card. A bank would have no incentive to undertake financial exchanges with you without the legal power to obligate you. Similarly, the laws in the Bible are designed to take God's people from a penury state to a more prosperous one.

This point is illustrated wonderfully by G.K. Chesterton is his great work Orthodoxy, about how a wall of safety makes children freer, not less free:

“We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”

Similarly, Christ's laws and commandments are given to us to help us do the will of the Father, to help us prosper on our journey with Christ, and to help us conduct ourselves in a way that will bring us more intimately closer to Divine love and grace. There’s a good reason why the origin of the word paradise is a ‘walled garden’. A state of true peace, protection, purity and harmony would be such, not just by what it lets in, but by what it keeps out.

Oscars: Going Woke, Going Broke

I’m a big fan of movies, but it’s been quite a few years since I’ve given two hoots about who won which Oscar. I believe this feeling has gradually crept up on me, as the Oscars has lost more and more of its credibility with every passing year and decade. I largely attribute it to one thing; the ever-increasing wokeness that infests every Oscars ceremony. Because the sure fire way to deplete the credibility of the academy, and of art in general, is to stop caring as much about excellence in cinematic achievements, and instead use the ceremony as a platform to dole out awards based as much on diversity, inclusivity, virtue signalling and political posturing as on quality of moviemaking.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the world of film, television, writing, art and music has such a diverse array of cultures, ethnicities, talent, perspectives and expressions. But once you start to award and commend based on secondary factors outside of merit and artistic achievement, as the Oscars clearly has for quite a few years now, the whole edifice is undermined, and credibility erodes away, leaving only a confluence of woke attention-seeking and unattractive self-righteousness, glitzed up to the hilt. 

 

Christian Corner Solutions

 

It’s been a long term venture of mine, trying to understand why people believe so many crazy things, especially in religion and politics. Bear with me, and I’ll suggest something fascinating about things that unbalance Christians and cause them to adopt strange beliefs, and why.

If you have studied economics, you may have come across corner solutions. Corner solutions are extreme choices where a constraint limits options to a single point, not along an indifference curve (i.e. not conforming to the typical trade-off between goods based on preferences). An indifference curve is a graph representing combinations of goods providing equal satisfaction, outlining preferences, and optimising consumption analysis. If you got your child to draw it in relation to their desires in a toy shop, they would draw a line showing different options that make them equally happy, helping them decide what to ask you to buy for them.

With my high tech post-it note and pen, I’ve drawn an illustration, where you’ll see that to have all the things in your ideal spending session (what’s called an optimal consumption bundle in economics) the tangency condition between the budget constraint and an indifference curve is indeed a necessary condition for an optimal consumption bundle (a tangency condition is the point where the budget constraint touches an indifference curve, indicating optimal consumption).

Last technical point– consequently, the optimal consumption bundle may occur at the aforementioned corner solution, where the indifference curve is not tangential to the budget constraint, but touches it at a bent or a flat portion. When this happens, the consumer is likely to choose to consume all of one good and none of the others.

Christian corner solutions
I think we can analogise a way in which the corner solution example in economics of consuming the maximum amount of one good within the budget constraint has parallels in Christian belief. Here budget constraints could refer to things like church or family pressures imposed upon your viewpoints, dogmatic cultural or denominational legacies, low intellectual competence, issues in one’s personal life that influence beliefs and viewpoints, or an insecure hankering for a black and white theology for self-preservation – things that sway a Christian’s ability or incentive to believe the right things or cause them to adopt very excessive positions against mainstream alternatives.  

Examples of views and beliefs that could be seen as a corner solution within various Christian individuals are Biblical inerrancy, opposition to second marriages, opposition to women in leadership, opposition to contraception, mistrust of medicine, denial of scientific facts to do with evolution and the age of the earth, to name a few. These corner solutions most frequently occur, I’d suggest, because of the following overlapping phenomena; 1) remaining ignorant is preferable as a ‘path of least resistance’ strategy to minimise stress and contention; 2) unease and insecurity regarding the perceived challenges of reconciling faith with empirical evidence, especially in light of family, church and peer pressures; 3) psychological and emotional relief in taking over-simplistic stances or interpretations at the extreme end due to the complexities of the issues at hand; and 4) strict adherence to denominations or theological traditions that have consistently enhanced individual utility through inculcation and conditioning even when empirically false or excessively extreme.

