I read More Than A Theory (2009) by Hugh Ross in 2025. Like his other books I’ve read, I thought it was a bit sloppy. Its stated purpose was to propose a version of the Intelligent Design Hypothesis that was specific enough to make testable predictions. In the broadest possible sense, I believe Ross succeeded, but just barely.

The basic idea is that the creator made the universe with humanity in mind, and wanted us to know. Thus, examples of necessary fine-tuning should increase as more science is done. It’s not that the universe is fine-tuned for us (as it must be or else we wouldn’t be here), but the fact that the underlying laws of nature require such incredible fine-tuning for life to exist in the first place. Naturalism predicts that no more examples should be found, and the ones we already have are somehow illusory, being a result of either a vast multiverse or mathematical inevitability. The RTB (Reasons To Believe) model differs from other creation models in that it requires multiple instances of miraculous intervention (not just the Big Bang), and it requires billions of years, rather than thousands of years, or just an instant.

In Hugh’s mind, everything that came before was for our benefit, including mass extinction events (for the petroleum). This raises the possibility in my mind that we are only here for the benefit of something yet to come. Skynet perhaps? I also wonder whether all humanity is too broad a receiver. If the world was more for us than for the Lycophytes of the Carboniferous that died to give us coal, might it be that some humans are more favored than others? God was said to have loved Jacob and hated Esau. Maybe the universe was created primarily to give Jesus a place to live and a realm to rule.

The book is filled with the usual creationist claims, such as the distance and mass of Jupiter and Saturn striking the balance just right to deflect comets from the inner solar system without also pulling Earth out of orbit. The density distribution of matter at the Big Bang and the constant of gravity are precisely balanced between a universe of only thin gas and a universe of only black holes, thus allowing stars and planets. Without previously existing cells to manage them, organic molecules are poisoned by oxygen and destroyed by ultraviolet light, yet ozone protection requires oxygen, meaning life can’t get started from simpler molecules. Also, there is no known natural method to enrich prebiotic molecules to the homochirality found in living things. Very high levels of polarized light can partly enrich such mixtures, but only if (unnaturally) monochromatic, at luminosity high enough to destroy the molecules, and at polarization levels that do not exist in nature – and only barely approached in extreme environments such as the vicinity of magnetars (not a place where life is expected to begin). There are many reasons to suspect more is going on to nature than impersonal forces. On this we can agree.

Where Ross begins to lose me is in answering why some things are the way they are. There are those that point to the immense size of the universe and number of stars unsuitable for us to live around and ask why God would bother making all that if all he wanted was to make a home for humanity. Ross sidesteps the issue by bringing up the fact that without the requisite baryon density after the big bang, there would be either too much or too little helium for later stars to convert it into heavier elements needed to make terrestrial planets (and life). What he seems to miss is that a smaller universe with fewer stars could still have the same density. Furthermore, he claims that (sometimes deadly) hurricanes are necessary to better distribute rain, yet gives no good reason why rain must be so well distributed, since it is certainly not perfect even with hurricanes (deserts and rain forests exist), and humanity is already so constrained in habitat already (Mars and Venus and Challenger Deep are inhospitable) that a bit more constraint on Earth would hardly change the argument. One could also ask why God couldn’t simply distribute rain by other means, and the explanation that hurricane damage is necessary for our spiritual development seems ad hoc. Sure, some good can be extracted from bad things, but if the bad outweighs the good, further explanation is still needed.

He also seems to think much of the strange coincidence in timing of humanity. It takes billions of years for generations of stars to raise the metallicity of interstellar gas to the point that life (and technologically advanced life) is possible, yet certain heavy elements decay rapidly. Allegedly, we live at the perfect time in history when the abundance of such elements is at its maximum. At the same time, we live early enough in the age of the universe to see evidence of dark energy before all other galaxies are swept away faster than light, hiding the secrets of the universe. At the same time, greenhouse gas levels have been dropping just the right amount to compensate for the sun becoming hotter over the last five billion years, yet we are very close to the minimum levels of carbon dioxide needed for photosynthesis. Whether the Earth overheats or the plants starve, life will end in twenty million years one way or the other. He even makes the claim that no civilization can last more than 41000 years. I agree that all of this is interesting, but I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from it.

Furthermore, Ross makes very many claims without explanation, evidence, or much context. He claims that human lifespans are the perfect length to eliminate sin from the world as quickly as possible. I have never heard this and have no idea what he is referencing whatsoever. He claims that our sun has no sufficiently similar stars in the Milky Way, yet numerous other stars have their “twins.” He cites no examples of this, and no statistics either so I can judge how likely this is to happen by chance. He makes many claims on page 88 of the world yet to come, some more speculative than others, including the wild claim that there will be no gravity, thermodynamics, or electromagnetism on the “new Earth,” yet there will be light somehow. How does he know?

Then there are the claims that contradict what I have already read from other sources. This does not mean Ross is the wrong one, since the other sources are wrong often. Yet, Ross makes no effort to explain himself or debunk mainstream science. It is things like this that make it hard to sift through the book for the good stuff. He claims that Neanderthals made no contribution to the gene pool of modern humans, although I have read differently. He claims that Homo neandertalis and Homo erectus are non-human animals, yet I have read they made stone tools, bone flutes, and clothing. He also claims that our last universal common male ancestor (predicted based on levels of diversity in Y-chromosome DNA) and our last universal common female ancestor (predicted based on levels of diversity in mitochondrial DNA) lived at the same time, although I have read differently. To his credit, he does later briefly mention that the mainstream predictions for mitochondria differ because they assume monoplasmy, but I still felt I needed a better explanation than that. In any case, the fact that “Y-chromosome Adam” and “mitochondrial Eve” lived at different times does not mean that there wasn’t a true Adam and Eve who lived further back, so the Bible can be true either way.

Most annoying by far is the absolutely bizarre nonscientific mystery phrases that keep popping up:

He claims some animals (mammals and birds) are “soulish” while others are not. This is a very inexact term to the point of meaninglessness. Over the years, psychologists have proposed many classification schemes for different types of animal minds, including ranking them on a spectrum of preprogrammed animals, remembering animals, planning animals, and empathic animals capable of true language and incrementally building technology. New surprises about animal psychology are discovered every year, and nothing in this field is settled. Soul and spirit are words with more definitions than there are people using them; I don’t know what they mean.

He also repeats that the beginning of the universe was found to be the beginning of space and time and vice versa. What would it even mean for a universe to exist without space and time? What would it even mean for space and time to exist without a universe? Of course they are the same! What is he talking about?

He also repeatedly talks about space being a “surface.” In what sense? What is under the surface? What is at the center? What does that even mean? He compares the universe to a tent, meaning it is without center. My tent has a center. If he uses the word tent to mean only the material itself, this is a bad analogy because space is neither material nor two-dimensional. He compares the expansion of space to the stretching of a balloon with galaxies imbedded in it, but why? Why not just say that distances increase in all directions? Using a balloon as an analogy implies there to be an “inside” and an “outside” beyond our space, but there is no evidence of that. What is he talking about? If space being a surface is such a profound claim, then what would it mean for it not to be a surface? He cites eleven Bible verses (Job 9:8, Psalm 104:2, Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13, Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15, Zechariah 12:1) that refer to God stretching out the heavens, claiming this as a confirmed prediction by the prophets, but these are quick, throwaway lines in the middle of much more mundane prophecies. Not one prophet explains precisely what they mean and how they know or why God would tell them. It is clearly just flowery language illustrating God’s greatness, not to be taken too literally. I hope Ross wouldn’t take Isaiah 29:4 literally, or else he will have to admit that the dead speak.

He also makes the claim that Christianity makes claims of an interdimensional nature, while no other religion does. This is then used to support his claim that while other religions are mere human constructs, Christianity is divine revelation. His examples do not support this. He claims that triunity and the coexistence of free will and divine sovereignty imply additional dimensions. I can’t see what either of those has to do with dimensionality, and neither of these things are accepted by all of Christendom anyways. One might say they are human constructs later added to the gospel. He mentions Jesus entering a locked room, which could have to do with a dimensional shift (or not), but is hardly unique to Christianity. He also seems to miss that the fact we talk about higher dimensions today is not because they have been discovered, but because humans thought them up, thus proving that dimensions can very well be human constructs. He goes on to discuss string theory (which requires ten dimensions), but string theory is just a model created by human minds that people hope will make testable predictions one day that might confirm the existence of extra dimensions. The jury is still out.

The book is so full of bad reasoning and poor writing that it is hard to take it seriously.

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I read Designed To The Core (2022) by Hugh Ross in 2025. It represents a new take on the intelligent design hypothesis. Unlike young Earth creationism, which assumes to short a time for evolution to have worked, and unlike those who argue from fine-tuning and irreducible complexities, who are agnostic about age and merely insist that evolution is guided by an intelligence, Hugh’s model requires billions of years for our privileged place in the cosmos to be meaningful.

I would strongly recommend reading the book in reverse order. He starts his story at the level of galaxy clusters, moving down to the Milky Way, our local arm, the stellar neighborhood, the solar system, and finally the Earth-Moon system. At each step, he makes statements which are either unclear or at least not substantiated until later chapters. Instead of explaining how our sun sits in a safe place in the galaxy and later explaining how most galaxies have no safe place at all, he states that our galaxy has the requisite gas flow and other properties to be safe (without explaining how or why), later detailing all the dangers that still exist, only to finally explain that we are in a safe place. It’s very confusing.

Another thing Ross is guilty of is info-dumping. I didn’t need to know the exact geography of the Laniakea Supercluster to follow the later arguments, and without any introduction to the purpose of the information, I didn’t know what I would need to retain or what to relate it to. It was far too much to memorize with no narrative to bind it together, and then I needed to go back and reread to see what he would later reference. It’s a poorly-written book.

Another thing he is guilty of is asserting much without supporting. He does cite scientific papers, but he never describes the evidence himself. He simply mentions, with no further discussion, that Laniakea is uniquely flat and that this is important for any life living there. Why? Also, Earth has hundreds of times the uranium as similarly-sized rocky worlds. How do we know? A high ratio of dark matter to stars in a galaxy is important for life. Why? Three meteorites struck the Earth recently in just the right places at just the right times. In what way? Right for what purpose? How could that even matter? I also wish he had discussed the evidence for the grand tack planetary migration model instead of just citing it.

Now that I have finished attacking his writing, I can attack his model. It has problems with exactness, speculation, causality, and temporality. Then again, some of this might actually be his writing too, rather than his science. It’s confusing.

Exactness: His basic premise seems to be that our location in the universe is uniquely perfect for life. At one point, he states that the central black hole of the Milky Way has been inactive for a long time, unlike those in other galaxies. I already knew that there was evidence for a great “burp” event in the recent past, so I was skeptical. Later, he mentions this evidence, but claims that the radiation was minor enough not to threaten our ancestors fifteen million years ago.

Later in the book, he explains why the corotation radius is the best place in the galaxy for a solar system, only to contradict himself by complaining about mean motion resonances (without explaining what they are), finally deciding that the radius is only one important factor among many.

Later, he explains how the distance, mass, and number of gas giants in our solar system represents the best possible compromise between too many comet strikes of Earth and too much orbital instability of Earth. He makes it sound perfectly balanced and substantiated by observations, only to later mention that it is the Moon that stabilizes the Earth in spite of Jupiter’s influence. He also explains away the few comets that do get past as necessary for the elemental enrichment of the crust.

Speculation: Much of his conclusions depend on knowing the exact size and shape of our galaxy, the cause of spiral arms, and the mechanism behind planetary magnetic fields. All of these things are still very much unsettled. I know. I’ve been keeping up on these subjects as recently as 2024. He also claims the “cobweb” structure of our universe to be a result of baryon acoustic oscillations, with voids full of dark matter and a tiny bit of normal matter right at their centers. This contradicts the mainstream simulations I have been used to seeing based on Lambda-CDM. He also says that a diurnal cycle a mere hour longer or shorter would create a climate too extreme for advanced life, which not only sounds insane, but I know it has long been believed that the Earth has slowed substantially over the past four billion years, meaning the day used to be much shorter and life did fine.

Causality: Ross is also bad at explaining the causal relationships within his model. He rambles on endlessly about correlations between spiral arm pitch, gas flow, star formation, galactic bulge size, and dark matter ratios while sometimes giving one impression and sometimes another, but never spelling out exactly what parameter is actually special about our home and which parameters are “downstream” from it. I suspect that our uniqueness is not nearly as surprising as he seems to suggest.

He also confused me over whether he thought that subduction caused both the Cryogenian and the concurrent oxygenation, or whether he thought that subduction caused the oxygenation, which caused the Cryogenian. The way he explained the process, it sounded as if subduction more deeply buried carbon that was already buried anyways, doing absolutely nothing to reduce greenhouse gas levels itself (which gradually decrease anyways). In any case, the mainstream narrative is that the Cryogenian was brought about by the “invention” of photosynthesis, which trapped carbon dioxide and released oxygen as a byproduct.

Temporality: Possibly the worst flaw in the model is its temporal nature. Ross argues that we are in a local “bubble” of gas and dust that protects us from supernova radiation (as well as that of pulsars and black hole accretion), yet we only just entered this bubble recently and will not stay here. In fact, our sun had to start its life in the galactic bulge in order to have the right mix of elements to make planets (and life). If the argument is that “God” is looking out for us, why didn’t he protect our microbial ancestors? A young-Earth creationist would say that there were no ancestors and that God placed us in the right place with the right elements from the beginning. Ross can’t say that. Also, what of our future? We will not stay in the bubble. Is God planning on letting us down, or does he know that we will then have the technology to save ourselves?

Ross also argues that our sun is unusually stable, producing far fewer flares than most. However, it is later revealed that this is a temporary phenomenon. We just happen to be at the midpoint of the sun’s life when it is the most stable. Why didn’t God protect our Precambrian ancestors? Why not our future descendants five hundred million years from now?

Another example of this flaw is that of the Earth’s magnetic field. Due to iron crystallization beginning five hundred million to one billion years ago, the field has dramatically increased its strength. This field protects our atmosphere from solar wind, yet it became stronger just as our sun became quiet. It is only later in the book that he reveals that the early moon also had a magnetic field (gone now) that helped to protect the atmosphere our microbial ancestors enjoyed, and it is later mentioned that the mantle once had one hundred times the electrical conductivity it does today, giving the Earth a strong field at that time. When was this? Has the Earth always had strong magnetic protection, but for different reasons? It is so unclear. Why not cover all this together in one chapter? I feel like I’m piecing together a puzzle.

Overview: Life requires a fine balance. Too little star formation, and there are too little elements heavier than helium. Too much star formation, and there are too many opportunities for irradiation and orbital disruption. Too little gas flow, and there are too few stars formed. Too much gas flow, and the supermassive black hole spits some of it back out at high speed. Too small a galaxy, and neighboring galaxies will disrupt stellar orbits. Too big a galaxy, and there will be too much radiation. Too far or too close from the galactic center, and stars will orbit at different speeds than the arms they are in, which are thought to be waves of density rather than coherent objects themselves. Only at the corotational radius will stars maintain a relatively constant distance from their neighbors. As the sun has become brighter, carbon dioxide has reduced to compensate. As the mantle has cooled, more water has worked its way downward to compensate and keep tectonics working, building mountains faster than erosion can tear them down. Life as we know it must be incredibly rare indeed. In fact, there are likely no aliens inside the observable universe at all.

Thoughts: I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, study of physics suggests that infinitesimally tiny changes to the constants of nature threaten not only the existence of life, but of stars, atoms, and even matter itself. On the other hand, my experience with bodily health, the economy, and especially the ecosystem has led me to believe that such things are more resilient than the fearmongers would have us believe. This book tends to add fuel to the argument that the world is fragile. What lesson should I derive? Is the universe perfectly designed just for us? Or is it so precariously balanced that we should be constantly filled with terror?

What counts as greater evidence for God? The miraculous creation of innumerable species all over the cosmos? Or the existence of one species miraculously surviving in a hostile world against all odds? How does one quantify the degree of miracle? Probability is likely part of it, but I’m not sure we know enough yet to make those calculations. I hope there are aliens somewhere.

The problem with the multiverse hypothesis as an explanation of the anthropic principle is that there is scant evidence for it. There is more evidence for God than for the multiverse! However, there is undeniable evidence for multiple star systems. Living in a privileged universe is currently a mystery requiring an explanation, whether God or multiverse. Living in a privileged star system is just chance. We had to be somewhere, and we could only be where we could be alive. It doesn’t sound like evidence for divine protection at all.

I read In Praise of Good Bookstores (2022) by Jeff Deutsch, an attempt to account for the unaccountable, the value that books and bookstores deliver us beyond their monetary value.

He makes the case that books are far underpriced considering the value they bring compared to other commodities such as food. Food is consumed quickly and forgotten, but books take days to read and the impact they have on our lives can be permanent.

