Among the sheer avalanche of argument-dumping that Catholic apologetics has produced in the wake of the conversion of Joe Schmid, one of the targets of condemnation, naturally, has been Protestantism. Schmid and his fellow convert Ethan Muse have made extensive comments, perhaps best expressed by Muse who said the Catholic church gives us a system we need:

…to have it where the faithful, even the lay faithful, including like illiterate peasants, are going to be able to get all the teaching and instruction that they need in a way that they can count on, that they can rely on, where it’s actually going to be reasonable to expect them to harken to basically sound doctrine, so like basically where theology and sound doctrine can actually matter and where they’re actually going to be preserved, so there’s an enduring and faithful witness to Christ’s teaching ministry. And what I realised was like it just seems extremely obvious to me if you’re not like coping like crazy that like just like me and my bible is not going to work. You know. So it’s not going to work for like illiterate shepards, you know, it’s not going to work for the vast majority, just before the printing press there was a reason like Protestantism didn’t get started, you know, which is it didn’t work because if no one can read the bible then the idea that Christ designed a system where everyone was meant to be sitting in private judgement over a million competing sects that you wouldn’t be able to recognise unless you had already created a systematic theology based on the exegesis on Greek and Latin for all the illiterate people all over the world. These debates are too subtle.1

Where does one begin. Besides the fact that this certainly sounds like little more than a derisive argument that stupid people need the church because they are incapable of thinking for themselves (a conclusion I assume Ethan reached by thinking for himself), it’s an entirely wrong understanding of anything Protestants think, so let me lay some things out at the outset before I go through it:

“Me and my bible” is not what Sola Scriptura means; Protestants do not reject church authority or structure in the early church; Protestants still believe the church should be a faithful witness to Christ’s teaching; Protestants think unity is good and disharmony is bad; Protestants do not think every single believer has to do their own exegesis; Protestants do not think Christ founded a “system” where people have to read the bible and start from scratch to discern between “sects,”; Protestants can accept apostolic succession; Protestants think reading is good and that individuals should have access to the bible in the common language, something we, even Catholics like Ethan, ubiquitously take for granted and that Protestants died for. Protestantism and its ideas have a historical context which matters to our understanding of them. Protestantism is not and was never “we reject church authority and everyone should figure it out by themselves including illiterate peasants.” Protestantism is a reforming principle that makes scripture the sole infallible authority and individual faith the mode of salvation and sanctification, but that does not deny or reject and furthermore values and reveres church authority as the visible form of the whole invisible Church of Christ.

That all said, one thing rarely mentioned in these generic condemnations of Protestantism is the historical context. Muse handwaves to the role of the printing press, yet rarely do Catholics acknowledge that the state of the Catholic church might have been such that reform became inevitable. He says that one of the essential problems of Protestantism is that if no authority can decide over disputes authoritatively, then the church will end up splitting. We are apparently meant to ignore the fact that the most significant splitting in the history of the church, that is to say the Reformation, was within the Catholic church. It must be remembered that what reformers ultimately wanted was reform, and since the response was their condemnation as heretics, little else was possible.

Thus, there is an opposite problem to the claim that Protestantism causes division and subdivision and emphasises the individual too greatly: if the church is deemed an unerring infallible authority then it cannot reform. Historical, patristic retrieval or biblical retrieval is possible only as selective defence interpreted as justification for something that cannot be reconsidered, and it is thus not possible as an ongoing principle of reform. If the church does err, there is no source at its core to which we must return to since the authority is identified with the state of erring instead of the principle by which that erring is reformed. To put it another way, Joe and Ethan used the analogy of the law being given without a law court to interpret it, claiming Protestants lack that secondary function, which is incorrect anyway since what Protestants reject is that that second function is infallible, but if it is infallible, if a contradiction or accretion arose, there would be no principle by which the law court could be reformed by a plea for a return to the law, and the law would be subject to the law courts. Not only that, no individual could state that the court had contradicted the law, since only the court gets to interpret it.

In other words, while Ethan claims that under Protestantism “illiterate peasants” would have to work out their own exegesis, (which they wouldn’t because Protestants do not reject the church as a source of teaching and authority) under Catholicism there is no means by which anyone can apply scripture and reason to doctrine because there is no point. Under this understanding of Catholicism as aimed at Protestants, we all might as well be illiterate peasants for all it matters. To anyone concerned the church is telling you to stop thinking and do what they say, this is hardly a reassuring view of how authority works in relation to truth.

