From Zero

Where all coordinates are zero, there is the origin. If in the beginning, all things are zero, nothing can happen. And if nothing can happen, all remains zero.

But if something can happen, it is the splitting of zero into equal negatives and positives. It is this quantum fluctuation that the natural rationalist must have faith in, or nothing has happened, nothing happens, nothing will happen.

It is more believable, some say, that something happened with such extreme fluctuation that a universe was created. And the proof, some claim, is that the universe exists.

But this is proof of nothing. The universe exists, but we cannot know how and why by any natural means, because this is the nature of universes. We have no statistical probabilities, no learning lessons to use inductively or deductively in order to 'know' how universes are formed.

Maybe we were all born yesterday. Maybe quantum fluctuation is that cool, the fluctuation between nothing and everything. And just perhaps, some people might think that to call it quantum fluctuation, a phenomenon without mind nor directivity, is better than to think of God, a person with altogether too much mind and directivity.

Come And See

For a faith that is assumed to deal mostly with intangibles, Christianity is unusually empiricist. I am struck by the frequency with which characters in the Bible are exhorted to "come and see" — that is, to make themselves physically present in order to observe a specific phenomenon.

More than that, the concept of controlled testing is not alien to the book either. In the first chapter of Daniel, the eponymous author proposes a clinical trial (well, not double-blind, but a simple one) in which he and his friends will eat a vegetarian diet for ten days and then be compared to the rest of the cohort in terms of fitness to serve in the king's court. Later, King Nebuchadnezzar very cleverly demands that his dream-interpreting sorcerers and diviners should tell him the contents of his dream first before they interpret it. Only Daniel passes this test.

It's interesting to see also Elijah's test on Mount Carmel, where he demands that his sacrifice be wet down with water three times, the water overflowing into a trench, before calling down fire from heaven. The precision of the resulting strike is now a matter of legend, and the consequences to his opponents proportionately dire.

One verse that is often quoted out of context is: "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test." That kind of testing is the test of provocation, not the test of hypothesis; it is the kind of testing we imply when we say, "Do not test my patience." The God of the Bible doesn't otherwise seem to mind having his power being tested for a specific reason.

Generally, the many tests of power in the Bible are rooted in results — a test is proposed with a result that allows falsification (i.e. proof that the assertion tested is false). It is thus no wonder that early scientists like Galileo and Newton were able to investigate the natural world without seeing conflict with their faith (although they might have cut it fine with their nominal co-religionists).

To this day, just as with science, two kinds of tests remain in everything Christian — the test of reason and the test of findings. If hermeneutic reasoning shows an assertion to be theologically unreasonable, or if the findings of an empirical test show an assertion to be false, the penalty used to be death by stoning or the sword. In this supposedly more enlightened age, we have a much, much more tolerant response to false prophets and other snake-oil salesmen of various persuasions.

Silly Calculations

P Z Myers (or 'Pharyngula') is one of the best science-bloggers around. He's also generally reasonable. When he uses the word 'silly', it's interesting to see what he thinks is silly. In this case, he thinks that it's silly to call something a miracle just because there are low retrospective odds against it. Of course, his argument is right. No single contingent product of the universe's history is more or less miraculous than any other in a statistical sense.

Like Myers, I hate it when people misuse language. (Hey, I hate it when I myself misuse language, and if you point it out to me, I will self-flagellate with the best of them.) So let's define miracle: a true miracle is an event that has NO chance at all — it has no logical antecedents, no explicable cause or chain of causation — and yet it happens. By Myers's lights and my definition, the only miracle should be the hypothetical origin of the universe ab nihilo; I would agree with him about its miraculous status.

The difference between humanity and what humans do, and the rest of the universe, is what humans think is significant. It's purely subjective. Do you think Myers would bother getting off his ass to write this article unless something provoked him sufficiently? And that provocation is of course subjective.

He closes by exhorting humans to "go forth and feel and act like you aren't any more special than anyone else on Earth." Clearly, however, the act of exhortation betrays his subconscious belief that this doesn't include him.

Which of course leads back to the point about atheists. When confronted with meaningless, they put up spirited arguments which must also lack meaning or be the deterministic (or random) fruits of physics. They (and we) shouldn't have free will. They (and we) shouldn't care. And if they (and we) do, that too should pass.

Me, I don't think my physical body is a miracle. What is a miracle is that I should not be redeemed by the body and blood of Christ. I am not redeemable; I cannot have been redeemed. But... it has happened, and I have been. No chance at all, and yet here I stand. This is the miracle.

Gaps in the Clockwork

Perhaps the most infamous idea of how God and Science fit together is the 'God of the Gaps' concept. This is the general idea that whatever Science cannot (yet) explain (a 'gap') is God's due. If the explanatory universe is of constant volume, then God's role thus gets smaller and smaller, or at least, more and more involuted.

But the real gap in all religions is more fascinating. The real gap is the one between 'supernatural' and 'natural'. What is 'supernatural'? And if it is 'supernatural', how then does it interface with the 'natural' without being merely 'natural' itself? I use quotes throughout simply because I don't know what these terms really mean, in relation to each other.