“The most important things in the world seem impossible to measure. We have as yet, Carlyle said, no scale to measure admiration by. And we have as yet no scale for measuring meaning, knowledge, hope, pleasure, reverence, curiosity, beauty, kindness, awe, justice, wisdom, and love.” – In Praise of Good Bookstores, page 100

He also shares my basic approach to life, believing that productivity should serve pleasure, rather than exist as an end in itself. Pleasure is not frivolous, and there is no greater pleasure than learning.

“I couldn’t fathom the notion that one strove to become educated rather than learned, or that one might study in order to make a living, rather than to learn, continually, an endeavor essential to living a more meaningful life. What, after all, was the point of making a living if not to build community and create deeper understanding – to come home for dinner and then learn with one’s chavrusa?” – In Praise of Good Bookstores, page 12

He also makes the case that curiosity is a better guide to practical knowledge than practicality. If we only look in the obvious places for the knowledge we seek, we will miss out on the treasures hidden elsewhere.

Books are unique and priceless. Their natural price is infinite and would do better as gifts than salable goods. Gifts create a bond with the gift giver, thus creating community. The physical spaces of bookstores provide both solitude and community. Deutsch is not a fan of Amazon.

Good bookstores are arranged to slow down time, create lasting memories, aid browsing, and foster discovery of related titles. Good book sellers collect books that reinforce each other and aid discovery. Browsing spaces should be jumbled, reflecting the nature of knowledge.

“While an algorithm might suggest a book that we are likely to enjoy based upon who we’ve been, or what an advertiser might want us to think we want, nothing can replace the work of browsing to help us discover who we are or who we might become.” – In Praise of Good Bookstores, page 32-33

So why are bookstores disappearing? Part of the problem is that there are too many products. In fact, there are far more titles than any one person could ever read in many lifetimes. These products take up shelf space that could be held by other books they are in competition with. It is practically impossible to carry all the classics that the public expects, all of the latest releases the public expects, and other books besides.

The other problem is that Amazon does loss leading. It sells books at breakeven prices or less to lure in customers who will then spend more on other items. Brick-and-mortar stores can’t compete.

Overall, the book was decent, though it was more poetic than my taste, and near the end it began rambling about things I didn’t understand, such as “intercalculated time,” books “ripening” over 280 days, and why “now, more than ever” is somehow a bad phrase to use.

The book got me thinking about what I look for in a bookstore. I definitely prefer paper to webpages. They feel more natural, are more intuitive to use, and I can read excerpts at random instead of where the author or seller chooses. I’m pretty good at picking titles I will like and I have always enjoyed browsing. In fact, I might enjoy it more than the actual reading.

Bookstores have a certain atmosphere that I miss. They are so full of possibility. Amazon is full of possibility too, but it doesn’t surround me, instead content to remain on my computer screen. It is a provider of products only, not a place to experience, and certainly no place to meet those with similar interests.

Amazon is too big for new authors to stand out against the background of millions, but smaller stores, specializing in specific genres or specific geographical locations, can give authors some small visibility rather than none at all. I would rather have twenty devoted fans who read my every word than twenty million who give me little more than a cursory glance. It’s not about the money – except that without book income, I will need a job that takes away all my time, energy, and ability to read and write just to stay alive. I am literally decades behind on both my reading list and my writing list right now. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Oddly, many small bookstores I have approached tell me that they only stock books from established authors, and that thirty miles away is too far to be considered a “local” author, even if they are the only bookstore within thirty miles!

Coffee shops seem to be disappearing, too. I have long wanted to meet people for educated discussions in coffee shops, but haven’t had the time or the friends (with time). I prefer the atmosphere of the coffee shop to write in, too. Home is too noisy and distracting to write sometimes, and sometimes I just need a change of scenery, yet what I believed to be a permanent industry has been taken from me before I truly had a chance to take advantage of it.

I hope somebody finds a way to keep the old-style bookshops (and coffee shops) profitable, and they do it without pricing the books higher than I can afford (I can barely afford them now).

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I read The Celts (2015) by Alice Roberts in 2024. I had always known the Celts as the original people of the British islands before the arrival of the Romans and the Saxons. Then I read The Farfarers by Farley Mowat, who claimed that they came from Germany and pushed out the real original people there, the Albans. Mowat speaks with authority as if all this is largely settled, showing uncertainty only for his idea that it was the Albans who reached Canada before any other European. In contrast, Roberts speaks with great uncertainty, casting doubt on many theories of ancient Europe, and makes the situation much more complicated.

The theme running through the book is that we can’t study what we can’t agree on the definition of, and the Celts are very poorly defined. Are they defined by genetics? Are they defined by art? Are they defined by language? Are they defined by religion? It now looks highly probable that each of these things began in different parts of Europe and were adopted by other tribes as they exchanged ideas and artifacts.

A big part of the problem is that the Celts never wrote anything down, so much of our knowledge of them comes from Greek and Roman historians. The Greeks referred to people living in and around the Alps as Keltoi, or sometimes Galos, the Celt word for warrior. They had friendly relations with Alexander The Great, king of Macedonia, but when he died and his relatives carved up the empire, the Celts joined with Thrace to attack. Later, a small number of Celts migrated to the Gordion region, where they soon became known as Galatians. The Greeks often referred to them all as Galatians after that. The Romans called the same people Galli, or Celtae. They recognized them as one of the main tribes living in Gaul (France), distinguishing them from the Cynesians, Teutones, and many others who might have been Celtic also. Early Romans did not include the people of Brettanike and Ierne (Britain and Ireland) in their description of Celts, but later linguists noticed the similarities in language.

Since the Celts never described themselves, it is possible that our sources are filled with anti-barbarian propaganda. Archaeologists have searched for confirmations in their physical traces, but what some claim as evidence is highly dubious. According to the literate Mediterranean people, Celts are hard drinkers, crave meat, battle naked (men), wear blue dye (women), conduct human sacrifice, and collect the heads of enemies to hang from their horses (adopted from the east) and houses. How much is true?

If we define those living in the Alps first described as Keltoi to be the true Celts, there is evidence that their culture changed several times. They used to cremate their dead, but later buried them, along with treasures in much the same way that the Egyptians did. Is it possible that they believed one could carry belongings into the afterlife? Many of the brooches and other items were deliberately damaged so as to be unusable. Was this to deter thieves? Or an act of revenge against the dead? What today is called Celtic art actually developed post-Christianization, but it is based on earlier art that also used flowing lines. This kind of art apparently originated near the Alps, as did the making of torcs. The practice of dumping cauldrons and swords in bodies of water also probably originated there and later spread to Britain.

If we define Celts as those holding to the Druidic tradition, this probably started in the islands and then spread across mainland Europe. Druids took apprentices, teaching them all about astronomy, geography, and nature. They settled disputes between neighbors and even between tribes. They believed in reincarnation, sky gods, water and soil goddesses, and mistletoe as the cure to everything. Those stories that survive heavily feature cauldrons, shapeshifting, hybrid animals, and reverence for dogs. There is also a story of a warrior who experienced “war spasms” much like the stories of Viking berserkers.

If we define Celts by their language, the latest theory is that the first Celts were from Portugal and adopted Phoenician consonants as the basis for their alphabet, adding in vowels that they made up. If true, this is the only written Celtic language before the Roman invasion. Place names in Portugal bear some similarities, such as prefixes and suffixes such as “briga” (hill fort) and “eburo” (yew).

So, where did the Celts come from? It is entirely possible that the Celts we know today are the original people of Britain and Ireland (the Albans?), who adopted language from Portugal, art from central Europe, and started and introduced the Druids to the world, before being invaded and influenced by Romans, Picts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans before taking over the world.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

I read the book Metabolical (2021), by Doctor Robert Lustig, in August of 2024. It was long and dense with facts and analysis. Some parts were not entirely clear. I never saw any citations. Overall, it was still a decent book.

He starts off by claiming that health in the West, and especially in the UK and the US, is diminishing. This requires some parsing of the statistics. It is not enough to say that the number of heart attacks has increased per capita, since modern technology allows people for the first time in history to survive their first few heart attacks. Instead, he claims that there are indeed more first heart attacks. It’s not enough to say that cancer diagnosis per capita is rising, since we are diagnosing cancer earlier and earlier, meaning people have more years to live post-diagnosis, and because people are living longer in general, even long enough to get cancer, which is very much an age-related disorder. Instead, he claims that cancer rates are rising even among children, and after taking into account early diagnosis. Also, while it is true that people are living longer than they were a century ago, those extra years are less healthy ones by other metrics. I’m not sure what to think.

He then goes on to claim that the entire medical establishment is focused on treatment rather than cure or prevention. This has been my impression as well. My hunch is that it has a lot to do with the causes of many diseases being too unsettled, controversial, and mysterious to properly advise on how to prevent them. He admits this is part of the problem, though he still thinks that most chronic diseases are at least partly caused by metabolic dysfunction brought on by sugar and that at least on this point doctors should be more focused on diet than on prescribing yet more pills.

From there, he gets into the three main points of the book: Avoid fructose. Eat fiber. Avoid processed food. So long as those three stipulations are met, we are free to choose our personal diets as we like. He supports both veganism and keto.

Allegedly, fructose is literally poison in too many ways to keep track of, not all of them clear to me. From what I was able to pick up on, it seems to contribute to perforation of the intestine (“leaky gut” syndrome), suppress the enzymes that bring glucose into the mitochondria and burn it, are not useful for conversion into amino acids (unlike glucose), increase free radical production at rates much higher than glucose, and increase glycation at rates much higher than glucose. The only thing it is good for is that it can be burned for the same number of calories as other sugars (4kcal/gram). The worst part is that while every cell in the body takes in glucose, only liver cells and muscle cells can take in fructose. However, if they do not burn it all up immediately, it gets converted into fat within the cells. This ectopic fat (fat outside of the designated adipose tissue) leads to insulin resistance, in turn leading to many other problems, though exactly how was not clear to me. High levels of glucose, while still problematic, do not lead to this same problem, since the liver will turn it into starch instead of fat, something I thought only plant cells did.

I still do not have an overall picture of the insulin system, and this book barely helped. Over the past five years, I have collected many individual pieces of the puzzle, but there are many pieces missing, and some of them are contradictory. I was hoping this book would explain. It did not, but it did teach me many new facts: Three hormones are involved in the feeling of hunger. Ghrelin is secreted by the stomach and tells the brain when it is empty. Leptin is secreted by the adipose tissue and tells the brain when it is full. Insulin is secreted by the pancreas and does very many things. It tells every cell in the body to open up to incoming blood glucose. It tells the adipocytes to stop releasing fat. It inhibits the leptin signal to the brain. It also promotes blood vessel wall muscle growth (raising blood pressure), and reduces the ability of the kidneys to remove salt (also raising blood pressure). While a necessary molecule, too much insulin over too long a time is not good.

Something Doctor Lustig repeats over and over is: Protect the liver. The liver can be damaged by many things. Iron is one of them, yet we need some iron for other body processes. An excess of branched amino acids is another. For those actively building lots of muscles, these amino acids are necessary, but any excess goes to the liver and destroys it. Omega-6 fatty acids are another. These are compounds used in the cell membranes of some plants, but risky for animals like us to incorporate in large numbers. We need omega-3 fatty acids. Excess glucose is another. The worst thing for our livers by far (except for alcohol) is fructose.

Another thing he repeats over and over is: Feed the gut. This brings me to his fiber theory. Fiber provides no calories to us, but it is important for digestion. There are two kinds of fiber. Insoluble fiber creates a lattice in the gut while the globular, soluble fiber plugs the holes in the lattice, trapping other compounds such as sugar or starch away from digestive enzymes. This means that anything thoroughly mixed with fiber is digested slowly, absorbed slowly, travels further down the intestine before being absorbed, and therefore gives the gut microflora the first crack at it. By keeping our bacteria well-fed, we ensure they do not try to eat our intestines, contributing to “leaky gut,” which causes myriad troubles all over the body, including an autoimmune disease where the body attacks its own digestive tract, potentially leading to even more troubles. Well-fed helpful bacteria are also better able to limit the growth of any foreign bacteria we eat, keeping us from getting sick.

After fructose, his archnemesis is processed food, but he doesn’t even make an attempt to define it until two-thirds of the way through the book. Here are some of the things he says about processed food:

“If you take processed food out, you’ve lowered salt and sugar, and you wouldn’t need the medicine.” – page 42

“In particular, we’ve learned that sugar, the main component of processed food…” – page 151

“Processed meats are laden with nitrates…” – page 154

“Processed food is dangerous because of the lack of fiber…” – page 154

“…processed food won’t ferment.” – page 256

My problem here is that “processed” is too vague a term. Cutting, cooking, and freezing are all processes. Sometimes I lack the time, patience, or equipment to do these. What difference does it make if I do this myself or let the producer do it for me ahead of time so I can just pop it in the microwave? Do I really have to pluck my own chickens and pick my own fruit? Finally, on page 242, we get seven criteria for what makes a food processed:

Processed food is mass-produced, consistent batch to batch, consistent country to country, uses specialized ingredients from specialized companies, and consists of pre-frozen macronutrients. All of these sound like this is exactly what we want, and I am surprised that freezing is not considered a process. Processed food also must stay emulsified so that the fat and water do not layer out and it must have a long shelf life or freezer life. I understand that if there are specific emulsifiers or preservatives that science has shown to be harmful, then we can talk about those, but to be against all processed food simply by virtue of being “processed” doesn’t make sense.

Speaking of specific compounds, chapter 20 covers some of those. Diacetyl is a flavor enhancer that causes damage to both lungs and liver. Potassium bromate strengthens dough, but also causes cancer. Lecithin, polysorbate, carboxymethylcellulose, and carrageenan are emulsifiers that keep fat and water bound together, but for this very reason they are also able to damage the mucus layer protecting the intestine from digesting itself and allowing the bacteria or large molecules into the blood. Watch out for all these things in the ingredients list, possibly under other names. The most dangerous compounds are nitrates, nitrites, and trans fats, but each of these have been banned.

I notice he never mentions artificial sweeteners, extracts, MSG, or dyes. Instead, he mentions things that have either been banned or that I never see listed. This book is not the one to read if you are looking out for specific ingredients to avoid.

Other compounds will not be in the ingredients list because they are given to the living organisms before they are food. Among these are pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics. Hormones given to promote growth of livestock have been implicated in epidemics of breast growth in children – more than once. Antibiotics given to livestock to prevent disease have been suspected of killing the beneficial gut microflora of those who eat them. Thus, it is not only processed food that is suspect, but whole food as well.

Of course, watching what we eat does us no good if there is food fraud. Sometimes companies lie about what they’ve put in it. To minimize the risk of fraud, avoid foods with large numbers of ingredients and large numbers of contributors and middlemen to its production. While it is possible that your bottle of olive oil might be diluted with some other oil, it is even more likely that the traces of olive oil in your herb-infused crackers came from another company the cracker company chose based solely on price, not on verifiable quality. In other words, the more processing, the greater the risk of fraud. Also, the more processing, the harder time laboratories have to detect fraud. Doctor Lustig cites no evidence to show that fraud occurs or that it occurs often, but it still seems like good common-sense advice.

I don’t know what to think of all this, but where he really starts to go off the rails is his take on food groups and labeling. He acts as if he doesn’t understand the difference between a food group and a nutrient class, saying inane things such as fruit juice not being a fruit (because the sugar is freed from its fiber matrix, making it as bad as soda). I always knew that fruit juice was full of sugar, which some people thought was unhealthy, but it was still considered fruit. Not all fruits are equal. He gets all uptight because some language in an official document was changed from “eat less than” to “don’t eat more than.” Isn’t that the same thing? He insists that sugar in nutrition labels should be measured in teaspoons and not grams to be less confusing to the average person, but knowing the visual size of a teaspoon means nothing if you don’t know how much you should be eating in the first place, which one can learn in either format, so what difference does it make? He insists that listing added sugar is important, before finally admitting on page 328 that it is the total amount of sugar that is important. He calls out vague and misleading phrases in advertising such as “helps build strong bodies,” “natural,” “GMO-free water,” and “evaporated cane juice,” but given how confused the average person is about everything and how diverse the language is between different groups of people, I can’t say with certainty that companies are doing wrong to use such phrases. Some people do indeed need to be assured that their water contains no GMOs and call evaporated cane juice what most of us would call molasses.

He even goes so far as to declare sugar a non-food. According to him, salt and fat are foods, but caffeine, alcohol, and sugar are addictive drugs. I do see his point. Ethanol is commonly understood to be a (mild) poison, yet we can metabolize it for calories (7kcal/gram). Fructose is commonly understood to be a source of food calories (4kcal/gram), yet we are gradually learning it acts in many ways like a mild poison. Both ethanol and fructose have been consumed since antiquity and have important places in cultural rituals, such as Passover (wine) and birthday parties (cake). They are more alike than different. However, does this really mean that fructose is a drug? Or does it mean that ethanol is food?