And when one looks at some of the issues in the Catholic church that Protestantism objects to, this is a problem. Even centuries before the Reformation, one can look at people like the Lollards, a ‘proto-protestant’ movement who followed the teaching of theologian John Wycliffe. In 1401 English parliament passed De heretico comburendo, an act that allowed the burning of seditious heretics at the stake aimed at and enacted upon the Lollards specifically, many of whom came to be burned, and even Wycliffe who died in 1384 had his remains exhumed and burned.

Lollards argued for what are now common Protestant beliefs, the rejection of transubstantiation, prayer for the dead, priest’s right to forgive sins and so on, but also for many things that most of us would now take for granted. They objected to the idea that Priests can exorcize or hallow random objects, that Christians should fight in crusades, that priests should be forced to be celibate, claiming it led to the temptation to sin; they objected to financial contributions for prayers for the dead, and to pilgrimages for the veneration of relics for time off purgatory, a feature of medieval Catholicism that became increasingly ridiculous with pilgrims travelling to touch things ranging from sticks claimed to be from the burning bush, milk from Mary’s breast, or hair from Jesus’ beard. (Ironically, one of the most massive collections of such relics was held by Frederick III of Saxony who ended up having sympathies with Protestantism and protecting Luther.)

The point is, this ‘meta-narrative’ criticism of Protestantism as a disintegrating principle and Catholicism as a sustaining principle only works if you assume certain views about church authority that Protestants don’t accept and reject the possibility that the Catholic church could find itself in a state in which it is either doctrinally or practitionally in need of reform. I would argue, as Protestants would, that both before the Reformation and now the Catholic church contains clear doctrinal accretions that do not reflect the teaching of the New Testament, that many of its practices from indulgences to confession reflect a view of sin that can be unbiblical, legalistic, transactional and unhealthy. At the very least, the pre-reformation church contained practices that played a role in the emergence of the Reformation that the supposed claims of the authority of the church did not solve.

We might then consider the claims about scripture and the printing press and whether today any of us really reject Protestant claims about the democratic nature of the bible as a text. It is of course the case that the emergent demands of Protestants that the bible exist in vernacular language for ordinary people is a response to the emergence of the availability of technology and process that enables such a thing to be possible. In Anglo Saxon England, although bibles were produced in theory, as Bede put it, “for lesser folk to read,” their cost was enormous. The bibles known to have been produced in Lindisfarne under Ceolfrith would have required the skin of 1,500 calves to produce and depended on generous donations of land from the King.2

So of course, in one sense Protestant views of the nature of scripture are influenced by historical changes. Yet it is a misrepresentation to argue that the result is that Protestants therefore assume the position “me and my bible” let alone that this constitutes “coping like crazy.” For one thing, the idea that people who cannot read should be offered education and given the freedom to read scripture for themselves is hardly something any Christian would now seriously object to, and when Tyndale famously said that ‘If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy who drives a plough to know more of the scriptures than you do,’ what lies at root of this sentiment is a deeply democratic principle, the opposite of which being that “illiterate peasants” need to “harken to basically sound doctrine.” We don’t even have to arrive at a discussion of where infallibility solely lies to recognize that most if not all of us today ultimately land on the side of Tyndale who, incidentally, was also burned at the stake for his beliefs.

In reality, Protestants maintain a view of church authority that is perfectly consistent with what Ethan seems to be denying they have. If someone attends an evangelical church and tells the pastor they don’t think Jesus was divine or that people don’t need to be baptised, they will not be able to become members of that church. The pastor won’t respond that because they’ve read the bible and decided that it must be right it is equally valid because we’re all in the same epistemic position to truth relative to scripture. If you attend an evangelical church, most new members will attend a course or sessions where they are taught basic doctrine, in fact as far as teaching and belief goes, Protestants operate within a functional view of authority in which scripture is absolutely self disclosing and deeply valuable to an individual, but that interpretations are not free to be outside of authority without good reason.

But Ethan goes on to say that “private judgement as to arbitrating theological disputes doesn’t seem like a sensible or scalable way to ensure that all the faithful get the sound teaching that they need and to where it’s easily and immediately recognisable…if theology was going to matter, and if there was going to be a reasonable expectation for people to have basically sound doctrine to not fall for heresy or not fall into schism, then the standard needed to be like basically saying this guy is top dog this is the court like what he says goes, Rome has decided the cause is finished.”

Amazingly, Ethan then goes on to argue that he concluded this from reading the bible, where he says “oh, it’s like Christ picks a group of guys, and says whoever listens to you listens to me and whoever despises you despises me, and those guys go around by both word and letter bossing people around and demanding faith and not having to justify themselves based on previous revelation.”3

One might ask an obvious question. Should an individual investigate whether the claims of Rome are true? By Ethan’s argument here, the answer would be no, because Rome has already told you what is true, and as he says “even PhDs” have theological disagreements, so your judgement can’t be counted, and since “Rome has decided the cause is finished,” what would you do if you find points of disagreement anyway? Again, this just effectively places us all with the illiterate peasants under the authority of a church which it may seem, certainly a many points in history, to be rife with problems we are demanded to ignore.