In Christianity, the religion to which about 33% of the human world claims allegiance, God is always involved with His creation. He made it, and bridges the gap between it and Himself by unpredictable intervention and communication. He is able to say, "My ways are not your ways," and yet also, "Come, let us reason together." In Him we live and move and have our being, and yet clearly He is not of our substance. Yet, God became Man and dwelt among us.

How does that work? The authors of the Bible, expressing God's thoughts, point out explicitly that the whole thing defeats philosophy. They don't claim that logic will hold in this realm. In fact, they claim that you can attempt to use reason, but God is not bound by it. Once that happens, all bets are off.

The modern rationalist is repulsed by such things. If such a situation maintains, why bother? If ontology trumps epistemology, and deity trumps deontology, it is a farce.

To me, it is an amusement. Logic is like the screwdriver in the toolbox. It uses circular motion to effect linear progress. But it isn't the only tool, let alone the toolbox itself.

Its existence tells us only a few things about the tool-user: 1) makes tools, 2) has occasional need for screws, 3) is capable of effecting a grip-initiated turning motion... and so on. It's a good, very useful tool, but it doesn't even tell us what the other tools are, although it can replace some of them crudely in certain situations.

Some users treat it more like a Swiss Army knife — a multitool of some sort. But it requires a lunatic bravery to rely on a multitool for all your needs, all your life.

I don't think of a 'God of the Gaps'. I think that what we see of the universe is more wonderful than we can think, and if this is so, not all of it is amenable to thinking. I think the explanatory universe is infinite, and that God in His complexity can bridge 'natural' and 'supernatural' since they are only our feeble labels for 'what would exist without us' and 'what may exist but which we will never be able to describe, explain, predict or control'.

What is a Religion?

When dealing with students from a particular kind of institution, I often find that they have the same woolly or imprecise ideas about religion. For example, if they're from a parochial Christian school, they all think that a discussion of religion begins with their own peculiar subsect(ion) of Christianity.

But religion is easy to define more accurately, by anchoring the definition around four points. This has the virtue of coupling accuracy with precision; we can now say what a religion is, and what exactly makes it so.

A religion requires at least four elements:

1. A belief in the supernatural; that is, things which to some extent cannot be examined using the natural sciences. Whether such things can exist is debateable, but one could place abstracts (such as justice, love or peace) in this category on the basis of empiricism.
2. A belief that the supernatural can somehow interact with the natural, even though the natural cannot interrogate the supernatural.
3. A belief that this supernatural interaction has necessary consequences on human behaviour. This would define elements of human morality.
4. A belief that these moral consequences can be usefully codified as a guideline for human behaviour.

Without any one of these four belief elements, a construct purporting to be a religion cannot be one.

A religion, therefore, is based on a set of practical behaviours and attitudes centred around the detailed working-out of these four beliefs. When such a set is recognisable as such, and can be effectively transmitted as a reasonably similar package from one person to another, a religion has been established.

A religion is therefore the product of a) these four beliefs, b) the details of these beliefs, c) the construction of a behavioural construct demonstrating these beliefs, d) the self-recognised consistency of this construct, and e) the effective propagation of this construct. If one of these fails, the religion becomes defunct.

Now, a word on faith. Faith is belief without a necessary sufficiency of evidence. Since belief in the supernatural is a criterion for a religion, and the supernatural is by definition not admissible as evidence in any arena of discussion based on the natural, all religions are faith-based. What is not so obvious is that many other human knowledge endeavours are faith-based too, but we do not make that as clear as when we are discussing religion.

We also try to reduce the amount of faith required in many of these other areas of human experience, except perhaps in the aesthetic disciplines. Religious morality and behaviour is thus very much close kin to aesthetics. Theology, on the other hand, is the religious equivalent of mathematics. See this post for elaboration.

Reason as a Way of Knowing

Reason is the way in which we console ourselves that the universe is congruent with our brain's model of it. It seems to work. But it is not so much a way of knowing as a way with which we define a certain kind of indirect knowing.

Reason as most people have it is apparently the linking of facts and ideas so that they appear to meet certain tests. Knowledge based on reason will generally meet the tests of validity and reliability, transferability and generalisability, and perhaps the tighter tests of coherence and congruence demanded by pure logic.

Two main processes operate in what we call reason: induction, which is based on experience and empirical knowledge; and deduction, which is based on rules and axioms. The former assumes that if we have observed prior cases, we can use those cases to formulate rules and generate norms; the latter assumes that if we have rules, we can use those to classify and determine (or delineate) the cases we are presented with.

The provisional conclusions we must draw are called inferences; the possible conclusions we may draw are called implications. This roughly outlines the concept of reason, and also fixes the boundaries of the kind of knowledge it can provide.

Reason suffers from two problems: simply put, deduction requires rules and axioms, and we assume these are right before we apply them; induction requires a critical number of cases, but this is not always known, and we do not always know what cases are relevant. In theory, both should cancel each other's defects out. In practice, this is not always so.