The book is more than nutrition advice. It also dives into the money and politics behind American food policy. Allegedly, Kellogg invented cereal because he was a Seventh-Day Adventist who believed that consuming meat aroused sinful passions, especially lust, and also dulled the mind to the point that one could not understand and accept the saving Gospel. Allegedly, the link between sugar and cavities was certain before dentists realized they were losing business and so created the bacterial theory. Later, fluoridated toothpaste and drinking water offered some limited protection from cavities, yet dentists went along with it anyway. Contrary to popular belief, the pharmaceutical industry might actually be anti-vaccine, since seventy-seven of the eighty-nine proposals for a COVID-19 vaccine came from universities, not corporations. I don’t know what to think, and I don’t really care about the complex mix of motives institutions might have for their positions; it’s too easy to dismiss truth because our teachers might have ulterior motives for spreading it. I care about what the science says.

So, if doctors are focused on treatment and our food supply is tainted, what can we do about sickness prevention? Chapter 9 tells you what to look for in your blood tests to diagnose yourself and how to change your diet. It’s far too complex to repeat here, so you’ll have to buy the book yourself. In fact, it is so complex, I still can’t keep it straight myself.

The final chapters contain his manifesto for public policy change. He suggests taxing soda and using the money to subsidize water. He suggests having food companies pay for our health care, incentivizing them to deliver healthy food. Alternatively, he suggests that insurance companies buy our groceries, only covering what they approve of. This will cost more on groceries in the short run, but less on health care in the long run, no matter who is paying. Finally, he calls for educating the public that there is no biological requirement for sugar, for requiring that nutrition labels include how much sugar has been added separate from total sugar, for a ban on advertising sugary foods on television and at sports events, for a ban on loss leading of processed food, for a tax on sugar, and for an end to food subsidies that distort the market and keep sugar cheap.

Finally, I got to what really interests me and why I bought the book: the biochemistry!

Calories are not calories: That is, what you eat is not what your body gets out of it. Without sufficient levels of vitamins and minerals, even sugar will pass right through you without being absorbed. With enough fiber, as much as thirty percent of calories will be eaten by gut bacteria before we have a chance to get to it. It takes calories to digest food, and the amount depends on what the food is made of. At the cellular level, it takes calories to prepare molecules for burning. Fat loses 2-3% to this process. Carbohydrates lose 6-8%. Proteins lose 25%. Triglycerides containing omega-3 fatty acids effectively have zero calories because they are never burned, but stored away to build cell membranes from. Trans fats also have zero calories because our bodies don’t know what to do with them at all, so they just sit around and clog arteries.

Protein is not protein: Not all proteins have the same proportions of amino acids. Of the 20 amino acids the body uses, 11 of them it can make itself from other compounds. The other 9 come directly from food. Of these, tryptophan is the hardest to come by. Furthermore, the amino acids that make up muscle protein (what most of us eat) are toxic to the liver, even though we need them to build our own muscles.

Carbohydrates are not carbohydrates: Glucose and fructose have immensely different effects on the body. Sucrose breaks down into equal amounts of glucose and fructose, while lactose breaks down into equal parts glucose and galactose. Starch breaks down into glucose alone, and thus pasta is safer than sweets.

Starch isn’t starch: Linear starch (found in legumes) has two ends for enzymes to snip glucose units from. Branched starch (found in wheat, rice, and potatoes) has many ends, meaning it breaks down faster and causes blood sugar spikes.

Fiber isn’t fiber: Grains that have been ground no longer have insoluble fiber of the correct size to be useful, even if it is chemically identical. Processed foods that have had fiber added cannot possibly have it fully mixed at a microscopic enough level to be useful. Natural fruit keeps its sugars safely locked inside a fiber matrix. Fruit juice and flour does not. Thus, whole grain bread is no better than white bread.

Triglycerides aren’t triglycerides. Saturated fats from animals are better than unsaturated oils from seeds, but oils from fruit (such as avocadoes and olives) are okay. Unsaturated fats can be transformed into trans fats with enough heat, but saturated fats never can be, because having hydrogen bonded to every site where hydrogen could bond means no weak spots.

Saturated fats aren’t saturated fats. Even-chain fatty acids (from meat) are processed everywhere in the body, but odd-chain fatty acids (from milk) are processed in the liver. There is some evidence that milk protects the liver, although there is otherwise no need for adults to be drinking milk.

Cholesterol isn’t cholesterol. Not only is there a difference between HDL and LDL, but there is a difference between LDL and LDL. LDL-C is correlated with heart disease only at very high levels, and negatively correlated with heart disease at moderate levels. Yet, all LDLs are measured together and a statin is prescribed to lower them when too high, but statins don’t even work on LDL-C anyway.

Glucose spikes are not insulin spikes. This is largely because fructose also raises insulin, but also because of lag and pancreatic abnormalities.

Body fat isn’t body fat. A while ago, the medical community figured out that height mattered and used BMI instead of weight. Doctor Lustig prefers to use waistline as a rough metric because it is the ectopic fat and visceral fat, rather than the subcutaneous fat, that matters.

More things to worry about:

Beyond its main points, the book is packed with many anxiety-inducing factoids. Olive oil can be turned into trans fat by cooking with it at too high a temperature. Antibiotics can survive in meat and kill your beneficial bacteria in your gut, allowing “bad” bacteria to take over. Low stomach acid reduces the ability to absorb vitamin B12. Lack of sleep increases ghrelin, leading to hunger. Stress increases cortisol, leading to insulin resistance. Caffeine makes fructose worse. Wheat contains 700 antigens that some people have sensitivities too; it’s not just about gluten. Bottle-fed babies don’t work their mouths as hard, leading to different oral architecture later in life, possibly leading to sleep apnea and mouth-breathing. Breeding tomatoes for sweetness has reduced lycopene levels. Breeding grapes for sweetness has reduced vitamin C levels. Mother’s blood sugar levels determine the number of fat cells baby will be born with and retain throughout life. Monoculture agriculture depletes the soil and requires more fertilizer.

Then there are the random comments that make me question his judgment. There is neither the quantity nor quality of them that warrants tossing the whole book out, but I point them out as a lesson to authors not to make the same mistakes.

On page 232, he states, “Galactose is an essential component of certain fats in the brain called cerebrosides and ceramides.” I thought fats were three hydrocarbon chains linked by a glycerol bridge, whereas monosaccharides were circular molecules with a carbon-hydrogen-oxygen ratio of 1:2:1. It doesn’t make sense for galactose to be a “component” of fat. Did he mean it was a precursor molecule? It is things like this that make it hard for me to see the big picture of how it all fits together.

On page 245, he states, “Trans-fats are calories, but not food.” This contradicts what he says elsewhere about trans fats not being used by the body and therefore not having calories. Did he mean that they have calories when oxidized in the laboratory? That’s confusing.

On page 360, he calls sugar, coffee, corn, cocoa, and even crude oil hedonic commodities. What does he mean by that? Is oil hedonic? Is it hedonic to be able to get to work on time and not freeze to death in winter? On page 379, he claims that it is the hedonic actor that drives the epidemics of processed food, opiates, and guns. Gun epidemic? What is he even talking about? Is there an epidemic of guns? What does that mean? Are guns hedonic? Is it hedonic to want to protect ourselves from murderers, rapists, and fascists?

On pages 18-19, he said, “Obamacare…hasn’t solved any of these issues, because it isn’t addressing the root cause of the problem. Then there was Trump’s response, which hoped to solve the problem by letting sick people die.” Here he assumes motives when all Trump did was convince congress to end the mandate portion of Obamacare, reversing many problems while making none of them worse. Could he have done more to help people? Maybe, but he was dealing with many issues and can’t do much on his own without congressional approval. I find it bizarre that in the midst of a paragraph criticizing both Obamacare and Medicare-for-all, including criticism of the cost, that one would not claim Trump an ally. It is little throwaway comments like these that make me think Lustig is completely out of touch with reality. On medicine, I have no expertise and have to trust his, but when it comes to politics, we are on my turf.

Will this book change habits? Probably not. As he acknowledges himself, people are often too busy and too tired to prepare a proper meal and will just reach for something quick. With rising rent prices, many people are living in vans and eating from cans. Visiting multiple grocery stores a week is too inconvenient. It is often difficult to know what ingredients are in the food. Not all foods are available to us and not all available foods are affordable. Furthermore, the science isn’t settled yet. Lustig himself admits on pages 58-60 that studies are difficult, expensive, and fraught with many forms of bias, since many of them rely on patient recall of what they have been eating. Can we trust anything in this book at all?

There are also too many tradeoffs. Limiting this argument to just what I saw in the book, I have determined that we are screwed either way. This is a fallen world and not our final home. Some processing is good. Lustig admits that milk is the one thing that should be processed (pasteurization). Preservatives are bad, but so is spoilage. Smoking meat is the traditional preservative, but also carcinogenic. BPAs in cans protect the food from metal contamination, but can also be poisons themselves. Farming without preservatives or pesticides means more food waste and higher food prices. Pureed baby food means less chance of choking, but also means weaker jaws and trouble chewing later in life. Cooking food leads to glycation products, but raw food allows the ingestion of living pathogens and parasites. Which is worse? Lustig offers the compromise of fermented foods, but I simply can’t take seriously anyone that thinks sauerkraut is food. It’s literally garbage. I would rather be sick.

Overall, this was a stressful book to read. Everything I love the most is poisoning me. Telling me I have to work harder at preparing my own food and suggesting I might eat sauerkraut wears me out. I need some sugar. I wasn’t planning on it, but after plowing through this exhausting book, I need to relax with a Dunkin Donuts Signature Latte and some pastries. I’ll see you later.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

I recently read The History, Present, and Future of Happiness, downloaded for free from IncreasingHappiness.org. It’s a quick, easy read. The book is divided into three parts. The first part tells the story of evolution and how the phenomenon of what we call happiness first came to be. The second part adds up the numbers of how happy the world is currently. The third points to the possibilities of the future and how we might greatly increase happiness. The book also gives some debating advice, including stating the goals of the debate up front and contesting only one point at a time.

At its core, the main thesis seems to be one of repackaged utilitarianism. Happiness is seen as the ultimate goal governing our actions because whatever other goals we might have, they can be thought of in terms of happiness. The author uses the term in the same way I always have. It must be true because it’s a tautology. What is not mentioned is the alternate meaning of happiness, which is something much narrower and by definition temporary, often repeated by those disparaging our “happiness-seeking culture” in The West. I can see this leading to misunderstandings.

While the book acknowledges the many complications in quantifying, measuring, and achieving happiness, it does not fully resolve all of them. Among these complications are the fact that maximum pleasure is of a much smaller value than that of maximum pain and this seems to be a biological limitation. Also, people tend to return to the mean happiness levels eventually as a matter of homeostasis, no matter how their condition might remain. Empathy can allow us to feel pleasure at increasing the pleasure of others, but too much empathy can drain us if we are unable to fix their problems or if we destroy ourselves in the process. Short-term happiness can be at odds with long-term happiness, and vice versa. Finally, any rules that a culture, government, or even an individual might adopt to maximize happiness must necessarily be few and simple to be actionable, but this raises the possibility that they will be inappropriately applied in specific cases.

The area showing the most promise (in my opinion) is measurement. Questions are asked such as: Would you replace a neutral moment in your life with this one? What negative moment would you be willing to relive for a chance at reliving this positive one? By asking relative rather than absolute questions, it takes some of the guesswork away of how to compare different experiences of different people. Perhaps it can be used to settle the debate on whether it causes more harm to force transwomen to shower with the boys or to force transwomen to shower with the girls. Either way, someone is going to feel awkward. Lies can be caught by asking what people are willing to give up or endure to get their way and then holding them to it. Unfortunately, constantly surveying people on their satisfaction can bias the results via an observer effect.

As with the original utilitarianism, no mention is made of how to choose between two societal outcomes equal in total happiness quantity when one of them is comprised by a small number of ecstatic elites living off the miserable slave class and the other is comprised by a large number of equal, but mediocre-feeling individuals. One way around this conundrum might be to proactively alter the structure of the society such that the greatest total good always coincides with the improvement of every part of it. That way, we avoid having to make the choice. I have wondered whether there might be a mathematical way to quantify this as we do with entropy, involving the alignment of individual good (microstates) with that of the whole community (macrostates). Perhaps the entire universe is evolving such that sometime before the “heat death,” we will enter a utopia wherein every part (no matter how divided) is valued as much as everything taken together.

In this book, pain and pleasure are roughly defined in terms of that which brings about a tendency of behavior that historically would have achieved reproductive fitness. About halfway into the book it finally becomes apparent why the evolutionary definition is used. The secondary theme of the book is to spotlight the suffering (and happiness) of animals. By using the evolutionary definition, it becomes easier to guess under what situations animals will feel pain so we can avoid those situations.

It is further suggested that in the future we continue to do research to determine which animals feel pain and to add warning labels to or meat about the living conditions at the farm so we can make better decisions. It is suggested that we eat larger, but fewer animals, so as to minimize the number of individuals harmed. Switching from chicken to beef is used as an example. This is an interesting point I never heard of before. I wonder if the author would also be against farming insects (assuming they feel pain), since much greater numbers are needed for the same biomass, and in favor of hunting whales, since whales eat trillions of krill alive and killing the whales would save them. Of course, eliminating the predators from the ecosystem often has disastrous consequences all across the food web, sometimes creating more pain than before. It’s complicated.

Another suggestion is to prescribe customized artificial meat. This is congealed organic molecules made to resemble meat. In theory, it can be made tastier, healthier, cheaper, and with less energy than real meat. In practice, it isn’t quite there yet – and if you believe the carnivore diet apologists – it can never be as healthy if made with the plant-based oils and other chemicals they currently use.

What I was surprised wasn’t mentioned is the other artificial meat. I remember reading over fifteen years ago about animal cells grown in petri dishes to make meat. While the texture will differ from flesh taken from a living animal, thus making these cuts unappetizing to most, at least these would be real animal cells, yet with no body, no brain, and (presumably) no pain. I was also surprised that the biochip alternative to animal testing was not mentioned. These are chips with different reservoirs for different kinds of human cells – liver, brain, heart, et cetera – connected by tiny channels. Drugs can be tested for their interactions with living tissues. While the chips will never perfectly predict how drugs will affect living humans, neither do animals, which often have very different chemical sensitivities.

In the last part of the book, it is hinted that future technology might increase not only our happiness, but our capacity to feel happiness – perhaps through drugs, surgery, or genetic engineering. At the same time, animals might be altered so as not to feel so much pain. This inspired me to think of several other ideas:

If we could give carnivorous animals alternatives to hunting prey, this would also increase happiness. This would require domestication on a scale never seen before. We would have to take over the entire ecosystem, reprogramming parasites and pathogens to be less harmful. Suddenly, Isaiah 65:25 starts to make sense.

If we could engineer our own happiness, we could also engineer away our empathy so as not to be bothered by how we hurt others. If happiness is the only goal, there can be no objection to this act. However, if we still remembered doing this, we might still feel bad about that. We could erase this memory, but not without creating a new memory of wiping our memory. It is possible that reality is structured such that the highest happiness comes from serving others. I feel a story plot idea coming on.

I imagine those of the Abrahamic religions might object, citing Genesis 1:28-30 and 9:1-3 as evidence that animals exist for our use. However, having dominion often means to serve. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet (John 13:1-17). The sons of Zebedee were told that leaders must be servants (Mark 10:42-45). The Jews were God’s chosen people – not to be world masters – but to bring light to the world. It’s not that sacrificing animals to consumption, labor, and science is wrong; it has to do with our motives and goals. Are we using the lives and deaths of these animals for a greater good worthy of their contribution? Maybe it would be helpful to erect a statue or plaque to remember them.

Those who abuse their anointing can be removed. The Good News was taken from the Jews and given to the Gentiles (Acts 13:46). The kingdom was taken from Saul and given to David. The birthright was taken from Esau and given to Jacob. World dominance was taken from the dinosaurs and given to mammals. Could the “image of God” be taken from humans and given to… IDK, raccoons, maybe? I feel another story plot idea coming on.

In any case, we won’t get to a better world if people’s hearts aren’t oriented the right way. The best first step to improving the world for animals and humans alike is to introduce more people to Jesus.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Progress is hard to define, but you know it when you see it, and we haven’t seen progress in physics since the Standard Model was established. Revolutions on the scale of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Big Bang Cosmology seem elusive.

I recently read On Progress In Physics by N. Otre Le Vant. It might have been longer than it needed to be to get the point across, but it was a fast read once I got into it. I liked the conversational style.