Not only that, using language like claiming the disciples and apostles were “bossing people around and demanding faith and not having to justify themselves based on previous revelation” is just ridiculous, false, and frankly kind of obnoxious sounding, especially if one is implying that this is the extrapolated role of Rome. Clearly Paul applies the Old Testament to his arguments, and if we are to take what Jesus says directly to his disciples the command is the opposite of this kind of language, calling instead for humility, he says in Mark 10: “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Also, there is an important aspect of Jesus teaching key to Protestant ideas of revelation that appeals not to authority but to God’s word in recognition and transformation. In the parable of the sower, seed that falls on stony or thorny ground and seed that falls on the soil are contrasted to those who hear the word and reject it and those in whom it grows, then in Matthew 7 Jesus tells his followers not to submit to arbitrary authority based on his command but that “wolves in sheeps clothing” will bear bad fruit, and “by their fruit you will recognize them.” When it comes to both the reception of the word and the acknowledgement of authority, the work of God in producing recognition and the ability to see the fruit that signals authenticity is clearly taught as primary.

It must be remembered here that all Christians believe in the work of God in salvation and transformation. That sounds obvious, but Ethan’s arguments don’t suggest so. According to Protestantism, the self-disclosure of scripture is not a sudden rational ability to discern all doctrinal disputes, it is the sowing of the seed that in a person in whom God works enables the recognition of the truths necessary for salvation, and that greater understanding comes from both the authority of and participation in the church as the body of Christ and from further immersion in scripture as a believer continues to be sanctified. These Catholic arguments about a lack of defining “top dog” authority essentially rest on excluding the genuine work of God from the dialogue, as if our only hope for access to truth is top down.

There are of course other disagreements here that I don’t have the space to go over without doing an equally massive argument dump. The claim for example that Protestants must accommodate Catholic miracles is just a repeat of the assertion that Catholic miracles are undeniably true to the minutest detail, which really has nothing specific to do with Protestants whose ‘accommodation theory’ does not extend to admitting Catholic affirming details, (it seems like this should be obvious), and Joe’s arguments about the early church miss a lot of nuance and are slightly tangential to the point about authority. All this is a shame, because these are interesting topics, and how exactly one works out the tensions between revelation and authority are really worth considering. Hopefully that might happen with dialogue and mutual interest, rather than takedowns and claims that “God has disproved Protestantism,” which Schmid announced on Matt Fradd’s podcast. Otherwise, all you’re doing is producing the kind of apologetics that, just like much of the pop-Protestant apologetics industry that is no doubt equally as rife with muddled views of Catholicism, adds nothing and is ultimately just interminably boring.

The lot is cast into the lap,
but its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33

With the recent conversion of atheist-come-agnostic-come-Catholic YouTuber Joe Schmid, many areas of philosophical and religious discourse have seemingly been once again reignited, including various harmony arguments, Catholic miracle claims and the idea of eternal conscious torment. The latter Schmid has adopted as a view since he is now a Catholic, and his reasoning reflects a response that has been repeated since by those supporting him: that the evidence stemming from those other arguments mentioned, arguments for God’s existence and the specific arguments of miracles, means that one’s ‘intuitions’ that eternal conscious torment might be wrong must themself be wrong. Especially in a Catholic context, since the church infallibly interprets scripture, to be a Catholic, according to those embracing Schmid as a convert publically, this is a view that must be adopted. When asking Schmid the question on his Daily Wire sponsored Pints with Aquinas podcast, Matt Fradd slightly mockingly represented the idea that God’s love might overcome even hell with the sarcastic “it just seems unreasonable, it’s a belief born out of a more brutal time, especially when you read the likes of Dante and others, that we’ve progressed in. We realise now that God’s love is greater than our sin.”

I mentioned Schmid’s reasons in a note, and had responses that repeated the same idea, here’s a typifying example:

Thus, I suppose, one is forced into simply rejecting all questions of the problem of eternal hell and resorting to seeking proof for both miracles and the infallibility of the Catholic church. This means of course the question of whether either of those things can stand up to skeptical judgement will depend on whether or not you are a Catholic, but even were they to be I want to make emphasis that the above understandings of the problem are simply wrong. Objections to hell are not based on “feewings,” they are based on observations about the incoherence of the theology that generates it.