Nevertheless, apart from even more abstruse considerations concerning the nature of reality, reason (by its own self-defined coherence and consistency) is the best bet we have of making useful sense of the world — which doesn't say much, but says enough.

Ludicrous

Humans play games. The necessity for that seems built-in, since games of all kinds offer various proportions of expected and unexpected outcomes. The former provides the cognitive triumph of an outcome that one has judged correctly and/or well; the latter provides excitement and a break from routine. The problem with homo ludens, or 'game-playing man', is that he too often stumbles into the Ludic fallacy by either thinking that life mirrors games, or that games don't mirror life enough.

Recently (and still ongoing), I have been interlocuting with a gentleman who asserts that logic is important. I agree. However, I added the caveat that logic is not always the best tool. This, he violently disagrees with.

Here are the arguments he's tried so far:

1. Logic is the best tool because nothing else is a tool.

2. If logic does not succeed, you must be using a simplistic form of it.

Here is what I've said:

1. Some areas of human endeavour are not susceptible to logic.

2. Logic itself will tell you that it fails to provide an answer sometimes.

To me, it is a game, these acts of provocation. I don't know if I will ever convince the rationalists, atheists, or rational atheists. But I feel compelled to answer them at times. Oddly enough, I too am using logic. I am also aware that I am using logic in realms where it was not meant to go. But the paradox is that my interlocutors believe that logic can be taken anywhere, and that if the outcomes do not favour them, I must be misusing logic.

We all agree I am misusing logic; that much is clear. I believe I shouldn't be using it, they believe I am using it badly. But the point is equally clear, either way: there are things you can't use logic for. One of those things is justifying the use of logic using logic. Ho ho.

Logic and Reason

It should not be a surprise to anybody that a logical position is not the same as a rational position. Both are positions derived from rules, but both have weaknesses arising from the kind of rules they use.

A logical position arises from consideration of what is valid and what is not; that is, after rules are established, it becomes possible to evaluate whether a position is allowable by the rules or not.

A rational position arises from consideration of what is likely or possible, and what is not; that is, after evaluating a position as possible, rules are generated to validate or invalidate the position.

The strength of any particular logic is that things are either consistent or not. If things cannot be determined to be consistent or not, then the logic is insufficient or the thing is not amenable to that particular logic. This makes everything simple. The weakness of logic is that if the system has false or inappropriate axioms, analysis will fail.

The strength of reason is that it can draw on any prior semi-stable (or better) position as a basis of explanation; it casts a very wide net that includes the use of logic without precluding voices of authority, magic, philosophy, religion, intuition, faith and inspiration. This makes it both reasonable and not — and this is reason's weakness as well.

Logic and reason are not the same thing at all. A reasonable person is not necessarily a logical person. A purely logical person cannot deal with most human constructs simply because the axioms behind such things are mostly unknown — and where axioms are unknown, logic cannot be applied.

The reasonable man may also be an unreasonable man, although George Bernard Shaw, who famously said that all progress depends on the unreasonable man, would ram the difference down your throat. The logical man, however, is also the incomplete man, as Kurt Gödel would have pointed out.

On the balance of things, I would prefer to be reasonable than logical. Most humans would agree.

Claims and Arguments

You know, there are days on which I feel a twinge of despair about the process of education. It seems that some parts of the mechanism are just not working the way they should. So here are some helpful comments for students, based on the sort of questions they ask me.

1. A claim is an assertion. It is something that is said to be true. If you are asked to discuss a claim, you are being asked to talk about arguments (see below) which show that the claim is upheld (that is, it is true), or rejected (that is, it is false), or some state in between (that is, more likely to be true or false, or not provable either way).

2. An argument is a series of statements which start from premises or assumptions, are logically linked in sequence, and are aimed at some sort of conclusion. Preferably, that conclusion has to do with what you are discussing, debating, or arguing about. More usefully, it is used to say something about a claim (see above). Most usefully, it provides definitive help in deciding whether the claim is true or not.

Be happy. Life is good.

Defeasible Reasoning

For the last twenty-five years or so, students and colleagues (and colleagues who are fellow students, or students-turned-colleagues) have been asking me questions and which I've gamely tried to answer. We trade questions, mostly with civility, sometimes with a slightly jagged or sharp edge; it can get heated at times, but we learn a lot from each other.

There is one particular problem I've identified, which I personally call the 'textbook problem'. This is best stated as a subconscious tendency to adhere to 'textbook knowledge', which is not reprehensible or to be considered less lacking in authority simply because it is from a textbook, but is problematic because textbooks are always out of date. By the time a textbook is edited and published, it is often a year or two out of date. In some cases, because it is indeed a good textbook, serious revisions do not occur for longer periods of time.

One would think that the quicker publishing that online modes afford should eliminate or reduce the problem. This is not always the case. However, it does bring the horizon closer to the sailor, as it were.