A full unpacking of these is beyond the scope of this article. But it’s clear to me that corner solutions are pervasive in Christian churches across the globe, and consideration of their impact on Christians can shed light on why so many absurd beliefs are adopted among the ecclesia (ditto the same kind of analysis in political spheres).

Finally, though, it doesn’t just mean that corner solutions amount to the extremist views that are driven by those susceptible to absurd thinking – corner solutions can also occur in those more noble but almost opposite extremes, like believing in and practicing chastity, traditional values around marriage and the family unit, forgiving the most evil people in the world, and the sanctity of life as an infinitely valuable proposition, to name but a few.  

Sunday Faith Series: Can You Do Good And Defy God?

 

Here's an intriguing thought experiment that's in my book The Ecstasy of a New Morality. If someone does a morally good act that is not part of God's will because it interferes with God's plan, is the act still good? Imagine a wise sage who lived around the time of Jesus' crucifixion. One day he has an epiphany that puts him years ahead of his contemporaries - he realises that the Roman civilisation is pretty barbaric, and he thinks he can do things to make it better. The next day he's walking along and he sees Christ getting whipped and beaten, about to go on the cross. Being a kind, decent and morally advanced sage, he steps in and tries to save Jesus from any more pain. After giving an epoch-changing talk of the barbaric nature of nailing human beings to crucifixes, the Romans see sense and the process is discontinued, and Jesus is not crucified.

Now, by any normal standards of morality, what our sage did could only be construed as good. He helped a relatively backward civilisation advance their morality, and tried to promote tolerance, respect and kindness over the more reactionary tribal barbarism of the day. But in saving the bruised and battered Jesus from death on the cross, what he also did was interfere with God's grand plan for the salvation of humankind.

I doubt that God, being omnipotent, would let any compromises occur that would impede the plan over which He has perfect control, but it does engender a quite interesting observation about an act that can be good on a human level yet thoroughly prohibitive in terms of God's will and His plan. Such an observation seems to confirm an important distinction between our will and God's will in terms of how our apprehension of morality reflects the goodness from which it emanates - rather like how the scent of a woodland is smelled by our being immersed in the forest.

The Increasingly Inadequate Police Force

I’ve been frustrated for a while now with how this country is policed. Obviously the police policies are driven by lawmakers – and there’s a lot that they get right. But at the extremes of both ends, there is a lot I think they are getting wrong. At one end of the spectrum, there are some ridiculously dubious so-called crimes (or non-crimes), especially to do with offence, speech and online conduct, that involve the police when it really should not. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, the lawmakers and the police are utterly feeble when it comes to behaviour that really should be dealt with more comprehensively. It’s madness that people can burgle your house, or cause deaths and suffering through the mile-long tailbacks created by blocking the major roads, and not go to prison. Too much of the law has become weak and woke, and its lack of sufficient power and authority has created a culture where too many people doing too much harm to others fail to receive proper punishment, and the victims fail to receive proper justice.

It’s well known that from the early 1990s crime rates have been falling all around the Western world (for a multitude of reasons), while at the same time, more and more laws have been created, and many more possible crimes have been introduced by making more things illegal.

What you have to remember is that it is always in politicians and the civil servants’ interests to keep growing their departments, keep the public convinced their services are more and more important to the running of society, and keep lobbying for more money to achieve this. Just as it’s in a plumber’s interest that people need leaks fixed, pipes mended and products installed, so too it’s in politicians and the civil services’ interests that they remain needed and relevant, and that there are problems in society for which we turn to them to fix. In economic terms, they are incentivised to keep demand high so they can keep the supply coming, and justify the funding for it. The way politicians and the civil services keep demand for policing high is by making more things illegal, and involving themselves in more and more of our daily business.