After all, within Christian theology hell is a concept tied to the question of salvation, tied to the question of God’s purposes and and nature. These claims must therefore be integrated and coherent. Whatever you think about ‘intuitions,’ we know what certain concepts mean and what certain acts and experiences entail, and we know what a contradiction is. We also have biblical data and philosophical reasons which, unless we are to defer any thought at all to an infallible authority on the basis of miracle claims, we can consider as a whole, not just in the light of our own present thought or what the church claims but in the light of what other theologians historically have claimed. If our theology contradicts what the bible seems to say, what we can find in patristic thought, and our own feelings and reason, we have cause to consider if the doctrine is really what we should be believing as Christians. So let us consider these things.

First, the idea of universalism or of a limited or purgatorial understanding of hell is not a modern “progressive” notion and serious believers of this view do not cite Dante or claim hell was invented in a more brutal time and we now have more intuitions about God’s love. Universalism certainly existed in the first centuries of the church, besides the strand of theology influenced by Origen, who believed that the “end of blessedness” and the purgatorial process by which we arrive at it is something “even the enemies themselves are subjected to,”1 clearly the view is held widely enough for those rejecting it to address it. Augustine writes in the Enchiridion that there are “very many” who “deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be…they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express the literal truth. “God will not forget,” they say, “to show mercy, nor in his anger will he shut up his mercy.””2

Indeed, Augustine’s theology is important to the theology that rejects any possibility of such interpretation, but whose contradictions have never been resolved. Much of the church, both within Catholicism and Orthodoxy, offer free will as a substantive solution to the issue of salvation, as do some Protestants, while strong Calvinism rejects free will in favour of God’s absolute sovereignty in predestining and calling the elect. For some Calvinists though and for Catholic theologians like Aquinas both can be reconciled with a form of compatibilism that for Calvinists of this bent is called ‘dual causation,’ the idea that our free will is contingently real but God’s sovereignty is ultimate. In a more philosophical context, this might be comparable to arguing that when I go to the shops to get more milk, the ‘reason’ I do so is neurons in my brain caused by physical laws caused by an infinite regress of prior causes, but this causes no damage to the ‘reason’ that we ran out of milk and I decided to go and get more.

This might offer us some pragmatic use of free will, but this concession in Calvinism still subordinates the will to God’s. Additionally, when it comes to salvation, there are also evidential reasons to question how ‘free’ we are in any absolute sense. There are substantially more Catholics in Catholic countries and in people with Catholic parents, as there are with Protestants or indeed any religion. The idea that the moment of salvation is a libertarian choice freely given to all does not seem to bear any resemblance to the obvious fact of our contingency. Free will may be valuable pragmatically, but the Calvinists, drawing on Augustine, may have a point that it does not stand ultimately as a reason behind our reasons.

Yet not only do we have the problem of leaning on free will, the theologies that accept eternal hell also accept the idea of original sin. This varies in theological emphasis, for someone like Aquinas and the Catholic tradition, Adam’s sin is not a legal condemnation we inherit but a tendency and a disorder in which the relationship between God’s justice and our actions is distorted by Aquinas’ concupiscence, our leaning or tendency towards sin. In Calvinism, this will is corrupted to total depravity, yet while degrees of emphasis are present both believe Adam’s sin means we are born with a will incapable of fully living in harmony with God, dependant on his will to heal ours through grace.

Thus, since our wills are in ‘bondage’ in Calvinist language, and since even for Aquinas our will cannot fully overcome our tendency to sin, we must require God’s unchaining of our will and transforming our desires to return us to a state in which our desires are properly ordered and fulfilled in the beatific vision. Yet there is a significant problem here, one perhaps best represented by C.S. Lewis.

For C.S. Lewis free will is the most convincing response to the problem of evil and the reason for hell. For Lewis, hell is a kind of grey place full of shades shrunken by sin, proverbially locked from the inside. It is the result of those who will to reject God. Yet at the same time Lewis famously formulated an argument for desire, which rests on both Platonic notions but also shares Aquinas’ view of the unification of our desires in God. Lewis argued the longing that accompanies us in life that never seems to be satisfied by anything is a symbol of a longing for another world, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”3

You might notice a problem here. If the subsequent argument is true, why would those in the former state of hell not choose it? After all, it is the fulfilment of all their desires, all the ends of the longing they possess are God, and the wants to which they direct themselves are merely “dumb idols” as Lewis puts it. How, then, if their wills are acting in contradiction to what they want, are they free? One must assume the reason would be ignorance, that they do not know that God is the end of those desires, but then if they are ignorant, and if God could grant them this knowledge, how are we to claim that the hell they exist in is their choice?