As I understood it, the important points were: Keep track of all assumptions in our models. Start at the appropriate beginning; remember Ockham and Descartes. Remember that distinctions imply additional concepts. Keep our models falsifiable. Since fewer and simpler theories are easier to refute, keep theories simple and continue the trend towards unification, joining space and time into spacetime, taming the particle zoo of many mesons and baryons into a few quarks and leptons, understanding heat and pressure as vibrating molecules, understanding millions of species as an expression of DNA, understanding dreams and Freudian slips as manifestations of the subconscious, and even understanding the myriad of spirits in polytheistic systems as subject to a single “Lord of Hosts” at the top. Since subjective theories assume less, continue the trend of subjectivity, assuming the relative motion of Galileo, the relative time of Einstein, and the relative color perception of our different retinas. We need more creativity in science, and therefore we should remember that even bad theories can be stepping stones to truth. Scientists are sometimes corrupted by desire for money and worries over reputation and would do well to remember that any idea they come up with is based on earlier ideas, could very easily have occurred to someone else, and will likely be proven wrong in the long run anyways. The type of person who will make the breakthrough we need will be humble, intelligent, creative, have a variety of skills to allow cross-references between fields, have excellent pattern recognition, will know when to listen to his/her intuition, and will likely have the “amateur advantage,” meaning they will not be constrained to thinking “inside the box” created by extensive education in the established models.

Furthermore, Le Vant uses the book to introduce his subjectivity hypothesis, though it is hardly even a hypothesis at this point and just a collection of hints that might or might not point in the same direction. He suggests that the speed of light might derive from the maximum processing speed of our brains and that time and space are all in the mind. He notes that all the major numbers in physics – as big as they are – are still small enough to be encoded in a human brain. What if the entire universe is in our minds? Then again, what if the entire universe is in your mind? Am I and this blog just a daydream of yours? Yikes!

I have several difficulties with the idea. First, the only reasons we have for thinking our brains have the speed and memory limits they do is because of our experience with this world, but if the world is a dream, all bets are off. We might not even have brains, just disembodied minds.

Furthermore, there is no such number small enough that it would not be described as small compared to the much larger numbers that are possible, so it is unclear what “small” even means in this context. Furthermore, numbers can have different “sizes” depending on how they are represented. 99 is nine times the size of 11, but both require only two symbols. 10 uses twice as many symbols as 9, but is not twice the size. 9^9 is huge, but requires only three symbols. 9[9]9 (using an operation of order nine) is even bigger. F[F]F (hexadecimal) is even bigger. There are also paradoxes: The phrase “the smallest number beyond the capacity of 100 symbols to represent” is a phrase representing a number with fewer than 100 symbols (67 including spaces). Furthermore, if the goal is to have as few assumptions/theories as possible, smaller numbers (at least of those) are better.

The author also suggests that the twin paradox of special relativity might be experience differently by different people, such that no one will ever experience being the “older twin,” though they will meet people who do (or who seem to). The same might be asked about why different observers are never observed (by me) to disagree on how the wave function has collapsed. The twin paradox has always bothered me. The idea that velocity can be relative without acceleration (merely a set of velocity-time pairs) also being relative boggles the mind. Is it possible that there is another reality in which the older twin is still young and sees his sibling as old from his point of view, but we happen to live in the reality where this twin is replaced by an aged doppelganger? The same might be asked about why different observers are never observed (by me) to disagree on how the wave function has collapsed. In either case, the only way to know is to do the experiment myself; I can trust no one else is real and not a figment of my imagination. This reminds me a lot of a science fiction story I wrote.

The ideas on subjectivity also remind me of both quantum immortality and top-down cosmology:

Quantum Immortality: This is the idea that if everything physically possible happens in some part of the wave function, there is always a world in which you escape death. No matter how many times you get run over, mauled, and blown up, a dwindling number of versions of you survive due to the precise configurations of matter/energy being slightly different. Perhaps in one universe the Brownian motion of air molecules pushes on the bullet just enough for it to nick rather than pierce the artery. From the subjective view of the survivor, he sees himself as having supernatural luck. It is possible that within the Hilbert multiverse, there might be many such subjective viewpoints, each seeing themselves as the sole survivor in an increasingly lonely world. I wonder, too, if there are enough universes for there to be one in which everyone always survives together. I also wonder what happens with the aging process. Are there worlds in which we don’t age? Because of the limitation of the Plank energy, not all universes that could occur do, but how do we know which ones exist?

Top-Down Cosmology: This is the idea that consciousness collapses the wave function in such a way that the universe that results is one in which consciousness is possible. The constants of nature, the initial conditions of the big bang, and the myriad turning points in evolution only dropped out of superposition the first time one of our sufficiently-conscious ancestors in one branch of the wave function opened his eyes. Because “objects” can quantum tunnel into different states, there is no reason the false history created has to match all evidence in the present. It could tell contradictory stories. When I was very young (about 14), and first read about particles having “multiple histories,” I immediately thought that this could resolve the conflicting evidence of the “young Earth” and “old Earth” creation models (I was also reading about creationism at the time). I eventually wrote a science fiction short story based on this wherein the main character is told “There is only now,” and “There is only here,” and that he creates history by subjectively observing the present, creating mixed evidence for both creation stories. As luck would have it, I recently read that someone else had exactly this same idea. That is quite a coincidence! Unfortunately, I saw that the idea was debunked in the same article. The claim is that such superpositions can only be maintained for timescales far too short to matter. Once the universe was a second old, its fate was already fixed. There is no way it could be both 14 billion years old and 6000 years old. This also means that we can’t use this phenomenon to resolve the smaller differences in estimated age relating to “the crisis in cosmology.” However, we could perhaps use this phenomenon to explain beneficial mutations in evolution.

I also had some thoughts about runaway simplification and unification:

There are limits to simplification. According to the incompleteness theorem, all systems of axioms are either incomplete or inconsistent. If we eschew contradiction, this means that there will always be things left unexplained that will simply need to be accepted as axiomatic by faith. This in turn creates a new axiomatic system that is also inconsistent or incomplete. In other words, there are an infinite number of axioms – an infinite number of foundational principles do derive truth from.

I am also reminded of some philosophy I encountered recently having to do with the simplest possible universe. If there is only one thing, there is nothing to compare it to and it cannot be defined. It takes at least two things to be meaningful, but once this has happened there is also the interaction between the two, which can be thought of as a third thing. Thesis! Antithesis! Synthesis! This interaction can happen one of two ways as in the case of the interaction of 11 and 00 being either 10 or 01, thus yielding a fourth thing. Four might be the smallest meaningful number. I am reminded of the two possible moderate compromises between pure anarchy and pure tyranny being either sensible, responsible, and restrained government or being the utter insanity of a government that meddles where it shouldn’t and stands by when it should intervene. If there are four extreme possibilities arranged along two dimensions, the goal of “all is one” is misguided.

I am also reminded that it takes an axiomatic system of the minimum complexity to perform the equivalent of multiplication for Goedel’s incompleteness theorem to apply. Multiplication can be represented by two dimensions (the area of a rectangle being its width times its height), so one might conclude that any universe with multiplication must be based on at least two dimensions, not “all is one.” Of course, this does raise the question of what counts as evidence, since one could conceptualize multiplication without resorting to geometry. Furthermore, to reach infinity by adding or subtracting takes an infinite number of terms, whereas in full arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) infinity is always right there in the form of X/(X-X). This means that any model that uses multiplication (or involves at least two dimensions) will have singularities.

Something more happens when we rise from 2 to 3. The infinite number of possible regular polygons in 2d drop down to a mere five Platonic solids in 3d. The ability to dissect any shape into any other in 2d is restricted by the Dehn invariance in 3d. Non-transitivity (and therefore long-term stability) is only possible with three or more items. This is related to the three-body problem and chaos theory. Operations of order one (addition) and two (multiplication) retain adherence to the commutative property and only have one opposite each (subtraction and division). However, operations of order three (exponentiation) are not commutative and have two opposites (radicals and logarithms). Finally, Fermat’s Last Theorem states that for whole number exponents of three and up, there are zero whole-number solutions to the equation A^n+B^n=C^n, but an infinite number of solutions to the equation A^2+B^2=C^2. Maybe three is special.

Good book.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Sometimes I read a book where the author’s blazing intelligence shines through and you just want to meet them. Richard Dawkins and John Stuart Mill make me feel this way. Julia Galef is another example. This is one of those rare books that is so well-written that the words flow like sweetened milk and no special effort is needed to understand them. It is also dense with facts and examples to make the case.

The central point is to introduce the scout mindset and contrast it to the soldier mindset most people are in most of the time. The soldier is interested in defense and offense. The scout is interested in finding out the truth. The soldier argues. The scout asks questions.

A scout updates his maps of the world continually as new information comes in, not even thinking of it as “changing his mind.” Facts that don’t fit are not forgotten, but are used to build an alternate map in case the first one is shown wrong. People, institutions, and systems are not rejected for getting one thing wrong, but are listened to in case they get something right. Rarely does someone get everything right all the time.

Self-deception is not necessary to emotionally cope with the world. There are ways to take risks and inspire others without clouding our minds to reality, making it harder to make sensible choices. Often, a risk can still be worth taking even when the risk of failure is high. Will good come of the failure for someone else? What is the loss? Is there a high upside if you succeed? Communicating honestly the inherent uncertainty in the world, while remaining confident in oneself is what can inspire others to invest in your business ventures. It’s worked before.

Motivated reasoning causes us to ask “Must I believe this?” and “Can I believe this?” Evidence puts limits on our beliefs, but leaves a lot open to preference. This is why increased education causes a divergence in strengths of opinions between opinion groups, rather than a convergence.

Many practical tests for motivated reasoning are described in the book. You can ask yourself if the scandalous revelation was about someone you liked rather than someone you disliked (or vice versa), would you feel the same? If everyone in the world reversed their opinions tomorrow, would you think the same way? If an outsider took your job, would they do the same thing you are doing? If you had already left the status quo, would you go back? Are the studies that support your argument as flawed as those that don’t? To better make predictions, ask yourself how much money you would be willing to bet on them. There is even information on how to set up bets to be mathematically equivalent, and a test of trivial knowledge to find out if your level of certainty is well-calibrated to how many questions you actually get right.

While I tested as well-calibrated, I got so many right with a high level of certainty that there weren’t enough wrong ones at the lower levels of certainty to be statistically valid. My score might be a result of chance. I’m still interested in what my real score might be. It’s possible that I’m highly educated but still terrible at estimating probabilities, which might be the more important skill.

Another subject covered in the book is how our group identities can cloud our judgment. To solve this set of problems, Galef suggests we adopt the identity of a scout, someone who is interested in the truth over all other concerns.

Of some interest to me was the tale of a friend of hers who was accused of never admitting he was wrong, to which he replied that he had just admitted he was wrong twice earlier that day. The reason it didn’t look that way was because it was considered nothing more than an “update” to his worldview that he moved on from quickly without apologizing or taking responsibility for. This makes me wonder if this is why I’ve been accused of the same thing. I continually update and refine my opinions as new information comes in without even noticing it. I don’t consider it my fault when I am misinformed because it isn’t. Why should I apologize? It never occurred to me that this is what others are after because I lack the imagination to be that perversely evil.

Of most interest to me, Galef reports having the same type of troubles I had reaching out to “the other side” when it comes to politics. She kept finding that those willing to speak with her more often than not confirmed her prejudices of how irrational they were rather than teaching her something new. My final conclusion after many years of study was that most voters are evil monsters that we are better off exterminating than talking to. Her final conclusion is that those most likely to talk with us are the least agreeable ones that thrive on conflict and that we still need to seek out the ones who don’t like talking politics – since they are more likely to be conciliatory and agree with some of our underlying assumptions. That might be true, but it still leaves open the issue of what to do with the argumentative ones – which were the ones I was most interested in. It only takes a few poison berries to spoil the whole pie.

Overall, a good book. It should be required reading in school alongside How To Lie With Statistics.

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If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

A while ago I read Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson. It is very much like his previous book, Twelve Rules For Life. He rambles, going down every possible tangent, and it is not always obvious how the content of a chapter relates to its theme. Furthermore, there were parts I did not understand. For example, he first talks about how order can be good or bad (the wise king versus the tyrant) and about how chaos can be good or bad (the feminine potential versus the witch), giving us four character archetypes, but then he suddenly starts talking about seven characters, of which chaos itself is one (not two) of the characters.

There are many delicious ideas. Here are only a few:

Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. Conservatives recognize the value of institutions. Any solution to a social problem must work well enough that most agree with it over long periods of time. Thus, such things are hard to build and easy to lose. Liberals recognize the value of creativity. It allows us to find new solutions. There must be balance between order and chaos. Do not mistake competence for tyranny or tyranny for competence.

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. This is the highest calling and it will give you purpose. It will give you a reason not to give up when things are difficult.

Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. The truth may be unpleasant, but we are better knowing it. A conflict may be unpleasant, but we are better off having the argument than pretending that everything in the relationship is okay. Avoiding a problem teaches you to avoid problems. Giving in to pleasure reinforces the neural pathways that led to it. Addiction works through feedback. Willingly facing fears resets our anxiety. The first step is to really look. Looking at evil helps us to better appreciate good, to understand where evil is limited and not all-encompassing, and to understand how to avoid evil.

Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. This is a great way to start a business or get a promotion.

Do not do what you hate, or else you may end up hating yourself. Then you will slack off and self-sabotage.

Abandon ideology. Instead remain childlike, ready to learn new things, hoping to have been wrong before. Be an explorer rather than a hero.

Work as hard as you can on at least one thing and see what happens. You will change. You will lose some of your potential, but you will make something out of yourself.

Make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. Art inspires gratitude and connects us to the transcendent. Experience brings simplification in perception, but art can bring us back to childhood. Making friends also gets harder with age because we become more rigid in who we are with experience. Artists contend with the unknown and are themselves on a learning journey even while they teach (otherwise they are propagandists).

If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely. Your brain won’t let you forget trauma until it has reason to think it won’t happen again. This requires learning from the experience and learning how it can be avoided. Writing it all down helps us to understand the causal relationships.

Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship. Your partner might not deserve you, but marriage is a higher calling than either of you. The job of a spouse is to bring out the best in the other by speaking truth above all else.

Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant. These are bad things.

Be grateful in spite of your suffering. Suffering is only made worse by resentment.

We love because of the limitations of those we love; we do not love omnipotent beings.

Our perception is imbedded in our goals and our morality. Recognizing objects require values. Values make things detachable for different purposes. Otherwise, it’s all just “matter.” This is why AIs still can’t get around CAPTCHAS.

Living together before marriage sends the signal that the other is just an “experiment” not worth committing to.

Adam might have been a hermaphrodite before Eve was taken out of him. Jesus might have also been a hermaphrodite.

Lions coordinate to take down wildebeest when they can focus on the same one, requiring it have something that makes it stand out from the group. Human ancestors were also prey animals and would likely have an instinct to conform. In modern society, this instinct now manifests as a hatred of anything different. It is no longer helpful.

Something being more difficult makes it worth more.

Nihilists claim all is meaningless, yet some will find meaning in music.

Repeated annoyances are never minor.

Socrates believed that learning was actually remembering the knowledge we had in our omniscient, pre-carnal state.

We can’t help but see the world as gendered personalities. Gender is hard-wired into us. This is the sentiment behind polytheism.

We think not only as individuals, but in groups. The collective knowledge of society is greater than any one person could hold. This is one reason why speech (and freedom of speech) is so vital.

In the beginning, the primary adversary of humans were predator animals, especially snakes. Eventually, the human psyche and cultural storytelling grew to see other humans as the adversary, sometimes associating them with snakes. In time, this concept became broadened to include evil wherever it might be found, including in oneself. It was personified as the author of sin and father of lies, Satan, often taking the form of a snake.

There were also two quotes I thought were especially poignant and concise:

“Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid…It might be even worse…Right-wing Jews, Islamic hard-liners, and ultra-conservative Christians must admit, if pushed, that God is essentially mysterious. This concession provides at least some boundary for their claims…For the ideologue, however, nothing remains outside understanding or mastery…There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves.” – Beyond Order, pages 173-174

“Everywhere, the cynic despairs, are bad decisions. But someone who has transcended that cynicism…objects: the worst decision of all is none.” – Beyond Order, page 188

Overall, five stars.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Buster Benson wrote Why Are We Yelling? in 2019. It is yet another book about conflict resolution, with a special focus on politics. Like the others I have read, the prime takeaway is that I already follow the advice rather well, but it does me no good if no one else is doing it. Unlike the others, this book worded things in such a way that I wonder whether I went quite far enough before giving up. Benson seems to have found some success where I failed in part because he had resources I didn’t, such as a large number of friends and a house to host a pot-luck in.

Buster writes of having four goals of conversation: enjoyment, connection, growth, and security. Growth happens when we learn something and security happens when we “win” an argument. He writes of four voices inside us that serve to direct us to these purposes: possibility, avoidance, reason, and power. The voice of possibility is always asking questions. Avoidance tells us to withdraw engagement even while we are unconvinced. Power tells us to intimidate and launch ultimatums. Reason appeals to shared values between the participants, but is utterly useless when conversing with someone of different values. The biggest problem with avoidance, power, and reason, is that even when the conversation is over, the “roots” of disagreement remain, causing the same issues to sprout up again and again. Only by mutually pursuing the voice of possibility can we learn enough to reach a shared understanding.

What Buster does not mention is that such a thing is impossible without sharing reason first. To even discuss this arrangement of voices and goals requires reason. Reason underlies everything, and without it, there is nothing.