The second part of the problem, however, is that this enhanced access to knowledge doesn't seem to be utilised by a lot of the people I encounter. This is not meant as an insult or belittlement, but is a fact based on my own perceptions. I interact with many people, and in my interactions, find that they haven't used something simple like Google or Wikipedia to find out more about whatever they are supposed to know.

The third part of the problem is that people assume that other people know how to use Google and Wikipedia and all the other wonderful iterations of the information age as manifest in the works of the internet. But because of the second part of the problem, these expectations are sometimes dangerously unfounded and may lead to awkward disappointment.

This is the case with the many people I encounter whose epistemology seems to be based on a stilted sort of hybrid of Plato and logical positivism. Or some vague spirituality. Or other ideas which they got from other people — and strangely enough, didn't bother to evaluate further using internet-based tools. I'm not saying that these tools are better, but they are certainly faster than the ones I grew up with, in most cases. In a pinch, speed has to be a substitute for depth, and often is.

Let's try an experiment. All you TOK students out there, looking for answers to your 2010-2011 TOK Essay Topics and suchlike, why don't you try working your way through this article from the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy first? I am very certain that it will yield dividends in the days ahead. I mean, just imagine what the following sentence might mean for the fate of your TOK essay:

"With the collapse of logical positivism in the mid twentieth century (and the abandonment of attempts to treat the physical world as a logical construction from facts about sense data), new attention was given to the relationship between sense perception and the external world."

Now imagine that I was setting the 2011-2012 TOK Essay Topics, and I used that quote, followed by, "Discuss the nature of this relationship, with respect to two different areas of knowledge." Are we having fun yet?

Responses 009 (2010-2011)

Question 9 in the recent list was a shocker in its blandness — or at least, its perceived simplicity. "Discuss the roles of language and reason in history." That was all, and of course, to students who think that history is just another discipline, this would look easy.

The problem is that history, like art, is one of the BIG core disciplines of knowledge. History is one of the two parents of science; as late as the 19th century, science was either called 'natural history' or 'natural philosophy'. As I've mentioned before, in the posts of the 'Drawing Lines' series back in May 2009 in this blog, there is a very very thin line between history and science, and they are much more alike than people seem to think.

Consider this scenario. A community of professionals obtains and accumulates data. Then they select the most reliable data points by a mixture of methodologies such as critical comparison, cross-referencing, and context. Then they collate these data points and synthesize a body of data which is converted by analysis into a body of information and then knowledge. A critical appraisal follows, and then a conclusion is reached. While all this is going on, elements of the same community keep testing the analysis and conclusions by obtaining new data. Regular publishing and peer review keep the discussion alive and healthy.

Question: is this community composed of historians or scientists? Answer: you can't tell.

But wait, some will say, where is the hypothesis, where is the experiment, where is the inductive or deductive process? They must be historians!

Ha, I would have to say that if your idea of science is purely Baconian (i.e. stolen from Arab and Indian science) or Aristotelian (i.e. stolen from misinterpreted Greek texts) or Popperian (i.e. a negative definition of reality), then Newton and Hawking and Feynman would have harsh words with you. The fact is that there are many areas of science not susceptible to conventional hypothesis or experiment; and all areas of historical research use induction or deduction in various phases.

The thing about history is that its final output, the historical narrative, is a synthesis of historical data points. The most important data points are accounts (oral or written) and artifacts. With Aristotle (who claimed that all things consist of substance given structure), one can argue that these are the substance of history; the process which forms the narrative is the structural principle of history.

By direct comparison, a large part of the substance of history is therefore language, and it is the form in which the narrative is delivered as well. Since language is subject to the classical communication model (i.e. something is put into code, the code is transmitted, the transmission is received, the receipt is decoded, the decoding should give the original something) it is subject to the usual errors (bad coding, bad transmission and/or bad decoding), made worse by time and cultural bias. This is most true of cultural history and least true of scientific history, although there may be localised exceptions. Because historical narratives are in danger of being seen as narratives first and history second, extra pains must be taken to evaluate whether the style and presentation of content are being manipulated (consciously or not) so as to bias the receiver's perception of what the narrative means.

By the same comparison, the structural principle of history is a kind of reason that is mainly to do with chronological sequencing, cause-and-effect, evidence for conjectures about social phenomena, and deduction from empirical findings. Since historical reason may suffer from the problems (in this case) of incomplete data and error from data sources (i.e. the data are there but may be compromised in some way), there may be gaps filled in by plausible conjecture. This kind of reasoning is found in evaluations, for example, of the King Arthur legend — we know somebody (or some bodies) balked the Saxon colonization of Britain for a time, and we can deduce a lot from the accounts and artifacts, but we'll never know the real Arthur. When examining historical narratives, pains must be taken to identify the gaps and evaluate how much is conjecture and how well supported such conjectures may be.

It's interesting to evaluate Samuel Huntington's 1993 book The Clash of Civilisations along these lines. It's not a good historical narrative, although it's a brilliant conceptual trick. He's wrong about some key things, because his historical underpinnings are very shaky. It's an example of how linguistic manipulation can lead to false reasoning and be used to create an iffy narrative. (That book was published 16 years ago, so any IB student who wants to clobber Huntington in a History extended essay can do it now.)