In the free market, we pay businesses to provide the things we want, and when a lot of people want those goods or services, businesses become mega-successful. Political industries do not have the same model or the same kind of demand curves, so in a sense they have to act against those same natural interests in order to survive. In other words, politics purports to be about making things better and bringing an end to problems, but yet the existence of politics depends on those problems (plus newly created ones) continuing to exist in some form. 

Because of this mechanism, the police are becoming less and less of a good institution - reflecting a society as a whole that's gone down the same path, whereby actions that never should be crimes are being criminalised left, right and centre; and actions that should be more heavily penalised are being treated too lightly for fear of being too unsympathetic to the perpetrator's feelings, hardships or causes for grievance.  

 

A Short Post On Homelessness In Cities

 

We regularly hear that homelessness is on the rise in cities across the world. The general argument from the person on the street (no pun intended) seems to be along the lines of: We’re such a rich city, how on earth can we still have so many homeless people in it? But economist reasoning soon shows the enquiry to be under-developed. It is actually to be expected that the wealthier the city, the more homeless people will be in it.

It’s not that the wealth of the city or the high cost of property is causing the homelessness – well, not in most cases – it’s more the case that, if you’re homeless, the relative cost of being homeless in London or Norwich is lower than the relative cost of being homeless in Bedford or Swaffham. The reason cities are so popular is they contain more things that more people want. If cities are a more desirable place to live for city folk than rural towns and villages, then it’s likely to be the same for homeless people, because those same qualities provide more benefits for them too. In other words, if you’re homeless, it’s easier to get money, food and small opportunities in a city than it is a town or a village.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure it’s awful being homeless, and it’s very hard to get enough food and money to have much of a stable life – and I have every sympathy with those suffering from homelessness. I’m simply explaining away the fact that, while homeless people have a horrid time being on the streets, it is even more costly being homeless if you're not in a city.

Further reading: an economic analysis On Giving to Beggars

Moral Truths Seem To Be More Primary Than Physical Truths

 

Not everyone realises this, but most ethical debates are debates about facts and knowledge. When you listen to people having ethical debates, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that they are mostly arguing about propositions related to facts (when a foetus becomes a human, whether homosexual inclination is genetically driven, the impact of drugs on society, that sort of thing). Emotions and feelings dominate our ethical propositions. When you say “x is immoral”, you are expressing a feeling or emotion based on an interpretation of facts. But here’s where things take a strange turn.

In a previous essay, and also in my book on morality, I talked about the level of confidence we have in certain beliefs, and how, when it comes to propositions about good and evil, we seem more certain of those than we do physical facts (even comprehensive ones) about reality. Any scientific statement regarding "Physical property x is governed by physical rule y" that turned out to be wrong, or even a little misjudged with the arrival of new evidence, wouldn't confound us as much as the proposition that we were wrong about some kind of consensually agreed moral proposition like "It is wrong to torture a pensioner as an act of indulgent sadism".

This is one of the profound things about our moral intuition; we develop moral theories similarly to how we develop theories of physical reality, but our intuition about morality, based on our evolved conscience, is so much stronger and more certain than anything we distil from our discoveries of the physical world.

Moral facts and physical facts both come from our knowledge acquired by observing reality through our sense data. Our five physical senses (five for simplicity) enable us to formulate propositions about the physical world, and our moral sense (a bit like a sixth sense) enables us to formulate a sense of right and wrong under various conditions. We develop scientific theories (x reacts to y on the basis of z) based on what our sense data tells us, and we develop moral theories (It is wrong to do x to y) based on what our sixth sense tells us.

But we don't merely derive a list of normative propositions (that which we ought to do) from our list of positive propositions (that which we know about the physical world) - they seem to belong in different categories of intuition. We seem to have a much stronger sense of our moral convictions than we do our physical convictions - not least because:

1) We are more likely to be shown to be wrong about our physical convictions than we are our moral convictions (as per the above examples)

2) We feel ultimately surer about or moral convictions than our physical convictions.