Buster also writes of cognitive biases and mental heuristics. He casts them in a mostly positive light, explaining that without the bias toward the familiar, we would be overwhelmed by all the information pouring in our senses. We engage in mental shortcuts because we often have too much information, too little time, too little resources, and too little meaning/relevance to keep us interested otherwise. Because biases can’t be completely avoided, the best strategy for dealing with them is to hold everything lightly.

Buster also writes of many strategies for dealing with disagreements:

1. Pay attention to whether the disagreement is one of the head, heart, or hands. Is it a disagreement over what is true, what is meaningful, or which strategies work best? This is generally good advice, but it only works with people who are also following it. Some people entangle concepts or play bait-and-switch.
2. Pay attention to your anxiety and the anxiety of others. This points the way to where there are things to be learned. I find it odd that Buster thinks people need to be told this. You’d think the anxiety would speak loud enough.
3. Focus on what life experiences caused you to have the biases you do. Exchange stories to better understand each other. I find this advice very odd too. When it comes to politics, most of what is discussed do not pertain to anything specific that happened to me, but stances on the issues are easy to formulate by being educated on the statistics. For example, I have neither aborted a pregnancy nor been aborted, but that doesn’t stop me from having an opinion.
4. Let people speak for themselves. Hear them out so you know your impression of their position isn’t a straw man. Things can’t be changed from the realm of wishful thinking and willful blindness. This is great advice, but it only works if they will patiently explain their positions to you. So often it happens that I get called a racist or a homophobe for no other reason than not having heard the latest gossip and thus being unconvinced of their conclusions.
5. Cultivate neutral spaces where all are welcome. Invite those of different perspectives again and again. Ban people only as a last resort. That makes sense.
6. Food. Allegedly, eating food together makes people less likely to hate each other. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on me. I am fully capable of hating people I eat with – especially if they chew loudly.
7. Ask better questions. Instead of asking yes/no questions such as: Are ghosts real? Ask what experiences led people to their current beliefs about ghosts? Instead of asking what gun-control measures we might be willing to endure, ask: What is the endgame for the gun-control debate? Ask questions like these: What formative events in your life brought you to this belief? What’s really at stake here? What’s complicated about your position here that people don’t usually notice at first? If what you believe was proven conclusively true to its staunchest opponents, what would happen? What would have to be true for you to change your mind about this? What other possibilities might we be missing that would change how we each thought about this? Imagine a world where this is no longer a problem. How did we get here?
8. Inspire aporia. Looking it up, I find that the word aporia can be either a logical contradiction, or a rhetorical device to get the audience to fill in the answer the way the speaker wishes, but Buster uses it in a third way: the emotion that occurs when one finds out they have been wrong. I love this feeling. It’s the reason I love twist endings in spy novels and science fiction movies that question established physics. When people are motivated by aporia, they will seek out new perspectives and not feel angry at those who disagree with them.

Buster has had a similar story to mine. He was frustrated by unending disagreements and reached out to those he knew to settle them. At first, he got nowhere. He tried meeting for “debates” in a public setting, online, in private groups, and one-on-one. Most people were not interested. Finally, he hit upon hosting a potluck with the promise of “stimulating conversation.” First, everyone ate together. Then they shared life experiences pertinent to the issues. Then they broke into smaller groups to produce solutions to the issues. Then they all met together so that others could poke holes in their solutions. They all left with the impression that things are just too complicated to solve, but that things aren’t that bad anyways. That sounds a lot like the theme of my book, When Nothing Seems To Work.

Since my experience with groups up to that point had been that everyone talks over everyone else, and that a single statement can send multiple people down multiple tangents, it never occurred to me to try anything other than one-on-one. I did not see the possibility of the structured discussion. I had wanted to learn what my acquaintances based their positions on, where they got their information, and how they came to deem them reliable sources. I wanted to submit my ideas so they could find flaws in my reasoning. I wanted to know their underlying values so we could find areas we agreed on and build strategies together from there. Most of all, I wanted to know why the arguments of the other side didn’t work on them. My goal was primarily to learn. When absolutely no one had any time for me, yet continued to spew offensive nonsense at work and online, insulting me for not sharing their ideas, I kind of gave up. Should I try again?

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

Please leave a comment!

If you like this blog, be sure to explore my SubStack ChartingPossibilities, where I post thoughts on science, philosophy, and culture, plus excerpts from my many published books, my YouTube channel WayOutDan, where I post weird stories from my life, my science fiction series ChampionOfTheCosmos, and my xenobiology field guide FloraAndFaunaOfTheUniverse. You can support me by buying my books, or tipping me at BuyMeACoffee.

I recently read The Grace Message by Andrew Farley (2022). It goes farther and makes clearer what I already knew about the core of Christianity, yet most Christians don’t quite get it and most preachers muddy it up with a bunch of rules. Jesus ALONE saves. Our behavior plays no part. Therefore, there is no point in following a set of rules. We are dead to the law.

The book is broken into fifty-two short chapters each beginning with a story of someone with a question or objection to Farley’s message. This makes it very relatable and less abstract. Many Christians are afraid of letting go of the law, less because they are afraid they will fall into sin without it, and more because they think other Christians will. They themselves desire strongly not to do evil, yet assume that preaching rules of right living is the only thing keeping other people from spiraling into evil. Farley responds with what is almost obvious in hindsight: That sinners are quite capable of sinning with or without rules, that believers are new creations with new hearts that make them want to stop sinning, and that when a believer does sin, they soon find they regret it and cannot continue in sin. The purpose of the Law of Moses was never to be followed and achieve salvation; its purpose was only to arouse and thereby expose sin. The law is not for believers, but for unbelievers, to show them their need for a savior. The law was only a shadow of things to come (Colossians 2:17, Hebrews 10:1).

Where Farley goes further is by constantly hammering the points that the work of Jesus was finished once and for all on the cross, where we died with him. We don’t have to keep asking for forgiveness (see Hebrews chapter 9). Our next sin is already forgiven. Jesus foreknew your every sin and died for you anyways, never asking for any effort on your part. We don’t have to keep “dying to self” or be disciplined or sanctified over a lifetime. It’s done. There are only two levels of righteousness: believers and unbelievers. Jesus removed our sins from us, so that we are every bit as righteous as he is. This is both imparted and imputed. The sins we commit are not part of our identities. Thus, your ambitions are not selfish. Your dreams are God-given. The Holy Spirit works through us by giving us new desires. While the Holy Spirit corrects us when we make a mistake, only Satan condemns. God does not want you out of your comfort zone; he is the one who sent the comforter! This is in part how he guides us.

So many churches preach exceptions to rule-free living. Some teach that one must follow the ten commandments, others teach that one must follow the ten commandments plus tithing, and others teach that one must follow only nine of the commandments, the sabbath no longer applying to today. The problem is that nobody follows the whole law, with its rules about inheritance, diet, clothing, lending, and festivals. It’s impossible! The Temple in Jerusalem is no longer operational to take sacrifices! Besides, the law was never given to the gentiles, tithing pertained mostly to oil, grain, and meat, and today’s “priesthood” is allowed to own property and run side hustles so tithing is less necessary.

Farley hypothesizes that the real reason Jesus spoke of cutting off body parts that cause us to sin, of mere thoughts being as bad as murder and adultery, and of breaking one part of the law being as bad as breaking the whole, was to make it overwhelmingly clear that there was no point in trying to live by our own efforts. Many churches take these teachings of Jesus as actual rules to be followed, but then water them down by saying the amputation was metaphorical and making a distinction between willful and unwilful sins. They justify themselves by reinterpreting the rules rather than simply admitting it can never be done without divine intervention.

Churches also play word games to hide what Jesus has actually done for us. They say we have to appropriate the spirit or that we have positional righteousness, but not experiential righteousness. They say that we are saved once and for all and surely going to Heaven, yet we can still lose fellowship with Jesus or find our prayers unheard. None of this is true because Jesus now lives in us and gives us his spirit.

So far, this is powerful stuff – and all true!

Later in the book, Farley tackles some verses that do seen genuinely confusing. He suggests that First John is writing to both believers and unbelievers. He suggests that the warning to “examine ourselves” is about gluttony in Corinth. He suggests that the two judgements of the dead might be the same one from the same seat. He suggests that we might not have different rewards in Heaven. Finally, he suggests that “pick up our cross daily” might not be in the original Gospel, since the earliest manuscripts of Luke lack the word “daily,” as do all manuscripts of Matthew and Mark. It is at this point that I have no way of evaluating the soundness of his ideas except to say that they go against what I was always taught.

Then he goes on to get into stupid arguments of semantics. He says the “flesh” is not the “self,” and that it is the flesh that makes us sin, not our selves, which have the righteousness of Christ and the identity of children of God. He says the first step to stop temptation is to tell yourself that “you” don’t need it, that it isn’t “your” thought, and that temptation isn’t “from” you, though it might “sound like” or “feel like” you.

This is very confusing. Whether we call the part of us from which sin originates the self or the flesh is irrelevant. Will not a rose by any other name smell as sweet? It is certainly part of us in the usual sense, so it is not incorrect to say it is the self. Furthermore, temptations absolutely are “our” thoughts if we are the ones having them! What does it even mean to say a thought we are having isn’t a thought we are having? Who is having it if not us? And how do we know about it without also thinking about it? They are our thoughts by definition. As for where temptation comes “from,” it is hard to say, but we are unaware of it until it emerges in ourselves. When another person whispers in our ear (or uses book or television), we know where the thought came “from,” but when a thought occurs to us out of the blue, doesn’t it make sense to say it came from us BY DEFINITION? It has nothing to do with “feels like” or “sounds like” and everything to do with semantics. The bottom line is it makes no difference from where temptation comes. Resisting it is the same either way.

I finally did it! I finally read Twelve Rules For Life by Doctor Peterson. I was already quite familiar with his thoughts from his podcasts and interviews, so it was hard to read the words with an unbiased mind. I suspect I have read into them more than is there.

One takeaway was that the chapter titles only barely fit the content. Peterson rambles quite a bit from subject to subject, as if he is attempting to put all his knowledge into one book. Another thing I noticed is how the end of one chapter tends to flow nicely into the next, the illustrations between them somehow fitting both themes equally well.

The basic lessons are as follows: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Make friends with people who want the best for you. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Tell the truth – or at least don’t lie. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. Be precise in your speech. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

While I either learned these lessons long ago or else never had the problems in the first place, so I didn’t get a lot out of it, I believe the book can be most helpful to those who are trapped in guilt and low self-esteem. Some people bury their anger instead of dealing with problems because they think it is virtuous to do so. Some people won’t take their medication because they think they don’t deserve to get better. Some people greatly inconvenience themselves to please others, and when the others don’t recognize their efforts enough, they become resentful. Those are the people that need the book.

While I think Peterson has great advice, in some areas I know it will break down. Some people have so much chaos in their lives that they can’t possibly fix it all at once. Peterson says to start small, even as small as cleaning one’s room. As one masters one level, the next will become easier. I know two problems with this plan. First, I know from experience that habits long mastered can suddenly be lost overnight. Learning them again is impossible when they have already been learned. One just has to wait for them to return – which does occasionally happen. Second, if one is to clean up their lives, they must be clean themselves. Otherwise, they will dirty what is clean even while they clean what is dirty. At best, they will move the “dirt” around. Only an outside force can save them. This is precisely why people need Jesus. This is lacking in Peterson’s plan.

Another problem I have is his assumptions about status. He assumes that standing hunched over is a sign that we know we are low status. I can think of many other things it could be, such as being lost in thought. I also have trouble applying the principles to my life since there have been many times I have received mixed signals about my status and there is so much disagreement over values. There have been times I believed the world so arbitrary that concepts like status hierarchies didn’t apply.

I also find his theory on the origins of evil to be lacking. It has three parts:

First, he suggests that human young (like other animals) must probe the limits of their social environment by breaking the rules. This includes violence. Antisocial habits are the default and it takes continual effort to maintain culture-appropriate habits.

Second, he suggests that when early humans became self-conscious, they realized their own vulnerability, especially related to the way we walk upright with our soft parts exposed. This made them anxious and looking for a way to defend themselves (including by pre-emptive strikes on others). Extrapolating, they also understood the vulnerability of others and were capable of directed torture. He relates all this to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit and discovering nakedness.

Third, he suggests that malevolent evil (as opposed to selfish evil) arose as a way of taking revenge on God for the inadequacies of his creation. Since God cannot be reached directly, the vengeful instead attack that which God values, thus making creation even worse. Since in another part of the book Peterson defines God as that which we value above all else, this also means that the vengeful will destroy anything that reminds them of their ideal.

My objections:

First, studies show human young also show altruistic instincts even before they could have learned them, so bad habits being the default cannot be the whole story.

Second, while humans might be more vulnerable than the average animal, there are many vulnerable animals, and all animals have some vulnerability. Why aren’t there other evil animals?

Third, I also do not understand what is hoped to be gained by taking revenge on God (or anyone else), especially if it will end up furthering and adding to the same sort of problems that inspired the malevolence in the first place. If evil is caused by revenge, what causes the drive to revenge? Self-defense and deterrent punishment is understandable, but why hurt another merely because they deserve it?

Other criticisms of mine were later answered, either in the book or in what I heard him say before on YouTube. When attacking the idea of charity because it is often done out of a savior complex, he takes care to warn us not to use his words as an excuse not to help. When speaking of those of high and low status, he acknowledges that there are multiple hierarchies, and those doing poorly in one might do better in another. When telling us to set our house in order before we criticize the world, he is careful to warn us not to use our continuing minor imperfections as an excuse not to act when action is necessary. On YouTube, I often only heard the first half of his thoughts, and I sometimes wish he was clearer.

He also already understands part of the point of my book, When Nothing Seems To Work (which he has never read), the philosophy I call fix-it-later-ism. On page 201, he writes:

“Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly mighty and good.”

The book is full of ideas on a wide variety of subjects that I could not possibly cover in this review. You’ll have to read the book. A couple of the more interesting ones include the idea that the temptation of Jesus in the desert was to avoid setting the precedent of relying too heavily on supernatural means to win. God needed limitations for a story and we needed a relatable savior. Another is his theory of the origins of religious sacrifice. He thinks that trading with others led to trading with one’s future self by storing resources, which led to the idea of “sacrificing” effort and time now for the future to repay. This seems to me like quite the stretch and I wonder why this hypothesis is needed when a simple common sense understanding of object permanence should suffice to explain the origins of work without relating it to religious ideas at all. Why did people start putting animals on altars?

Overall, five stars.

I recently read Don’t Burn This Book by Dave Rubin (2020). I had watched his show, the Rubin Report, quite often, so I already knew a bit of what he thought of current events, but I never found a complete account of his awakening to the truth of what was really going on. How is it possible for a leftist to change? Can it be replicated? How does one become a leftist in the first place? These are questions I have never found good answers to and I hoped this book would shed some light on these issues. It did not.

Another thing he has mentioned on his show that I was led to believe would be explained in the book was his concept of “factory settings.” What this means is that we all have default worldviews (based partly on culture and the dominant media) until new evidence overturns them, but only if we are open-minded. While the term was briefly mentioned in the book, it was never explained and only the most vague examples were given.

One example from the book is that socialists are generous and capitalists are greedy. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, I have never understood why wanting to hold on to your own hard-earned money is greedy, but wanting to take money from someone else isn’t. My “factory settings” are to think of socialists as greedy. How is it possible that others have different settings? This is what I still don’t understand.

One example from his show is “Republicans are for war, Democrats are for peace.” I thought this was a strange example too, since we are the same age and would have grown up during the same events. I grew up thinking that Republicans were the anti-war party. Bill Clinton got us into Bosnia and Kosovo, fired into Iraq in 1998, and bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan, and at every step the GOP claimed we had no legitimate national security interest to be involved. They cast Clinton as a warmonger. Who thinks Democrats are the party of peace?

Related to both of these issues is the idea that the “mainstream media” is anti-conservative. This is something that almost every conservative says often. It is an unfortunate term, because it occludes the truth: The “mainstream” media isn’t mainstream anymore and hasn’t been for decades. Hardly anyone watches antenna television. It was replaced by cable and cable is currently being replaced by decentralized platforms across the internet. Even as CNN and MSNBC have embraced insanity, FOX has been by far the largest cable news outlet in terms of viewers. There are claims that YouTube censors content, and that might be true, but I have always had a harder time finding pro-Democrat channels than pro-Republican channels. Ben Shapiro is everywhere. Then there are claims that entertainment media pushes leftist ideas on us, and there are a few examples of this, but the reason that we talk about them is because they stand out so clearly against the backdrop of a pro-conservative storyline. If conservatism is nothing more than common sense truth and leftism is incoherent, self-contradictory garbage (exactly how conservative thinkers present it), then it is clear that conservatism dominates media, since most plots make sense.