So... what are the roles of language and reason in History? Ha, I think there's enough here to act as a starting-point.

Science vs Reality

Recently, I had the opportunity to engage in a fascinating discussion with two ironically-named gentlemen (who I will leave unnamed here in case irony overcomes my readers). Both are eminently reasonable, but Gentleman #1 took issue with my definition of 'reasonable' and Gentlemen #2 took issue with my view of science.

According to Gentleman #1, it is better to define 'reasonable' as 'just; fair; agreeable to reason' than to use the 'argument of popularity'. Actually, in the context of what a reasonable belief is, it is perfectly normal to define 'reasonable' as 'something a majority of the population are in agreement with'. This is of course a legalistic position, akin to the idea of 'the man in the street' or 'the reasonable man'. But the problem with Gentleman #1's stand is that we as humans define 'just' as 'that which fits the common sensibility', 'fair' as 'that which seems balanced to the common sensibility', and 'agreeable' as 'that which most people agree with'.

According to Gentleman #2, reality is a the objective test of science. The problem is that this is a circular argument. In scientific circles, it is common to find the argument that reality is that which is verified by some form of the scientific method (as borrowed by Francis Bacon from the Islamic world). If this is true, that reality is verified by science, then how can reality be the objective test of science? The fact is that we can only trust our reason and our perception to the extent that it keeps producing exactly the same answer. This, of course, means that the inductive fallacy lies in wait.

My point is that a properly scientific skeptic would indeed be only provisionally certain, and even then only in the pragmatic sense, about any scientific claim to knowledge. If computers work because of applied science, that's great. Whether this is true or real, that's for the philosophers.

It is utterly possible to (as the humorist Terry Pratchett has done) postulate a science that works by little psychic beings of immaterial (and hence non-space limited) 'substance'. This would have the advantage of making the entities we call 'subatomic particles' and 'atoms' (and base much of our science on) explainable in terms of inherent intelligence; it would also explain action at a distance.

Unfortunately, it would also be unsatisfactory to scientists because the next question would be, "How do we understand the minds of these little psychic beings?" In fact, scientists dig until they hit 'fundament', and then they call what they've found 'fundamental' until they get better shovels. The problem is the 'better shovels' part.

What if you reach the point at which no better shovel is possible? This is apparently the case with the Planck constant, which describes the level of quantization of energy. Other physical constants (for example, the rest mass of the electron, Avogadro's number) depend on it to some extent; the fine-structure constant is interdependent with it in establishing the nature of our universe.

Well, having reaching that kind of fundament, I suppose the next question would be, "Why it is that value and not another value?" A true scientist would never accept the 'because it is, and that's all' explanation. But to me (and logically, anyone else), it is the explanation which must eventually suffice, and it would be unreasonable to think otherwise, simply because of the gap in orders of magnitude between our perceptions (and their proxies) and what lies beneath Planck's constant.

That would lead to the conclusion that true scientists are unreasonable, which must be irksome to them — if there were any such people at all. However, there is hope. As GBS once said (in Man and Superman, 1903), "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Perhaps that progress will (as it often has) redefine our concept of what is reasonable. It is now reasonable to believe in flying steel machines, as it might not have been five centuries ago. But flying steel machines operate at the same level of perceptual reality as we do, while quantum electrodynamics (and other such theories) don't.

The Bible — Conservative or Liberal?

The United States of America is the largest and most influential state in the world in terms of meme-propagation and economic impact. It is that which makes us look on in awe, fascination, horror or incomprehension (in alphabetical order) as we look at the clashes of ideas that take place there.

One of them is the idea that somehow the Bible has been translated badly and no longer serves the people well. It must therefore be made more conservative, say some people. The odd thing is that the methods used seem to be the kind that conservatives often attribute to liberals (and vice versa) — a deliberate use of biased terms, an agenda that shapes the interpretation (see point 7 on making sure that the Bible expresses free-market ideas properly, for example!), and the idea that such interpretation will make people more open-minded.

This propagandism, witting or unwitting, is true of any two sides in an argument. Bound by our words, we have no choice but to be biased. Purely rational languages are stilted and inadequate; Wittgenstein and Russell both surrendered in the end, defeated by the fact that in the end, humans must communicate, whether or not language is used rationally.

And so, to the Bible. Is it conservative or liberal? I think the Bible mocks both sides just by existing. Abraham is a free-market warlord who liberally distributes wealth and lies about his wife; Jesus is an arch-conservative who says that not an iota of the Law will pass away, while the book of Acts notes that early Christians (following Jesus in Matthew 10) sold all they had, pooled their wealth and shared it out according to each one's need (proto-Marxism?).

A close reading of the Bible, attempting to apply the same rules throughout to everything it says, will result in a kind of revelation. The Bible is not about ideal humans, but about fallen humans. Noah is a drunk, Abraham a deceiver, Israel a liar, Moses a murderer, David a philanderer, Solomon a cynic.