Not only that, if we are to argue we have free will such that it constitutes the absolute reason for our eternal condemnation, where does our free will end and God’s sovereignty begin? Throughout the bible we encounter statement after statement of God’s absolute sovereignty, and if we are to maintain this sovereignty we must ask when it ends and our will begins. In a podcast with Pints with Aquinas, Trent Horn was asked about universalism and he responded that “we have to affirm that God wants all to be saved, anyone can go to heaven if they cooperate with God’s will based on the knowledge and revelation they were given, so we pray for them, but we just don’t have a false hope that they’ll be saved.” The obvious question is what we are meant to be praying for. If their free will to ‘cooperate’ is outside of God’s sovereignty, are we just praying God would up his efforts like a company spending a bit more on their advertising campaign?

But given the fact that our wills are clearly contingent upon circumstances and the many facts about who we are that are not of our choosing, when does free will become a choice with eternal consequences we are responsible for and when is it a choice caused by God’s sovereignty? If a relative prays you will hear the gospel and a friend invites you to church and you attend and hear the gospel, is the friend’s action their own free will or God’s intervention in their actions?

What I am essentially pointing out, is that absolute free will doesn’t work. You can have contingent and pragmatic compatibilism, but as Calvinists emphasize, the will that gives you redeems the imperative to act but cannot constitute an ultimate reason unless we are to cast all our actions as entirely beyond God’s sovereignty, which would not only leave us with a deist God who winds up the universe with free will in it and leaves it to see what happens, making petitionary prayer essentially meaningless, but would also leave us with a significant contradiction with the wealth of biblical data that claims that God oversees the lot in the lap, that he hardens whom he wills and has mercy on whom he wills.

Calvinism proposes to solve this by laying its emphasis on the sovereignty of God, employing the passages from Paul on election as reason for the division between the saved and the unsaved, and leaving free will as a contingent operation of God’s sovereignty. While this unties some of the knots, it is morally problematic, not just on the basis of our own feelings about it but as plain contradiction. Hell is not eternally awful just because we feel it so, it is definitionally awful, and if the bible claims as it clearly does that God does not will any sinner to be lost and that all be saved, how is this to be united with God’s sovereignty. Some Calvinists attempt to emphasise dual causation or that God has multiple wills, that he simultaneously wills damnation and salvation but only chooses some for the latter, but these all fail to square the circle, they leave a God that has nothing to do with the statements the bible makes about his nature, leaving only a husk of capricious and arbitrary judgement.

Naturally given space this article is not meant to be a substantive case for universalism, but what I am pointing out in response to the current discourse is the reasons for objecting to eternal conscious torment are not just trivial ‘intuitions’ about not liking the idea of eternal punishment for finite crimes, nor because in the modern world we come to see it as a bit unpleasant. The badness of hell is not an intuition, it is its definition, and the reasons for anyone suffering it must be coherent if they are to reflect biblical statements about God’s intent. The purgatorial and cleansing understanding of the role of hell is not meek progressiveness balking at the brutality of medieval hell, it is a reclamation of a view held in the centuries before Justinian’s condemnation of Originism that unites the biblical claims about God and about salvation, that fulfils the biblical promise that God will be all in all. Even if one wishes to disagree with this view or conclusion, it should be taken with due seriousness.

I recently listened to an event from one of the evangelical churches I went to growing up on the topic of other religions. The pastor was asked whether Christianity should be considered a ‘religion,’ to which he responded that, no, it shouldn’t, because “religions are about things that you can do to please God or achieve salvation.” His claim being that ‘religion,’ with its rituals and sacrifices and everything else that has defined it historically are about the placating of the divine through ‘works,’ by which we can have no ultimate assurance of salvation, whereas Christianity is a religion of grace, in which our salvation is assured not through anything we have or can do but through the work of Christ.

This is a particularly Protestant view of the idea of religion, something that grants a convenient view not just of religion as a whole but even of other parts of the church. Thus, when I was growing up in the evangelical church, Catholicism was generally referenced with a deep suspicion as a “religion of works” or even a “cult” with all of its rituals and performance, and within certain parts of the evangelical church, one might even find fellow Protestants such as Anglicans are met with a slight eyebrow raise and a suspicion that with their incense and robes they may not truly understand the religion-less religion of grace.