Another issue I have with Rubin (and most of those he interviews) is his use of the terms “liberal,” “leftist,” and “conservative.” Something I’ve observed in life is that such words have no agreed upon meaning. For example, conservatives tell me it is liberals that are racist, while liberals tell me it is conservatives that are racist. However, I believed there was a rough consensus that whatever “liberal” meant, it was the same thing as “leftist” and “progressive” (whatever those mean). Today, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Dennis Prager, and others call leftist what I used to call liberal, and call liberal what I used to call moderate, pragmatic conservativism, separating it from the barely-distinguishable idealist conservativism. Sometimes Rubin will also call himself a “classical liberal,” a term that is difficult to apply to today’s world and one that conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh also once claimed for himself. “Leftism” as Rubin defines it is not new. The average Democrat has been leftist (and not at all liberal) since before I was born. The terminology used on the show is very different than what I grew up with. It’s all very confusing.

Another issue I have with Rubin is his belief that most people are not leftists, but are holding back their voices out of fear. Repeat guest Jordan Peterson says the same. This has not been my experience. I see no shortage of anti-leftist sentiment being expressed. For every woke SJW, there are ten red-pilled meme lords to mock them. The truth is everywhere. You can’t avoid it if you try. If people are still blinded by leftist lies it is only because they choose to be. They are without excuse.

So far, I have been reviewing the Rubin Report rather than Don’t Burn This Book. So what is Don’t Burn This Book about?

The book quickly runs over Rubin’s opinions on the big issues, such as abortion and guns. His opinions are very moderate and commonsense. Where I disagree with him is mostly because I think he has oversimplified things, rather than him being totally wrong.

The book also briefly covers a few of the major hoaxes to make it into the news, such as Russian collusion, the Covington kid, and Jussie Smollett. You can’t trust the news.

The book also gives some life advice, such as: Get news from multiple sources. Look up the original sources. Read books rather than blogs. Think critically. Get the full context of quotes. Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know something. Dress like the person you want to be. Religious stories give societies cohesion. Most people need to have children to feel fulfilled. Laugh often. You can change the world, but change yourself first. Live unapologetically without compromise; be all you can be. Speak out. If the news outlet always supports one side over the other, it’s probably propaganda.

Finally, he ends with the thought: “The only way to combat this crisis is to get on with our lives as if there isn’t one.” Considering the left’s eagerness to use violence and the court system’s eagerness to violate the law, I am very skeptical that “getting on with our lives” will be allowed, but I’ll concede that attempting to do so might be the least bad option. Let’s hope he’s right, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I recently read Jesus Freak by Sandy Holly (2017). It is a memoir of her time living in a heavily-Mormon neighborhood in Utah and how she came to take her Christian faith more seriously. She doesn’t explicitly say it, but reading between the lines I gather that the combination of being surrounded by lost souls desperately trying to live up to an unattainable standard and being manipulated by the priesthood, being judged for her freedom in Christ in the way she lived, being surrounded by people who didn’t like crosses, being reminded of her childlessness by a culture that highly valued large families, and her discovery of new forms of worship music at the Methodist church 20 miles away all conspired to drive her deeper into the arms of Jesus.

The second half of the book really shows her bubbly personality as she gets excited about everything. You can almost feel the love in the pages. You can tell that God has done much for her. It starts on page one hundred when she meets the Mormon missionaries and explains that we must wait on the Holy Spirit’s leading and not do things merely because we are expected to. Some doors are not safe to knock on. Some strangers are not receptive to the Gospel. She also goes on to explain that we don’t need to perform because we have already been rescued by Jesus and that cleaning out our old emotional baggage isn’t just relieving; it also makes more room for more Jesus! Everything is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, but what else would one expect from a Jesus freak?

The first half of the book is less interesting. I also wondered at times whether she was imagining persecution where there was none. She always thought she was being judged for her bare shoulders, her cross jewelry, and her coffee pots, but I never saw a clear example. However, just because she can’t remember one good example doesn’t mean there aren’t ten more half-remembered examples that can’t all be pure imagination. I’ve got the same problem with some of my writings. I also thought she was taking it completely the wrong way when she heard a religious joke I thought was pretty funny.

I learned much I did not know before. I always thought Mormons were basically Christian, in that they believed Jesus was God made flesh who rescued them from sins, but added a lot of stuff most Christians would think weird, such as prohibition of coffee, post-death baptism, people becoming Gods, and magic underwear. I was extremely surprised to find that they were offended by Easter and the cross, and had their own version of the Bible in addition to the Book of Mormon, with many books rewritten. This makes them sound distinctly non-Christian. I don’t know what to think now.

I was also intrigued by her déjà vu theory. She proposes that when we see a familiar person or place that we should not remember, that this is actually us recognizing Jesus in them. I wonder if this is what Bush saw when he looked in Putin’s eyes. I’m not convinced.

It’s a quick, light read if you like uplifting memoirs of spiritual growth.

I recently read Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll (2019). The book hints at an ambitious undertaking to examine some profound ideas, including the derivation of space, time, and gravity from a proper understanding of quantum mechanics, but on this point it falls short. I suspect the real reason for the book is to lay out the case for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. On this point, it succeeds brilliantly. I’ve always thought Everett’s approach to QM was the most intuitive and this book makes the clearest argument for it yet.

Some say that the many-worlds approach breaks Occam’s razor by positing millions of additional, parallel universes that can never be detected, but the reverse is closer to the truth. Other interpretations of QM need to posit additional, so far unseen mechanisms to “collapse” the wave function. Some believe it random. Others believe consciousness plays a role. After observation, what happens to the other parts of the wave? Many-worlds assumes only that the wave that once existed continues to exist even when parts of it no longer interact. The idea is that you and your instruments observe a particle in the quantum state you do because the part of the particle’s wave function in that state is entangled with your own, while the part of the particle’s wave function in other states are entangled with the other parts of your wave function.

Once this is thoroughly explained, Carrol moves on to speculate chaotically about where gravity might come from and be made compatible with QM. He mentions the idea that space could be emergent from an abstract sort of space where objects of similar values interact stronger than objects of dissimilar values. This would be indistinguishable from how we experience space. He subtly hints that the wave function of the universe has broken its symmetry, allowing “position” to exhibit locality in this way, but not “momentum.” These two attributes might actually be fundamentally the same, but momenta have lost their ability to interact when holding similar values. The problem is that he proposes no mechanism for this to happen, gives no reason why we have three dimensions of space, and gives no reason why this approach would be more insightful than simply assuming space as foundational.

Carrol mentions Ted Jacobson’s 1995 paper suggesting that the entropy of a region is proportional to the interactions it has with other regions (and therefore surface area), and therefore reducing entropy might reduce surface area, warping space not unlike gravity. The problem with this is that gravitational collapse actually represents an increase in entropy.

He mentions Stephen Hawking’s work and that of his successors suggesting that a black hole’s information is encoded on its event horizon, meaning that the information of a three-dimensional volume can be stored on a two-dimensional surface. The problem is that there is still a lot of debate about this.

He mentions conformal field theory and the proof that a quantum field operating in a five-dimensional spacetime with a negative cosmological constant is mathematically equivalent to a quantum field operating on the four-dimensional surface of such a spacetime. The problem is that our universe has a positive constant and only four dimensions that need to be representable by three, not five.

Finally, he points out that the more degrees of freedom a system has, the more entropy it has, and therefore the more energy it has, and therefore the more gravity it has (m=e/c^2). Because gravity does something weird to collapse three dimensions into two, the degrees of freedom of a volume of space is limited at the Plank energy. The implications are that Hilbert space is not infinite (though still enormous), and that there is a limit on how many “worlds” can exist in the wave function simultaneously. This is the same reason I have heard elsewhere for why the vacuum energy is not infinite.

He never did explain where gravity came from.

My main criticism is that too often he would take up to ten pages explaining the same simple concept over and over when I got it the first time, and then suddenly cover twenty steps in half a paragraph. It was jarring. I simultaneously felt really smart and really dumb.

My takeaway observation is that this book confirms what I have heard elsewhere of big-name scientists over the generations accusing each other of fuzzy thinking and conceptual errors when it comes to QM. It gives me hope that my ideas might be just as valid even though I’ve never had to compute an eigenvector in my life. If the scientists can’t support their models and they get attention anyways, why not me?

Four stars.

I recently read the 2020 book Jesus Politics by Phil Robertson. I like Phil. I’ve seen his various shows a little bit. He has really made something out of himself by hard work. He remains connected to nature. He speaks firmly the truth about sin and redemption, but does it in love. He is not afraid to take on the leftist activists who are always stirring up trouble. I saw through the lies people told about him years ago. That is why I found his book so disappointing. It seems like he is falling into some of the stereotypes.

Before I bought it, I somehow thought the book’s message was going to be one of giving up on looking to politicians to solve our problems and instead putting our energy into spreading the gospel. Instead, it is the opposite. Phil apparently thinks we haven’t been putting enough energy into getting the right people elected, and through negligence have allowed Godless politicians to take over.

There is much we agree on. We are both pro-life. We understand that the root of violence is not guns, but hate, and that broken families feed into this. We do not elevate nature over human needs. We are both skeptical of government-run health care. We are both sick and tired of the hateful attacks on public figures when some minor mistake they made twenty years ago is brought to light. We agree that we need to act with more mercy and teach truth gently. He rightly sees that in order to better society and spread the love of God, Christians must be free to speak about their faith and free to spend their own money to help others. By extension, we both believe in free speech and capitalism.

Where I have trouble is the sloppy thinking around what he thinks are the solutions. I am fully against any government-created obstacles that would hamper the advancement of the Kingdom, but I see an important difference between a government that allows advancement, and one that would attempt to aid such an advancement. You can’t legislate morality. Threatening people with state punishment for sins will not make them better people inside, even if they act better on the outside. It will also create resentment, which can lead to retaliation and even more sin. Depending on just what it is we are talking about, it might create an underground black market for sin. Finally, giving the government so much power to regulate our lives creates the risk that it will be used to encourage sin and punish righteousness when the sinners win in the next election cycle. Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.

Throughout the book, it is never clear whether he is talking about a government that allows advancement, or one that aids. He cites some examples of leftist overreach, where government was used against the Kingdom, such as the time a Christian baker was forced to make gay wedding cakes or lose his business, the time a Christian foster care organization was forced to recommend gay couples, and the time that a school was forced to remove from display a copy of the Ten Commandments that a previous graduating class had gifted to the school. On these, I am with him totally that we must put a stop to such injustice, but then he goes on to say stuff like this:

Speaking of Jesus, he says, “he asked us to bring the Kingdom into the world around us through every means possible, including, if possible, political means.” Do we bring forth the Kingdom or does God do it, drawing all men unto himself when we show Jesus? Are we to bring forth the Kingdom by sinful means? What does it mean to “render unto Caesar”?

He says that Godless politicians removed God from public schools. In some cases, they tried, but in most cases, they merely stopped inappropriately bringing him into it. Just as you would never go to a dentist to buy flower seeds, you wouldn’t go to a school to learn about God. That’s what churches are for. Schools are for math, science, and geography. The real problem is that there is no way that we could bring God into the schools that would be acceptable by Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and everyone else in the community. We shouldn’t be so arrogant to think we have the only correct model.

He says we should vote for politicians that will “promote policies designed to strengthen families.” Strengthen families? Or get out of the way and stop breaking families up? Families should never be allowed to become dependent on the government.

He says, “through politics the government liberalized sexuality, removing it from the confines of marriage.” Did government do that? Or did individual sinners do that while government did nothing to stop it? There is a big difference. He talks a lot about how no-fault divorce made our culture worse, but which is worse? A modern divorce? Or a spouse who commits abuse or adultery first in order to have grounds for a divorce they wanted anyways? Keeping people trapped in marriages does not make them better people. Only Jesus can make them better people.

I bought the book hoping for JESUS politics; what I got was Jesus POLITICS.

I recently read The Sun Is Still Rising (2018) by Scott W. Rasmussen. The basic premise is that voting will not fix our problems, but community can.

Politics doesn’t work. Politicians are too spineless to act when there is a divided electorate and the regulatory bureaucrats that actually run things are unelected. This is a driving force in the rise of partisan conflict, as a quote from page 66 makes clear:

“Partisanship doesn’t matter so much when the formal government is a distant abstraction and we are generally free to live our lives as we see fit. It matters a lot when the change of government from one party to the other impacts our day-to-day life. It matters even more when nothing can be done to prevent the bureaucrats from imposing their own hand-book for redemption. The more that government assumes sole responsibility for governing, the more polarization will increase.”

The lessons of the book are that the public sector can be just as greedy as the private sector and that the private sector also regulates (governs) society through a network of clubs, businesses, and informal relationships. Rasmussen believes that the culture of America is basically good and that politics flows from culture. He has great hope that the politicians will eventually follow the changing attitudes of the people, but in the meantime we must solve our problems without government aid.

What are these problems and what are the solutions? It is never fully spelled out. Rasmussen hints that the poor can find food, shelter, and jobs through the actions of businesses, charities, new technology, and simply by being more connected and fostering community. He also mentions that the increased ability to move our home address creates competition between states for our business. Beyond this, there are only platitudes and vague assurances.

Of all the problems I care about and that make the news, ninety percent of them necessarily involve the government because the problem is that government won’t allow the private sector to do what needs to be done. Unless we get the government fixed first, there will never be any community solutions.

Furthermore, I don’t have the faith in the citizenry that Rasmussen has. I agree that politics flows from culture. That’s why I think our problems are only going to get worse. There are millions of people that demand it.

I also find it borderline comical how at his late stage in life he seems to have suddenly discovered what libertarians have known all along and he thinks it is something new. Of course the public sector is greedy! That’s why it was created. Of course the private sector regulates society! That’s called the invisible hand of the free market. The whole book reads like its author is an 18-year-old that has just discovered politics and thinks he knows everything. It’s not necessarily wrong, but there is no depth of insight. Even though women do it too, some would call it mansplaining.

Of all the chapters, chapter 11 was the most irksome, so I feel like I have to single it out for special criticism. It was a sloppy mess that only muddied the water around the conversation over states’ rights and the trouble with Trump. It was borderline dishonest.

Though I understand the terminology is problematic, there is a such thing as states’ rights and it has next to nothing to do with racism or slavery. The concept has been invoked in debates over gay marriage, abortion, immigration, the drawing of voting districts, the electoral college, prohibition, health insurance, taxes, and education. Just because at one point in history there were some that attempted to use the argument to protect slavery doesn’t mean we should do away with the term any more than we should ban cars worldwide because one guy once rode over a dog.

The idea that modern blacks distrust rolling back federal power because they think it means an increase in state power and they don’t trust the states not to revert to racism without federal checks is silly. The federal government is the sum of the people from all the states. They are no more trustworthy. Furthermore, the idea that blacks dislike Trump because he wanted to reign in federal power clashes both with the facts that blacks supported Trump more than any Republican since the sixties, and that Trump in some small ways wanted to increase federal power, even while shrinking it in other ways that would be beneficial to blacks (and everyone else).

The words in this book fed into the narrative the Democrats have been pushing that Trump is racist, without clearly saying it one way or the other. It’s irresponsible.

It’s not a bad book overall; it’s just disappointing.

I recently read The Rational Optimist (2010) by Matt Ridley. What Ridley is so optimistic about is capitalism, while he still finds plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about other trends, such as overregulation by big government.

A quote from page twenty-one sums up the theme of the book:

“…ask how long you would have to work to earn an hour of reading light – say, the light of an 18-watt compact-fluorescent light bulb burning for an hour. Today it will have cost you less than half a second of your working time if you are on the average wage…in 1950…you would have had to work for eight seconds to get the same amount of light. Had you been using a kerosene lamp in the 1880s, you would have had to work for fifteen minutes to get the same amount of light. A tallow candle in the 1800s: over six hours’ work. And to get that much light from a sesame-oil lamp in Babylon in 1750 BC would have cost you more than fifty hours of work…”

The first half of the book is history from the time our lineage split off from the great apes. Apes might sometimes trade when taught, but only by giving away something they do not value for something they do, not by giving away something of value for something more valuable. Even our closest relatives, the now-extinct Neanderthals, appear to have traded very little and only used materials from nearby, whereas humans from the same time period were passing goods from tribe to tribe along trade routes hundreds of miles long.

According to Ricardo’s law of economics, so long as one can more efficiently trade one resource for another than make it oneself, trade will be advantageous, even if the ones harvesting the second resource cannot do so as efficiently. Thus, Portugal was happy to trade wine for English cloth, even though Portugal could make cloth more efficiently than England, because Portugal could make wine more efficiently still. Since trade that is free only occurs when all parties agree that they are better off after trading, free trade is always good.

Over the centuries, growing markets made reforms possible that bettered everyone’s lives. Repeat business on an everyday basis conditioned people to become fairer, eroded the advantage of theft and drove down crime, conditioned people to learn to risk trusting strangers (raising our oxytocin levels), provided the excess wealth and free time to make charities and advocacy possible, provided the incentive to invent and produce new technologies, and made cities and agriculture possible. Ridley briefly covers some rival theories about the origins of trade, cities, and agriculture before rejecting them in favor of his own.