It is not the rise of the Republican-styled elite (read Plato to understand what this means) nor the rise of the Democratic-styled masses that is the concern of this book. Rather, it is all about making your aim to lead a quiet and peaceable life, to pursue with excellence the work of your hands, and to live in moderation. The Bible asserts that this is only possible through a right relationship with God. Given any effective definition of God, this is self-evident.

The Bible transcends ideas like conservatism or liberalism simply because it is (in a sense) statistically honest. It makes both mundane and extraordinary claims, dishes the dirt out equally on saints and sinners, and is wise enough to deal in ambiguity and apparent contradiction. A book claiming to have the divine imprimatur but which didn't take into account the mutability of our world would be suspicious indeed.

What I believe, personally, about the Bible is that it is the inerrant word of God. I believe not that it (as a text) doesn't contain errors of some sort (since manifestly anything in language must err by inaccuracy, imprecision, omission or false impression), but that it is inerrant just as an arrow that slays a man is inerrant. It doesn't matter how crude that arrow is as long as it fulfils its deadly task. No mere text can encompass reality or be the entire word of God.

What I believe, personally, about the Bible is that it is the sufficient word of God. It is enough for anyone who reads it to come to any conclusion God might want that person to reach. This is why it is such a complex text. Imagine a textbook designed to teach any student anything that a teacher might want to teach. It would vary in style, form, content, terminology, approach, and many other ways as well.

What I believe, personally, about the Bible is that it is the efficient word of God. I don't mean that it has a high output-over-input ratio, but that it has efficacy, that it has a high signal-to-noise ratio for what it is intended to do. True, many will say it is all noise and no signal, but that is true too of many things that are efficient, simply because what they are efficient at does not meet the specific need of the critic concerned.

I am aware that logic is often seen as the enemy of faith. I believe, however, that faith has a definite logic. In fact, faith is necessary for belief in any system that serves us rationally and/or reasonably. You can't do science, for example, without the belief that your intellectual cognition is related to perception is related to reality; you have to believe that the noumenon (the thing-of-the-mind) and the phenomenon (the thing-of-the-world) have some connection, even though there is no necessary link between them.

The Bible, for me, is a bridge of faith. As a rational being, I recognize that it doesn't contain specific answers to everything — what book could? But as an epistemological being, I recognize that there is truth in it, of a rather penetrating, definitive and assiduous kind.

Yearning

Recently I found myself in a discussion about that peculiar emotion known as 'yearning'. Someone said that yearning does not by itself prove that the thing yearned for exists. Someone else said that if a thing existed, we might yearn for it. For me, I've come to realise that sometimes we take our yearnings and we make a mental image of what it is that we yearn for.

One of the well-known, and to my mind somewhat spurious, arguments for the existence of God is that there seems to be a yearning for something higher and better than us. That is why, the argument goes, we invent gods. It's a ridiculous argument, because it's possible to yearn for stuff no one else has ever yearned for, and it's possible to have a yearning you cannot describe, and it's possible to claim that you have a yearning and never describe it the same way. And these are just three reasons why it's a ridiculous argument.

It's also possible to claim that when you meet something that satisfies you, you might realise that it is the object of your indescribable yearnings. Well, that's like saying you have no statement of hypothesis, you gather some experimental data, and amazingly the data supports the hypothesis that you didn't state.

Frankly, I believe that you can yearn for God, but I don't think it is proof of His existence. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, the main reason why you shouldn't indulge in arguments aimed at proof or disproof of God's existence is that God actually cannot objectively prove His existence within the strictures that He has created for himself.

I've expounded on this elsewhere. Briefly, one problem is that if God exists, it wouldn't be possible to have an objective proof related to him; another problem is that a comprehensive proof of His existence would render free will (as we conceive of it) and meaningful faith impossible; a third problem is that it isn't possible to prove the extent of the superset from the subset without common rules that bind both. There are even more problems than that.

Nevertheless, I will honestly say that for me, belief in God gives me a meaningful existence. Some will say that's very sad, and some will say that's very good. For me, it's just very true. I don't really feel yearning, what I feel is impatience to complete the examination that is this life, and move on to the postdoctoral stage.

Cultural Mandate

I was musing on the term 'Cultural Mandate' recently. Like the phrase 'Cultural Revolution', it has a completely different sense from its normal semantic burden when placed in context. In the context to which I am referring, it is the idea that there is an explicit religious directive or 'permission' to engage the world of secular culture from the viewpoint of a specific religion.

I think that this particular idea is relatively meaningless except when contrasted against another idea. This would be the idea that religion is a private thing to be kept out of the mainstream and out of other people's faces as much as possible.

The point I'd make is that no interpretation of religion should assert a 'Cultural Mandate'. Religion is a social phenomenon, and automatically engages culture. It should automatically engage present-day issues and current affairs. This is not to say that it should have the dominant say, but that it will always have some say. Let me show you why I say this.