Besides the many problems with this view, which we will get to, there are some things about it that are nonetheless emphatically positive. One of the central facts of Christianity is the idea of a radical acceptance, that no matter who a person is they are and can be embraced by the love of God and the community of a church because of Christ’s single redemptive act, that at conversion the gates are flung open and the prodigal is welcomed home. For all I remember the suspicion towards other parts of the church growing up, I also remember the compelling message of grace expressed in many of the most famous Protestant hymns, and of the sense to which it casts God’s love as something that we do not scrabble towards in the hope that we might do enough, but that it is wholly given and unconditional. It is hard not to stand in a church where “Tis mercy all, immense and free; For, O my God, it found out me” is boomed across the rafters and not feel moved by its affirmation of the gospel as the free gift of underserved eternal righteousness.

Yet the fact is that in many evangelical churches today you won’t hear these words boomed across the rafters. In fact what you are far more likely to hear are worship songs in which the theologically rich affirmations represented by the Methodism of the Wesley brothers has been replaced by a ‘relationship’ vocabulary by which God essentially becomes akin to the romantic other in a Taylor Swift song. A critic of Protestantism might argue that the lack of distinct moral grounding in the salvific notion of grace has entertained and made common the idea of ‘cheap grace,’ in which God does not unchain us from the weight of our sin but flatters us with how much he loves us already. Rather than God redeeming the goodness within our nature, grace becomes a kind of ‘it was you all along’ type analogy of romantic love that is emotionally shallow and theologically inept.

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In a comment on BB’s article today on the worst book he has ever read, someone brought up the murder of Junko Furuta. Furuta was a 17 year old Japanese girl who was imprisoned, tortured and brutally killed by four teenage boys, you may have come across it before, if not I’d rather not recount the details, you can read the wikipedia page.

Such a story is a test case for the problem of evil. Often we consider the problem as a kind of logic conundrum: evil exists God is good why does God not get rid of it, and so on. But when we encounter such stories the problem is not something we ‘know’ as a problem but something we feel. The question is not a logical obstacle but an aching question of why such a thing could possibly be, and an anger at what seems like pointlessness and injustice. Perhaps the question of why is answerable, and ultimately a robust notion of theism must work the other way around. We are presented with a world where such things do exist, the question is what do our beliefs amount to both in terms of the meaning of such things and what we are to do about it.

I am fairly convinced by the case for Christian universalism. One of the criticisms often made about universalism is that it both pragmatically takes away the imperative of the gospel, and that it lacks the kind of justice that the ultimate solution of Christian salvation offers out for sin. When Rob Bell published his 2011 book Love Wins in which he seemed to declare himself a universalist, among the parodies was one that mocked the idea that God would send Hitler to heaven, something that played on the instinctive sense that such a notion of universalism would not just take away the gospel but would be palpably unjust.

Granted, Bell is not a remotely serious thinker and so was easily parodied, but of course when we consider the above story one of the things that strikes us deeply is the need for justice, for the wrongs to be righted and account to be made. The pitifully low sentences dished out for such heinous acts is one of the things that strikes many about the events, and when you raise universalism it would seem the idea that at death everyone involved entered heaven would render everything about it meaningless, even if it proposed to solve the suffering with eternal reward.

Yet no serious universalist believes this, and indeed it is important for anyone advocating it to emphasise that hell as purgation is serious, that it may not be eternal, but that we do not deny the language of God’s wrath and justice found in the bible. More to the point, it is key to emphasise that every other position within Christianity faces a worse problem: for most Protestants, for Catholics, for many in the Orthodox church, yes, the perpetrators suffer for their crimes in hell. But in this case, for all of the above, so does the victim.

Thus, a universalist can in this circumstance affirm two things. Firstly, that the perpetrators will face the justice of God, and second, that through the encompassing act of Christ God himself knew and suffered with that girl’s suffering, and that she has a place in heaven. For anyone who limits salvation to being in the one true church or being part of the elect, the wrong in such a circumstance is left unrighted, and her suffering truly is meaningless. Be it by total depravity and limited atonement or the justification of apparent free will to reject God, many broad understandings of Christian salvation make no sense of such horrific circumstance and cannot declare that God truly knew and cared for her suffering.

It is key to grasping universalism that the shift to universalising salvation is not a naive wiping over the fundamental problem of reality, it is key to allowing God to enter into every part of it, to suffer with all suffering and to make right all wrongs, to bring justice to all iniquity, raise every valley and bring every mountain low. Universalism thus grants a theology in which God is truly in all things, and that Christ’s act on the cross encircles the depths of evil into God’s redemption such that God is truly with and near to every single of the brokenhearted. For Christians, practically, while the currency of the gospel remains unchanged, it means that we are near to God and we act out our salvation when we seek to bring about a world of justice and mercy, of goodness and compassion.