Ridley also explains why for so many millennia progress was so slow. There were three enemies of progress: isolation, birthrates, and greed:

Some societies, such as those in Australia, became fragmented into small units with little contact with each other. Having to rely on their own experts to make the technologies they needed, there was a gradual loss of knowledge over time as masters sometimes died before they had taken an apprentice.

For most of human history, when there were surpluses of food and other resources, we simply made more humans. Family sizes increased until the land could no longer support the exploding population. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, this is no longer true. Instead, living standards are rising while family sizes are getting smaller. The world population is expected to peak at nine billion before plateauing.

Wherever there is wealth, there are thieves and con men. The most successful of thieves are governments which tax, rent-seek, and support monopolies. It is during times of centralized, unified government that living standards and technological progress stagnate. It is during times of geopolitical instability that these things flourish. Examples are given from Europe and China over the last thousand years.

The bottom line is that capitalism is good and will continue to be good into the foreseeable future. It has already ended slavery and animal labor as we have learned to make use of alternative energy sources. It has already lifted most societies out of poverty.

On the other hand, attempts to rein capitalism in over environmental concerns are misguided at best. The claim is made that organic food is worse for the environment because it requires more acreage to produce the same amount of useable crop; it is fertilizer that has saved us from a Malthusian fate. The claim is made that concentrating people in cities supported by specialized farms is a more efficient use of land than spreading people out the way we used to live. The claim is made that “renewables” are especially destructive, and that most “green” initiatives are very much anti-green.

A quote from page 239 and 240 sums it up:

“Wind turbines require five to ten times as much concrete and steel per watt as nuclear power plants…Hundreds of orang-utans are killed a year because they get in the way of oil-palm bio-fuel plantations…Not even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that – in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat – it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rainforests to grow palm oil, or give up food crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime…”

Finally, Ridley wraps it up by reporting on the state of pessimism. Every generation since Plato has thought that the world was getting worse, yet polls show most people are optimistic about their own lives. This is similar to a phenomenon I have noticed among churched people: They are so keen on encouraging each other to have faith that our prayers will be answered on a personal level, yet are convinced in their interpretation of prophecy that the world is going to get worse and worse and worse until Jesus returns. I don’t understand it. The state of the world is merely the sum of states of the individuals living in it.

Another line of thought I found interesting was when Ridley was discussing how ideas beget ideas when inventing new technologies. It might not merely be a function of need and the limitations of physics. There might be some sort of metaphysical structure to “ideaspace” that guides technological development. That’s something to wonder about.

Ten Global Trends by Marian Tupy and Ronald Bailey is a collection of graphs with short commentaries on each. The world is getting better, not worse, is the basic premise. We are more efficient at using natural resources than ever, we are richer than ever, and the birth rate is dropping fast enough that we will likely never reach ten billion. Democracy is on the rise, wars are smaller and fewer, and the internet is educating billions. Tree cover is increasing globally and only in South America is it decreasing. While property damage from natural disasters are increasing (largely because of where people are choosing to build), deaths from natural disasters are down. While the total number of people living in slums has increased (due to increased urbanization), the percentage of city dwellers in slums has dropped. Literacy and communications technology are on the rise. The average workplace is sixty times safer than it was in 1910. Every doom-and-gloom prediction of last century has failed to pass.

The book was basically good, but slightly disappointing. Not all the graphs were explained well. Deaths from cancer are down, but is this because it is being diagnosed sooner, meaning people are living longer with it known to be there? This was never explained. Are less people dying in general? Are they living longer? What is killing people if not cancer? I had heard that heart attacks and strokes used to kill a lot of people in their 50s and 60s, but because of medical intervention such as defibrillation, more people are living long enough to get cancer, making it the new number one killer, meaning the rate was up. Is this true? The data lacks context.

Some graphs covered too short a time period to extract a meaningful trend. For example, the number of smokers went from 25% to 20% during the period 1980-2020. Death by homicide went from 6.5 per 100,000 to 5.1 per 100,000 during the period 1990-2015 – although there was a big jump in the middle to 7.5. Child labor is down twenty percent since 2000.

Some trends claimed as good were questionable, such as increased urbanization and decreased trade protectionism. While much good is associated with both, so is much bad and the jury is still out on whether good or bad dominates. Also, while I believe increased internet use is generally a force for good, it also increases risks of dependency and privacy violations. These things are very complicated.

Some trends are framed in such a way to sound better than they are. For example, while military expenditures are up, as a fraction of GDP they are actually down. A better way of saying this is that most countries are finally rich enough to spend money on something other than the military. That doesn’t mean we aren’t still on the brink of world war.

I was also surprised to see that economic inequality was decreasing globally. I had always heard it was increasing. I never saw this as a very big problem so long as the poor were steadily getting richer too (which they are), but I had thought it was agreed by everyone to be increasing. It’s even part of the extended Kuznets curve. The graph was poorly explained, so I can only guess that there is a stronger income clustering of most people (2000-2010) even while the tiny number of super rich have become proportionally richer. Is this true?

Overall, the book does provide some food for thought and helps counter the claims of the alarmists, especially when it comes to things such as resource depletion. On balance, the world is doing quite well.

Move! written by practicing pastor Tim Hatch is his appeal to Christians to never stop growing spiritually. The overall tone is encouraging rather than admonishing. He models what it means to stay positive, to be always wanting more of God in our life, and to take risks when necessary.

What I like about the book is that unlike many authors of spiritual subjects, he does not shy away from the complexities and exceptions:

After telling us to be positive throughout chapter three, he admits near the end that this is very difficult and we are bound to fail (after 36.5 hours, by his estimation). Then he explains that God is so patient and so powerful, that even when we turn negative, there are still mercies poured upon us. That knowledge alone can keep some people positive just a little longer.

At the end of chapter five, he tells a story from the life of Corrie Ten Boom, to illustrate how even when we don’t feel up to some challenge, God can still come through for us at the last minute. Whatever weaknesses or sins we might be struggling with will not stop God from acting at the appropriate time. Nothing can stop that. The bottom line is that there is nothing holding us back and no reason not to move forward into our calling.

One part I was not entirely sure how to apply to my life was the idea to look for opportunities rather than follow dreams. Sometimes the opportunities are many, yet just out of reach, and the dreams are themselves an opportunity of the same kind. My life is messy and complicated. Some things you just have to figure out yourself.

Hatch also has a YouTube Channel and Podcast.

I read Freedom, The End of The Human Condition, by Jeremy Griffith. I had been looking for a better model of the relationship between good and evil and an explanation of where evil comes from when I saw the book advertised. Since the PDF version was free, I got it. I quickly discovered that the writing style made it almost impossible to wade through and that the author was absurdly megalomaniacal, but I knew that even fools sometimes have good ideas because they think outside the box. Reading a bit further, I found that he actually did have a plausible hypothesis of human behavior after all, so I kept reading. The core of his thesis very well might have immense value. By the time I was halfway through and had gleaned all the insights I could, I kept reading out of morbid curiosity. I seriously think the guy is losing his mind.

The writing style is incredibly annoying and often a detriment to understanding. Nearly every paragraph is filled with stressed words. He uses bold, italics, capitalization, and underlining even when there’s no reason for them. How am I supposed to pay attention to anything when I’m supposed to pay attention to everything? There are numerous parenthetical statements breaking up sentences. He uses every word in the thesaurus at once in long hyphenated chains of synonymous words. He repeats entire paragraphs in every chapter, sometimes more than once per chapter, such that the book is three times longer than it needs to be (597 pages). Instead of saying things in different ways from different perspectives until the reader can understand one of them and thereby understand the others, he repeats the same vague idea over and over and over the same way as the first time. He also repeats quotes from other authors very many times and he reuses the same graphics over and over. He also jumps around a lot instead of following a linear argument. It’s exhausting. I can’t imagine anyone else finishing the book. Fortunately, I read it so you don’t have to. I should be given a medal.

The guy comes across as completely nuts. He has the incredibly narrow idea of reality that a six-year-old who has never seen the world might. He thinks that of all the centuries of music ever made, only the 1960s had special music that captured the true yearning of the soul. He seems to think it is universal across all individuals and cultures that 21 is the age that people are considered fully adjusted to society. The guy sees vibrant emotion in cave paintings and in his own terrible scribbles, going on and on about how well they capture some aspect of reality. I don’t see it. Not one of the pictures was helpful to illuminate the text. They are distractions. They only made me legitimately wonder whether he is going senile and how it is that his editor (which he mentions by name, so I know he has one) let all this slip through.

He tries to explain too much with his theories, claiming too much of human behavior as the result of psychosis. The reason we pursue materialism? To feed our egos and make us feel better about ourselves. The reason we tell stories and create art? To distract ourselves from our guilt. The reason we developed language? To justify our actions to others. The reason science is reductionist? To avoid looking at the whole of nature and feeling convicted by its perfection and our imperfection. The reason we chop and burn wood? To attack nature for being innocent and thereby exposing our guilt. The reason we hunt? To attack nature for the same reason. The reason we wear sunglasses? To block out nature and protect our egos. The reason rich people attack the poor and start colonial empires? Jealousy that the poor are relatively less corrupted and more connected to nature. The reason poor people attack the rich and engage in terrorism? Jealousy of the material wealth of the rich hurting their egos. The reason parents punish children, men dominate women, and the Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice? Also jealousy. The reason we swear, make jokes, and wear ritual masks? This is not to protect our egos, but is actually our true selves leaking through the façade. The reason we get tattoos? Because when the world around you is ugly, why not give in and become ugly yourself? Hasn’t he ever heard that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?

He wonders whether a certain tribe of ancient cave artists never drew faces because they were already so alienated from their true selves by that point in history that they could not stand to look at themselves. The problem is that according to his theory, we are even more self-alienated now and yet we draw faces. He then tells the story of how he suggested this to a tour group and they “shuddered” and “made choking sounds” because he was too close to the truth. I think it is obvious even to those of us that weren’t there that he was being laughed at and didn’t even realize it.

What stands out most of all is his paranoia, deflection, and double-standards. Using the term “affiliative” to describe primate behaviors he calls evasive and dishonest, but then he uses the term “friendly-cohesive-social-loving-integrative.” Calling consciousness “the ability to think abstractly” he calls evasive and dishonest, but then he goes on to describe consciousness as nothing more than the ability to remember, compare strategies with results, and plan ahead. Of course, if you have any difficulty in understanding what he writes, he says it’s not because he is a bad writer, or because he is writing nonsense, but because you are suffering from “the deaf effect,” meaning you are in denial because you don’t want to understand and therefore have to confront your own corrupted soul. He goes on about how special he is to have alone made such a grand insight in a world of people running away from truth, while at the same time denying being egotistical by claiming that if he was egotistical he couldn’t have made such an insight.

However, once I was able to get through his abrasive delivery to the meat of his arguments, I saw that there might be something there – just not as much as he seems to think there is:

World Transformation:

According to Mr. Griffith, all our troubles are the result of our conscious mind fighting with our instincts. This is because the nerve-based conscious mind learns by doing and our instincts come from genes, which have “learned” by trial and error over many generations. Being conscious is a “good” thing, but it leaves us feeling condemned by our cooperative, selfless, altruistic instincts when we behave competitively and selfishly. We might not always know why we violated our instincts, yet we somehow know that we are good anyways or else we would kill ourselves. Thus, a child might take all the cake and then lie by saying “it fell into my lap,” because even a lie like that is closer to the truth than the partial truth “I am bad.”

I know from personal experience that I have many times felt bad about something I did (or didn’t do that I maybe should have), only to analyze my memory of what happened and realized there was no way I could have done anything differently at the time. Juggling all the sensory inputs and making decisions is difficult when there are so many distractions. So far, I think he might be on to something.

Once we feel condemned by our own instincts and by those around us, our conscious mind also condemns us by noting we are not following the pattern of nature to fit into an ordered whole. People react to this stress differently. Some lash out in anger. Some pursue means of stoking the ego to make them feel better about themselves, leading to selfish and competitive behaviors. Some of these behaviors make them feel worse, leading to vicious cycles. Some become addicted to drugs or commit suicide, while others become addicted to power over others and commit genocide. Some deny the truth, and once one begins to lie to themselves, there is no telling how far the delusion will spread. Even facts that indirectly remind us of the moral code are covered up and rejected in favor of lies. This also tends to lead to more stress and more condemnation.

This also makes sense. Much of the ideas he claims most of the world is in denial of are actually common and non-controversial. For example, the idea that hurt people hurt people is an internet meme. The idea that those who have never seen love modeled are unable to give it is related to the old idea that criminals are “victims of society,” and to the “refrigerator mother” hypothesis of autism. The idea that we are fundamentally good and only conditioned to be bad was espoused by Rousseau two hundred years ago. Modern psychology has discovered that even very young children try to be helpful without ever having been taught. Most people would agree with all these ideas. All people would agree with most of these ideas. They might quibble over the details, but not much is fundamentally new here. What is new is tying them all together into a single narrative attempting to explain the entire human condition.

He further claims that everyone goes through the same life development stages as it pertains to the problem of knowing evil. First, they live carefree without rules. Then they try hard and fail to live up to the rules, making them grumpy. Then they become resigned to their fate, making them grumpier. In the third stage, everyone is in denial and cut off from their instinctual selves. This isn’t very controversial either. It is very similar to Kierkegaard’s model. What it lacks is the saving grace of Jesus.

Going on, once the first generation of humans ever to become conscious alienated themselves from their own instincts and from each other, they passed on the affliction in various ways, compounding the problem. Angry, sad, ego-distracted, or otherwise preoccupied mothers could not give their infants the level of attention and true care the infants’ instincts expected, and they grew up into angry, sad, ego-distracted adults. Angry fathers inappropriately disciplined their children, failing to recognize when children were trying to be helpful, or when they had been poorly educated in social norms, causing the children to resist learning and disrespect authority. Parents got the idea that children need to be “toughened up” to face the harsh world, but this form of parenting only created children who grew up to make the world even harsher. Over the past two million years, the level of denial and upset has grown. Living in cities surrounded by other people exposed us to the badness of others. Due to the level of clustering, different cultures aged at different rates. Thus, Indians and Chinese are more upset and wise in the ways of the world than Europeans, who are more upset/wise than the Aborigines and Bushmen. To succeed, a society must not be too cooperative or too uncooperative. It must not be too trusting or too cynical. This is why Europeans took over the world, but now that the world is so connected, the Asians are winning.

This is all certainly very plausible, but the book cites no evidence and there are many ways that culture could have evolved differently and many other plausible explanations out there for every phenomenon he mentions. I remain skeptical.

Anyways, he says that to solve this problem we must have self-understanding. To simply go back to obeying our selfless instincts without ever knowing why we sometimes don’t obey will leave us in a state of insecurity and perpetuate the problem. We must know for certain that we are not bad creatures. We must know that it is our consciousness clashing with our instincts that gives the illusion of badness. We must know that we have been heroes for going on with life while suffering from psychosis. We must understand that everyone is equally good.

This also makes some sense. In Christianity, we are told that God loves us, that we have value and are made “in the image of God,” that our sins are forgiven, and that we are to forgive ourselves and forgive others, but I know from experience that judgment cannot simply be suspended when wrong is done. Depression/anger accumulates until a convincing argument can be made that bad isn’t bad. We must understand where sin comes from and the Eden story doesn’t really explain much. Wouldn’t Eve have to sin first to eat the fruit before sin entered the world through the fruit? I have my own ideas about this that will be in a future book that I think are superior, but in the meantime Jeremy’s ideas are better than nothing.

Jeremy describes the violation of our instincts as the search for self-knowledge, which I’m guessing is roughly equivalent to the knowledge of good and evil, which can only be grasped by a conscious mind. Thus, we are helping others understand themselves when we introduce them to evil. It is a good thing to abuse children – or at least some good can come of it. I’m not suggesting we go out of our way to commit more abuse or that we stop punishing abusers, but it might be helpful after the fact for those who have lived through it to find the good and see it as a necessary step in our development as a species. The issue touches on one of the common explanations given for why God allows evil in the world: Without the experience of evil, we would never truly know good.

The explanation of human behavior doesn’t even have to be strictly true to bring healing. It only has to be true enough. This is the idea of psychoanalysis: Childhood memories are dredged up that might be misremembered or even “suggested” by the psychiatrist, but we are who we are and do what we do because of the imprints we have from the past, not the past itself. So long as it works and the explanation is plausible, it doesn’t have to be true. Depending on how they are applied, Jeremy’s ideas could be used for good even if he can’t prove them.

I’ve noticed that forgiveness is easier when I understand what the wrongdoer was going through and what they were trying to accomplish. Sometimes people are going through stressful times and desperately need to get away, so they clumsily lash out at those annoying them. Even if it isn’t the real reason, it’s better than nothing. It provides a platform to build a new, stronger relationship on top. It lets us know that we are cared about enough to be forgiven.

Further Thoughts:

I was familiar with jealousy, but the idea of attacking someone because their mere existence showed it was possible to be less corrupt than the attacker was a new concept to me. It might explain some of the unexplainable evil I have been seeing…except of course that it explains it without explaining. How is it possible to be in such a corrupted state of mind in the first place? I can’t imagine it.