(I will use the term 'Church' to represent any organised religion in the following points.) Societies that demand the separation of spiritual and secular tend to fall into four logical areas:

1. You can have the 'Church vs State' model in which you do not let churchmen into the state or statesmen into the church. This makes the country effectively a bipartite state. Historically, this idea could be seen in countries like Andorra, which was ruled by a French duke and a Spanish bishop.
2. You can have the 'Church above State' model in which the churchmen are statesmen but first churchmen (often called a theocracy). In such cases, since the Church makes almost everything its business, the secular state is very small in scope.
3. You can have the 'Church below State' model in which the State has all the powers and the Church is tolerated but is not allowed to express itself in all ways, since some of these ways might be detrimental to public order. This is the case for modern France, for example, which protects religious practice as long as it doesn't interfere with public order.
4. You can have the 'neither Church nor State, or whichever is more advantageous' model in which the State professes to also have an official Church. Historically, England and many other European states were like this; you will still find that the ruler of England has the title Fidei Defensor ('Defender of the Faith').

What I am saying with these four cases is that there is no case in which you can take the Church out of the State completely, and there will always be scope for the religious to place their views on offer in the marketplace of ideas.

But hold on, you say, what about those states which actively suppress religious activity?

Well, that is not the separation of spiritual and secular, but the separation of spiritual from secular, with the intent of abolishing the former entirely. In such states, even secular culture suffers and takes on near-religious mythological significance.

My point is that the only reason one might claim to have a 'Cultural Mandate' is that there is actually some force (possibly even from within, such as religious conservatism) that says that people of a certain religion should not act as cultural agents in the secular world. The acts of such a cultural agent would possibly include singing in a nightclub, posting sensual (but not obscene, speaking with cultural relativity) music videos, writing philosophy textbooks, teaching history, or running a wine shop (or coffee house) without posting the relevant scriptural justifications all over the place.

If these activities are seen as inappropriate for practising religionists, I'd probably add being a lawyer (in some religions, it is said that 'the strength of sin is the law'), being a banker or working in many financial organisations (in some religions, it is a sin to charge usurious rates), or trading in any tainted (by religious definition) goods — such as images, foodstuffs, books, or education (depending on what religion it is, and with specifics different for each).

Does a religionist need a 'Commercial Mandate' too? Apparently, it is not so popular a topic, and in fact I've noticed that movements who make noise about cultural sinfulness tend to be very happy and make big justifications for commercial sinfulness (although the reverse is not normally so true).

Well, these are some of my thoughts. There's no solid, meaty, whack-on-the-head conclusion here, except that I don't think a cultural phenomenon needs a cultural mandate.

Tidal Forces

The Sea is always receding. It was Matthew Arnold who moaned about the Sea of Faith that once was full and isn't anymore. But I've realised that it's not a closed system. The tide is moving out, as it always is. But other things are coming in, and faith is always there.

It's literally true that humans need faith in order to believe in anything. In fact, the harder the forces of reason push, the more logic tells us faith should thrive.

Why?

It's simple. Faith is belief in the absence of sufficient evidence. Since the level of evidence required is getting more stringent, it is harder to obtain 'sufficient' evidence. The evidentiary requirements for discovering a new element, for example, were never met when establishing the nature of 'ancient' elements such as iron and tin. In fact, quite a lot of things we have come to believe based on past evidence would no longer meet modern standards.

This means that the number of things justified by modern standards of evidence is actually falling. The tide is going out, but that's because the Sea of Reason is drying up, trying desperately to reduce itself to Grand Unified Theories and suchlike.

Emotion and Reason

Quite often, I have mystified students. It's almost as if they have embraced mysticism rather than rationality as far as thinking about themselves is concerned. One thing which triggers this state is when they have to think about emotion.

"What's emotion?"

"Err... it's feelings, right?"

"OK, it's feelings. So how come we think of emotion as a way of knowing?"

"It helps you know how you feel!"

"OK, so your feelings teach you how you feel?"

And so on.

The point is a really simple one. An emotion is a physiological response to a situation, that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. It distills a situation down to a complex but concentrated social package, based initially on 'feelings' (but also on the input of your senses) and tells you whether something is 'good', 'bad', or any one of maybe five or six other basic categories. Sometimes it does this very quickly for something that the reasoning mind cannot cope with easily, simply because the situation is too complex.

At this point, students often ask, "What about love? It's only a physiological response?!"

Well, not only that, but the emotion one calls 'love' certainly does not exist without a physiological response that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. If X says he loves Y and you hook him up to a machine that measures these responses, he will certainly show certain kinds of physiological changes when he's asked to think about Y. If he doesn't show any of the known likely changes, then he doesn't love Y in any sense, simple as that.

But is it possible to love someone purely rationally, without messy emotions getting in the way?

No, actually. Even loving some thing requires emotion. If a person truly loves money, then the sight of a $50k cheque made out to bearer will trigger a bunch of physiological responses linked to a change in psychological perspective. With loving someone, it engages the social parts of the brain even more.