It remains the case that everyone making claims about who is saved and who isn’t must tread carefully. None of us are God, and if we learn anything from passages such as Matthew 25, it is that one feature of judgement day will be surprise. Christ suggests it is those who walk with confidence in their own safety who will hear the dread words “away from me I never knew you,” and those who hang their heads in belief that never could they have done enough to please God to whom he will say “well done good and faithful servant.” Nonetheless, when we look at a view of salvation that cannot make right some of the worst of the wrongs of history, we must ask whether we are really interpreting things correctly and in the light of God’s own statement that he is near to the suffering and that he wills all to be saved.

Ultimately, all we can do is consider what we are told about who God is and what it looks like to follow him. So it is that the problem of evil may remain unsolvable as a logical problem, one of the many paradoxes of reality that exists whether we like it or not; but Christianity answers that we are implicated in it, and that to know God is to seek to have compassion for those with whom God says he has compassion, and to be near to those in whom God says he is to be found. It is only through a hope in the ultimate restoration of all things that one can affirm that sin is behovely, that all shall be well, and that all manner of thing shall be well.

In a recent video, now popular apologist Wes Huff makes an argument for the evidence for “historical reportage” in the gospels, aka that they were written by eyewitnesses and therefore bear factual accounts of history. In the introduction to the video, he plays a set of clips from various figures who are currently popular in the religious adjacent sphere but who are not themselves confessing Christians, including Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Tom Holland. In the clips, they express being compelled by the ‘truth’ of the story of Jesus, but also hesitation accepting it as really true. Douglas Murray, for example, says “many of us can walk ninety nine percent of the way there in terms of belief in the truth of the story, but as Betjeman puts it, ‘is it true? is it true?’”

Naturally, Huff is implying with this introduction that the gap can be approached by the kind of apologetics that insists on the evidence for Christianity, amassing arguments for the historical veracity of Christian claims, and so providing the answer to the ‘is it true?’ question that it seems everyone needs. Yet while there is no questioning Huff’s popularity, knowledge or ability to communicate, one might point out that this is not exactly new. Apologetics has long been populated by the “Case for Christ” or “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” type arguments, and anyone who has grown up in a church flooded not just with this apologetics but with the New Atheism type responses to these apologetics, must face the conclusion that at the very least, the idea that we can prove miraculous claims by applying the standards of historical criticism requires certain commitments that have already done most of the work.

Not to mention, if one wants to argue for the more literalist flavour that evangelicals such as Huff would argue for, there are long recognised circles that have to be squared such as the contradictions and historical questions in the birth narratives or questions over authorship and so on that anyone engaging in the topics with honesty will find no one has yet successfully refuted. This is not to say Huff isn’t presenting anything good, nor to say defending a truth at the core of the gospels is not important, that defending the historical person of Christ is not important, or that at the very least the possibility that something miraculous acts as the stone in the water from which the ripples of early Christianity come isn’t worth making a case for. It is to say that assuming we can look at what seems to be a popular pragmatic attitude to religion that cannot get itself over the line of actual belief and apply a bit more evidence to get us there is a wrong view of the problem.

This is not just true in hazy questions of scholarship; in a recent podcast with Alex O’Connor Ross Douthat claimed that religion is an “obligation” because of the strength of the arguments, yet when it came to explaining what those arguments actually were the answer was little more than fine tuning and some stuff about consciousness and the observer effect in quantum physics. Once again, one can’t help but respond that to someone not already entrenched in a position who is really asking ‘is it true? is it true?’ these are not the kind of arguments that are unshakable enough to provide certainty.

Yet that doesn’t mean that it is exactly enough to respond that faith is the leap made into uncertainty. This will not convince unbelievers to reconsider anything, and more to the point we have something of a human need for a kind of certainty that provides us with assurance. Since I have been writing on Substack, one of the things I most often get DMs about is people having what you might call existential anxiety, who want to ask me philosophical or apologetics questions ranging from how we can know materialism is false to whether Jesus really rose from the dead, usually accompanied by the confession that they are going through some form of personal crisis and feel like they need to know.

What I learn from this, besides the fact that I am not a pastor and am personally hopelessly ill-equipped and unqualified to solve such problems, let alone offer a convincing response, is that we often forget that the true place of the religious domain isn’t really abstract philosophical puzzles that we discuss out of pure interest or the consideration of evidential facts. The context of the religious questions might well be described as pastoral as much as philosophical. They are personal, our conviction about their truth has relation to our experiences in regard to them, to our disposition towards them, and to the degree to which they lay a path before us that we feel compelled or confident to take.

When I was a teenager, as many brought up in a religious home did, I went through a period of furiously reading as much apologetics as I could find somewhat under the belief that at some point I might find some piece of evidence compelling enough to believe it. One might argue that the fact that I didn’t and ended up drifting away for some considerable time is not simply a reflection that the kind of evidence I might have wished for doesn’t exist, it’s that it isn’t really what I was looking for.