While his paradigm might have some value, he seems to be of the impression that merely reading his book will cure everyone. Somehow the instinct-versus-intellect claim itself is supposed to solve all the world’s problems. How? He makes a big deal about his model being “scientific” and therefore superior to religious explanations, but I don’t think most people could distinguish between the two.

Jeremy also gives no standard by which to measure good and evil. In his model, both the instincts and the intellect are “good,” yet they conflict with each other. This is a paradox. It is also “good” to align ourselves with the moral order of the universe and group ourselves into ever-larger wholes, yet animals behave selfishly and they are not considered bad. Also, competition can often be a good thing (as in sports) and cooperating with a villain to hurt others isn’t being very cooperative. Morality is complex, but Jeremy simply skips over it, keeping things very vague.

It is still not clear to me why it is our conscious minds violate our instincts. Do instincts guide us or only condemn us after the fact? As an adult, I am warned before I make a choice, but that might be my experienced intellect talking. Is it possible that baby Dan had no warnings? If baby Dan made an innocent mistake, why would he feel condemned rather than merely educated? Since I do not remember those times, and child psychology is such an unsettled field, I have no way of evaluating these ideas. I have some ideas of my own, that might be compatible with Jeremy’s, but because he gives so few examples (over and over and over), I am not sure I understand his model at all.

The Moral Order of The Universe:

Though he does not believe in a literal deity, Griffith believes in a moral pattern in nature. He claims it is obvious that matter is arranged in ordered wholes and that the parts behave selflessly to preserve the collective. Because other matter does this, so should humans.

Later in the book, he paints a more complex (and therefore less obvious) picture. Molecules can only grow so large before becoming unstable, no longer “cooperating.” However, a self-replicating molecule like DNA is able to organize the matter around it to make even larger structures. However, genes are necessarily competitive and therefore so are organisms. However, cells of the body and workers in an ant colony can be selfless because competition happens at the level of reproduction.

Because there are so many examples of competition in the world, there is no reason that it would be obvious to ancient humans that they were supposed to cooperate. I’m not sure I understand the “ordered wholes” concept anyways. Isn’t the current selfish arrangement of humans itself an ordered whole? Are some ways of ordering better than others? Who decides? Is the solar system an example of cooperation between planets to make an ordered whole? Or the result of the sun winning the competitive race for accumulating matter? Are atoms cooperative wholes? Or do fermions compete for the lowest energy states? How does increasing entropy fit into this model? I don’t know how to apply it.

Human Evolution:

Everyone agrees that we have both cooperative and competitive inclinations, but propose different origins for them. Evolutionists claim that our competitive inclinations arose because any organism that lacked the competitive drive in a world with those who had it would have either starved or failed to mate, meaning only those with competitive instincts would have had offspring, and they would have passed those traits on to their offspring. Animals behave competitively, and so do we.

As for the origin of altruistic instincts observed in humans, evolutionists have proposed many theories. The most often cited idea is that natural selection happens at multiple levels, not only on the level of individuals, but at the level of groups too. Groups with altruistic individuals do better than those constantly fighting among themselves. The problem is that competition within groups is always greater than competition between groups, so there is no way for altruistic genes to catch on.

Another theory is that plenty of food led to larger group sizes, leading to more time for females to “talk” and form large alliances, allowing the females to dominate the tribe and only mate with who they wanted, which ended up being non-competitive males. This raises the question why this doesn’t happen in more animal species and why the females wouldn’t then become competitive, as they have in hyenas.

Another theory is that defense against predators required cooperation between members of the tribe and that this drove cooperative instincts. It is not clear that there were enough predators of early hominids to make a difference.

Religious creationists reject all these arguments (and evolution itself) and propose their own theories. Depending on the religion, they either believe that God gave us both competitive and cooperative instincts, or that God gave us only cooperative instincts and that competitive instincts are a result of sin entering the world. How exactly this is supposed to have happened is a bit confusing.

Griffith splits the difference between the evolutionists and the creationists, claiming that while our distant animal ancestors were competitive, our more recent hominid ancestors were purely cooperative because of a rare confluence of conditions, and our competitive drives are purely the result of a psychosis that arrived later. His proof that we are fundamentally cooperative is that the thought of being competitive or living in a competitive society bothers us, but not being cooperative or living in a cooperative society. I think he makes a good point, though how good it is depends on just what is meant by “cooperative,” which he never expands on. For example, communistic, interdependent societies terrify me just as much as hypercompetitive, selfish societies. Harm can be done to me “for my own good” just as easily as “for the good of others.”

Griffith’s idea is that a bipedal gait coupled with a relatively predator-free and food-rich environment allowed mothers to carry their offspring for years after birth, giving them complete attention and love. This “love-indoctrination” process worked on the infants to create a race of loving creatures. Love was passed down not through genes, but through good parenting. In such a loving culture, the females dominated and began selecting males with more cooperative, less competitive behaviors, so that over time even the genetic makeup of the tribe became cooperative. Since these behaviors are closely correlated with neoteny, humans eventually lost fur, shrunk their canine teeth, and gained brain. At some point, the conscious mind emerged, leading to conflict with the instincts, causing us to become competitive again. This gave us a drive to understand ourselves, which required even more brain, somehow driving up our brain size even more, though he does not explain how this was an evolutionary advantage. Oddly, he also characterizes the search for knowledge as “fighting” ignorance, which is a “non-loving” thing to do, driving up our level of upset.

According to Griffith, the reason kangaroos haven’t become cooperative is because they require too much grazing time given their food source and pouches don’t require as much interaction as arms. The reason that no other animals have become conscious is that any animal having such an awakening would notice the order of nature, decide to become cooperative, and lose out in the highly competitive worlds other animals live in, thereby failing to pass on the genes for consciousness. Only those animals with genes suppressing consciousness survive. He never mentions that meerkats and other non-primates have been observed with altruistic traits. He never mentions the one species of Argentine ants that do not engage in inter-colony warfare. These examples do not seem to fit his model.

Griffith repeatedly accuses modern science of being dishonest so as to cover up the truth he has uncovered. He accuses scientists of overstating the levels of prehistoric conflict in humans and downplaying the cooperation seen in our closest relatives, bonobos, by falsely claiming they do not share food. I don’t know what to think of this. I know that evolutionists of generations past were not above overextrapolating from very incomplete data sets, and in some cases committed outright fraud. These are things that creationists are fond of pointing out. How can we trust anything?

Another thought I had is that the prophet Isaiah mentions a future time when the wolf and lamb lie down together, and some thinkers have suggested that this is how Eden originally operated, meaning that both carnivory and competition are results of the fall. If it is possible to transmit psychosis among humans, and all animals with memory have the latent capacity for consciousness, could it be that humans also passed the psychosis to animals, who then entered into such a competitive environment that genes suppressing consciousness were selected for until they lost it completely? Perhaps the process worked faster in animals due to their shorter generation times and/or their lower general intelligence. Could this process also be reversed through human behavior?

Thoughts on Sex:

Jeremy also has a lot of ideas about sex. Don’t we all? Allegedly, sex is inherently corrupting, and what attracts men to women the most is the opportunity to destroy innocence and make women as psychotic and upset as the men are. This is the real reason that men prefer neotenous features, not that younger women have potentially more child-bearing years. Genes have nothing to do with it. At the same time, already psychotic women feed their egos by presenting themselves as pure, uncorrupted youths, and pursuing men that treat them as sex objects. While women are more sex-aware than men, women are less aware of their own corruption, and it is men that are more egotistical, which is why they talk less. The perversion of homosexuality occurs when men are tired of being the corrupt ones and want to be the object of admiration instead – or when women are tired of being admired and want to take the male role. There is no “gay gene.”

I have so many questions. Why do men like hips and breasts if they prefer neoteny? Why aren’t all men pedophiles? How is being a sex object synonymous with being uncorrupted and innocent? If the sex roles are determined by ego, and both sexes have egos, why don’t they behave the same? Do men really talk less? My life experience has been the opposite. Wouldn’t having a big ego lead to being more talkative in any case? If sex is corrupting, and women are more sex-aware, how are they less aware of their own corruption than men?

Stages of Life:

Griffith tells about how we start out as innocent, instinct-driven creatures, gradually become angrier as we become more conscious of the evil around us and in us, and then eventually become resigned to our fate. This makes sense, but he seems to think that everyone follows the same path and reaches each stage at the same age. Later, he contradicts himself by giving different ages.

While he never mentions the “terrible twos,” he does mention the “naughty nines” as the time when children lash out, saying they later become resigned in adolescence. Later, he talks about the “naughty nines” again, saying children are civilized at 11 or 12, but then become difficult again at 14 or 15. Later, he talks about how it is only at 21 that people are fully resigned to adult life. Later, he mentions that those aged 10-19 are animals following instinct, those aged 20-29 are lunatics following a cause or a set of rules, and those 30 and up are failures and frauds, which I can only guess means that is the age they resign. I can make no sense of it.

Science and Religion:

​Griffith has much to say about science and religion. He says that science is deeply flawed because it treats evolution as random rather than following the “obvious” moral order of nature to group matter into ordered wholes. Yet, his explanation of how these ordered wholes originate is based on processes such as chance events (which are random) and natural selection (which is not random, but is also widely accepted by scientists), so I don’t understand his problem with science.

He says that while religion gets it right that there is a moral order to the universe, it inappropriately deifies it, thus keeping it distant and not so convicting. Wouldn’t believing in a literal deity whose rules we have broken be even more convicting? Doesn’t the concept of “purpose” or “supposed to” require a mind behind it? Why should we follow the pattern of other matter just because other matter is doing it? I don’t understand.

He also says that belief in a literal deity is irrational and doesn’t go into it much more than that. I disagree, of course, for reasons too many to get into now.

Most strangely, he sees religion as a cowardly and treasonous escape from our responsibility to search for self-knowledge. By simply following the rules of our religion, we might appear outwardly better, and trick ourselves into thinking we are better, but so long as we have a standard of right and wrong without an understanding why wrong happens, we are still psychotic and upset. It is misguided utopianism. He includes within his definition of religion communism, which expects us to behave cooperatively but does nothing to solve the problem of ego-driven materialism, and post-modernism, which alleviates our consciences by denying truth itself, keeping us permanently alienated from ourselves.

He might be on to something with some religions (such as communism and post-modernism), but most religions have long and deep traditions of self-understanding and true healing. He even acknowledges this in the book, contradicting himself again, but still insists his “scientific” instinct-versus-intellect model is the final model that will save the world. The problem is that knowledge alone never saved anybody. Even the demons believe Jesus is the son of God, and they shudder. Christians say that it is not knowing the right doctrine that changed their lives, but the power of Jesus.

The Author:

Griffith makes many good points and provides plausible reasons for bad behavior that should make it easier for us to forgive others and ourselves and increase social harmony. At the same time, he sounds like a senile megalomaniac cult leader and I don’t trust his organization. The man is an enigma.

Most authors delivering a “bitter pill to swallow” will sugarcoat it. They “dress up” their harsh ideas to make them more palatable. Jeremy does the opposite. He takes some ideas as good as candy, coats them in tar and glass shards, then hides them in a garbage dump, and gives really poor directions how to find the place. I still don’t know what to think.

I read The Sin of Certainty by Peter Enns. It lays out the case for something I noticed long ago: Too many Christians idolize their own faith, believing that believing the right things and believing them hard enough is what wins God’s favor, rather than trusting in God’s loving nature to cover our genuine ignorance. Enns goes through things he learned over the course of his life that made him doubt what his church had told him was the correct interpretation of the Bible, and sometimes make other people drop out of Christianity altogether. It’s a short, easy book I read in one day.

​While I agree with the conclusion, I noticed that part of Enns’s trouble is that he has too readily accepted the credibility of secular scholars, who are at least equally guilty of false certainties. We should question everything.

I recently finished reading Brilliant Beacons, a history of the American lighthouse, by Eric Jay Dolin (2016). The book covers the upgrades in lantern technology and changes in management from colonial times forward. It mentions some of the more interesting examples of special construction on submerged ground or on the sides of cliffs. It even mentions a strange case of geese crashing through the windows of one lighthouse by the hundreds.

The book is packed full of anecdotes from the lives of the lighthouse keepers. There was the crew that stayed in the lighthouse even as ice floes broke it free from the ground and carried it around the bay. There were the many keepers who rescued people from drowning on multiple occasions. There were the keepers who got into a fight over how they wanted their potatoes cooked.
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Reading the book makes one think that lighthousing is a dangerous job, since so many of them have been destroyed by weather, war, and one was even destroyed by tsunami. That seems to be the theme.

I recently read Love Your Enemies (2019) by Arthur C. Brooks. The main premise of the book seems to be that Americans are addicted to outrage. Most of them want to quit, but can’t. When people know little more about another than their party affiliation, it is easy to assume motives and think the worst. Brooks claims we should not only tolerate our enemies, but love them and cherish the valuable insights they bring by disagreeing with us. The process of disagreeing peacefully is the best way to get to the best ideas.

This is the extent to which I agree with the book. Beyond this I run into problems:

Brooks claims that we all agree on the why, but not the what. We agree on the goals, but not on the best policies to get us there. This is what I used to believe. Then I made extra effort to reach out to people and allow them to explain themselves. Ten years later, it is now overwhelmingly clear to me that we agree on nothing.

I care about removing obstacles to progress. If an individual woman wants to go into business or politics or journalism or whatever, she should be able to because everyone should be able to. On the other hand, if she wants to be a full-time mother, she should be able to do that. I care about individual liberty. Other people don’t want individual women to have the option of pursuing full-time motherhood. It is as though they feel they are “letting the team down” when women on average make less money than men. That they personally are doing well means nothing. That other women that pursue wealth are doing well means nothing. That those who make less do so by choice means nothing. They care about group parity so much that they end up hating liberty. I care nothing about group parity. Don’t tell me we want the same things!

Another claim made by Brooks – so wildly false that I dropped the book in shock – Is that while people get angry disagreeing over politics, they do not get angry when disagreeing over ideas (page 297). He does not clearly define the difference between politics and ideas, but I gather that politics to him is about what party or candidate is in power, while ideas are ideas about policies or the underlying values behind those policies. These we certainly do disagree on, and these are what make me (and my opponents) several orders of magnitude angrier than I ever could be over who holds what office.

Holding that the term “free market” is inherently racist is an idea I cannot tolerate (and shouldn’t). The idea of Marxism is abominable to me. It makes me mad. At the same time, my opponents get mad at me when I espouse capitalist ideas. My opponents get mad at me when I state my idea that the word marriage is heterosexual by definition. My opponents get mad at me when I state my idea that men are not women (and vice versa). People I know have stopped speaking to me over this.

Another claim I found very confusing was his idea – based on the research of Johnathan Haidt – that the people on the other side aren’t evil; they simply have different moral foundations. What does the word “evil” mean, then? The word exists in the English language, so it must refer to something. I have always used it to refer to those operating on different moral foundations. This is the way everyone else uses it.

Another claim that I used to believe myself is that a kind word turns away wrath. Brooks gives an example of how he responded to a critical email that worked out well for him. In my life, things rarely go so smoothly. People will twist my words over and over when I am trying to be nice. I have even been charged with harassment for nothing more than offering my emotional support and friendship to someone going through a tough time. I only contacted her once! At this point, there is absolutely no loss if I just go ahead and insult people like they deserve.

On the level of national politics, being nice gets you destroyed. When Trump supporters were attacked and beaten by Antifa, unfairly targeted by law enforcement, and then watched their votes be overrun by proven fraud, they had every right to defend their lives and livelihoods by violence, yet they trusted the system and challenged the vote peacefully. As the process played out, Antifa attacked the capitol and Trump supporters were blamed for the violence anyways. There is truly nothing to lose anymore. Being nice didn’t stop the Nazis. Being nice didn’t stop the Japanese. Being nice didn’t stop the British. It won’t stop the Democrats either. Being nice has never worked in all of history.

Speaking of being nice, Brooks also cites psychological studies to make his case. He cites a study showing that nice people get ahead in the workplace and in romance, while meanies do not. I have heard of studies claiming exactly the opposite. He cites a study showing that faking a smile even when we don’t mean it can make us happier in the long run than frowning. I’ve heard this study many times before, but it seems to backfire for me and I have read other studies claiming that fake smiles are not the same as the real thing (physically) and that repressing emotion only makes it stronger. He cites a study that listing our blessings will make us more content. This doesn’t always work when our blessings only exist in relation to our troubles, and I have read studies showing exactly the opposite. It seems that for every study supporting one psychological phenomenon, there is an equal and opposite study supporting its inverse. I don’t believe anything coming out of psychology.

Brooks also seems to be of the mistaken impression that political strife today occurs because people do not know each other as whole persons first, but by their ideological labels first. This does not apply to my life. I not only knew people pretty well, I actually liked some of them and thought of them as friends, and I thought they knew me, but then they started to get into politics and turned against me.

It’s another useless book.