Some say that it's emotion, the social response package, that has made the human brain the size it is; we spend a lot more time feeling than using logic. We make snap judgements about how we feel about people (and things, and situations) almost all the time, and it's so much a part of us that we don't consciously think about it. In short, our feelings are actually the brain making sense of our physiological responses (the 'gut feel', the 'sinking feeling', the uneasiness which you can't pinpoint, the chill down your spine, the crawling of the skin, the hair standing on end, the blush of the cheek, and many more).

We aren't creatures of pure reason. We can't be. The brain is too heavily involved in emotion for any of our thoughts not to have any feelings associated with them at all. An honest person will admit it; only the worst kind of pseudo-scientific thinker will assert otherwise.

Radiology

I was listening to the car radio as usual with my 'peripheral hearing'. To my amusement, it was a Mandarin-language broadcast of rather soppy (and clichéd) content.

There was a woman who was obviously telling a man some home truths: "If I love you, I love you because I love you and not because you're wealthy; if I don't love you, I don't love you because I don't love you, even if you're wealthy. But I don't love you because in the depths of your heart all you care about is money and not love."

It's this kind of thing which leads me to believe that humans are basically irrational, and therefore when we invent things like science and mathematics and logic and so on, it's a sort of attempt to deny that fact. When we say 'human' we imply subjective and irrational; when we say 'mathematical' or 'scientific', we imply objective and rational.

A moment's reflection should disabuse you of these pretensions to rationality. Mathematics is only objective within the terms it has defined for itself; basically it says, "Here are my rules, and if we all play by my rules, I will always win." Science is less than that, because it says, "I assert the universe can make sense, now let's observe it and figure out what that sense is; I don't know what the rules are, but I am going to assume that all the games in the universe follow the same basic rules."

When humans attempt to use mathematics and science to solve problems, they can only solve the simple ones. That's OK, because if you build complex-looking problems out of simple ones, you can solve pretty complex-looking ones. It's like saying proteins are very complex molecules, and then asking someone to compare the molecular structure of haemoglobin to that of DNA, and then to that of a champagne diamond.

Then you take all that knowledge about molecular entities and say, "Yes, here is a cure for human stupidity, venality, and intransigence." Haha, so funny.

That's what I like about random radio shows. They have their own logic and it's not a very consistent one, but it shows human thinking. It's kind of radio-logical; you can use it to look into the human condition. In that sense, I suppose I can call myself a diagnostic radiologist...

There's No Logical Proof of God

There are a few ways we can show this. Here's the most basic:

If a system of logic is created that does not have the existence of God as an axiom, it cannot show that God exists. This is because by definition, God is of an order of complexity beyond other axioms (else He would be subject to, and limited by, such axioms). If a system of logic is created that has the existence of God as an axiom, it cannot show that God exists either, since that existence is treated as axiomatic and hence not to be proven. If we use any kind of reasoning in which X and not-X covers all the possibilities (principle of bivalence), then God cannot be shown to exist by logic.

Here's a theological proof:

If God requires belief, then that belief must be volitional (free-willed). Otherwise, it has no significance. Therefore God cannot present a complete proof of His existence, because if such were to exist, then the option to not believe would be irrational. That would mean that belief would be the only rational choice, thus removing the option of free-willed rational belief. This also means that if anyone tells you that they can prove the existence of God, they are either lying, or they are advancing an argument that is sufficient for them to believe but does not necessarily compel belief in anyone else.

That said, I believe I have good grounds for belief in God, and I am not ashamed to say that I can give a good account of my faith.

Absolutism

In my time as a Theory of Knowledge teacher and supervisor, I've noticed an interesting trait in the local population. Students here love the security of absolute answers.

If you tell them that a discussion can end with multiple supported viewpoints, they always want to know 'which one is best', or 'which one is right'. If you say, "This is a paradox and hence has no real answers," they will be most unhappy and want to know why such things exist. If the question asks them to evaluate A and B in terms of X and Y, you will get some sort of ranking table and a conclusion which might as well read 'four legs good, two legs bad'.

This is an odd artifact of reason which I can only conclude is cultural. Empirically, these students see the same things that we do: they see that human variety is manifold and that there are a myriad viewpoints for most things. They struggle with faith and reason, they struggle with the opportunity cost of going to a concert vs going shopping or studying for a test. They KNOW there are few easy answers, but yet they hope for them.

I've found that by overwhelming consensus, the majority of them like math. It's good stuff; the answers always seem to come out either right or wrong. You can become a professional math problem-solver, almost. It is straightforward stuff; just do a thousand or two thousand problems a month and you're good.

What makes them like this? I suspect it is the sheer pressure of needing to get things right. Their world claims to be a meritocratic society, but all the merits are a) selected by those who were selected to begin with, and b) numerical in origin, type and quality. That is why the certainty of ranking and hierarchy, of numerical value and quantitative profit, of mechanical logic and economic outcome, appeals to them so much.

But it need not be so! Surely?