3) We depend on our sense of value to formulate any observations about physical reality.

We trust the five senses because of consistency of experience over a long percentage game. My sight tells me I have a cup of tea on my desk; my touch tells me it is hot and wet; and my nose tells me what it smells like. If I drink it, I'll sense what it tastes like, and if I drop the cup, I'll hear what hear what it sounds like as it hits the floor. Sometimes our senses deceive us, yet we can come to learn why that has happened.

We trust our sixth sense of moral intuition because of a similar consistency with other sense data, but at the fundamental level it never ultimately deceives us (in terms of truth propositions, I mean, not temporary misjudgements), and it has a stronger fundamental bootstrapping than anything to do with our other five senses. We may have committed an evil when we should have committed an act of good, and maybe we should have developed our thinking on moral propositions - but we've never changed or been caused to question the fundamental value structure that tells us good is superior and preferable to evil. We intuit it with such an overarching conviction that it seems to operate on a level above our other experiential interactions.

My overall conclusion on this is that moral truths exist in a more primary way to how physical reality exists, which means that those who believe we simply acquired our morality from adapted physical experiential legacies are making a similar mistake to those who claim that we acquired mathematics purely from our observations about physical reality. Just as mathematics has an ontology over and above physical reality, so too, I think, does morality. It is too axiomatic and too fundamentally inhered in cognition to have been a just by-product of physical evolution - although it is that too, of course, as is mathematical symbolism. 

The best explanation, I think, for the explanatory and conceptual power of both mathematics and morality is that both exist because they have their provenance in the mind of God. The best reason I have for believing this is that both mathematics and morality have such fixed fundamental truths (the laws of numbers and the laws of good and evil) that we do not know of any way that they could be believed differently, and our minds have no capacity to undermine that fixity with a superior level of cogency or rationality.

How Do We Want To Be Understood?

It’s good to reflect on how we’ve changed over the years. When I was a younger, sometimes ladies found me charming on the basis that I appeared to understand them. To add to the allure, I was convinced that our greatest desire was to be understood, and that to be with someone who really understands you is just about the highest inter-personal reward of all. But 25-30 years later, I think differently about that, of which, more in a moment.

Back then, I also had higher expectations of people in terms of their character, and lower standards – whereas now, it’s the opposite; as I believe that having high standards for yourself means you get to fulfil your obligations, and having low expectations of others means you’re not too disappointed and more forgiving – as per my formula: Contentment = high standards for yourself + low expectations  of others.

Returning to being understood, having changed my perspective by expecting less of others, and having higher standards for myself, I’ve come to realise that people’s desire to be understood is often more a desire to be seen as they wish they were through their higher ideal self. In other words, people don’t always want to be understood wholly accurately because that would expose many of the parts of the self they’d rather keep hidden; they want to be seen through the lens of their higher aspirations.

But that’s where you need to be cautious. It’s far more important to have close people in your life who can understand you through the dusky lens of reality, because then you’re telling the truth, and it’s only the truth that can lead to proper enlightenment about the self, and actually, the legitimate fulfilling of potential. If you’re never going to be a good enough singer, or actor, or carpenter or philosopher to make the grade, it’s better that you know about it. Equally, if you’re good enough to be a great salesman, racing driver, life coach or artist, but you don’t recognise it enough in yourself, it’s better that you know that too, and can be encouraged further by others who also see it and share in your truths.

We often mistakenly act as though the people who see us through the lens of their higher aspirations are the only ones that truly understand us, but that’s not necessarily the case. Some who know us best are the most painfully aware of how far short of our ideal selves we fall. Knowing the true extent of our imperfections is one of the deepest understandings we can encounter. When we crave ideal understanding, we want others to accept our ideal self as our real self; when we crave authentic understanding, we want to accept our real self and trust in our pursuit of the ideal self. To be seen as we are and as we hope to be is to ground the understanding in truth and in faith, being forgiving of our faults and invested in our potential. That is the way we should want to be understood.