It is a common refrain in religious ideas that the individual soul is in some sense inseparable from God. Augustine famously wrote that God is nearer than our inward self, Julian of Norwich that there is not “ anything at all between God and man’s soul” and that “God is nearer to us than our own soul.” Of course, that the soul exists is a claim apparently as requiring of evidence as the claim that God exists, yet whatever is referred to when we talk about the soul or the self, the assumption is that whatever we are talking about is already given. In fact, it is, whether or not you have an eternal soul, there is little more given than the fact that you exist, have an irreducible interiority and a concern about your own state in the world and perhaps in reality as a whole. If you take the view of religion in the tradition of those such as William James, this disclosure is the place from which all religion comes, from “man in his solitude” who is aware of the absurd fact that we exist, and that no explanation seems to dent the existential vertigo of that awareness.

For James, there is a condition in which we find ourselves divided under the weight of this condition, that of the “sick soul.” In this condition, the present compensation of life becomes dwarfed by what appear to be the existential facts of the matter, that we are, as he describes it, standing on a frozen lake, and no matter how pleasant the day we know the ice will one day thaw and give beneath us. In this state, we are not just aware of the existential fact that we are, but that we will not be, that suffering and evil cannot be permanently postponed and that our loftiest attempts at “healthy mindedness” cannot keep us from the pit beneath us.

Perhaps one of the great philosophical accounts of this state is that of Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy, in which Boethius, betrayed and unfairly condemned to what would be a brutal execution, writes a text from his prison cell in which “lady philosophy” appears to him, and having heard him bemoan his state, responds that his despair is primarily a condition of forgetting, drawing on Plato’s notion that all knowledge is not learned but remembered, she argues that when “the mind forgets its inward light” the role of philosophy is to aid us to realise our identification and desire for the Good and seek to ascend towards it.

For someone like William James, we can speak of this objectively only through the approach of pragmatism, we cannot prove that such a condition exists, only that there are within the realm of our experiences the kind of landscapes that do not ignore but integrate the suffering of reality and enable us to wholly transcend it, and that these experiences are identified with a condition we must call religious. Perhaps personally, this objectivity is better thought of as example, which is another reason why we return to the fact that philosophy in the religious sense is pastoral, personal. Anyone who has spent time in religious contexts will know that while dogmatism and all the other features of ordinary religiousness might be as irksome as anywhere, there are unquestionably those from whom a holy light shines in the most ordinary and unattended of ways. Ultimately, if God exists, he is to be found in the religious person who shows concern for you when no one else does as much as in the apparent fortune of the cosmological constant being what it is.

All of this is not to argue we should shrug off apologetics and go and be better examples as Christians. I do think that, but apologetics is a space that will continue to exist either way, and public witness still matters. What is important is how easily we get lost in the arguments apologetics concerns itself with, such that we lose sight of the personal immediacy of the religious life. Often in our concern to seek popular figures for our side, we abandon the primacy of example; often in seeking to claim evidence will solve our uncertainty we abandon the primacy of the religious life as the journey of the individual soul seeking to know and transcend itself.

Yet there is another reason why this more personal or pragmatic view of religion can matter. If we recognise that a kind of inner honesty and a genuine relation to experience is what constitutes religious existence, the fundamental enemy to good religious dialogue or apologetics becomes dogmatism and projected certainty, not a lack of assertion about any argument we may have. A believer can and probably should have more affinity with an atheist who struggles with divine hiddenness or genuinely finds the problem of evil too much to overcome in order to believe than they can with a fellow believer asserting that the fine tuning argument or psycho-physical laws proves theism. The latter assumes that we have acquired our faith through an act of reason instead of a change in our relation to facts that are the same for all of us.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that on the other side of religious belief, the facts of reality do seem different to us. That things are intrinsically connected, that a meaning beyond circumstance imbues our actions, that life is transcendently good in a way that compels us to transfigure suffering into gratefulness and compassion for others: these are the things we seem to seek when we want ‘evidence’ of religious claims, but were the evidence to be before us it would not itself manifest these things in our experience or our persons. Christians claim salvation is a thing lived not a fact known, the latter being a static trace of something never seperate from its living in our experience, confirmed not by proposition but by our becoming of it.

How then does one convince those uninclined to see its truth? Again, I don’t wish to entirely dismiss the role of rational apologetics, but one often neglected answer is the case to be made that the religious life is wholly and transcendently worth wanting, a case made through a different kind of communication than argumentation. In a strange sense, in the age of clickbait and hot takes where the regularity of church attendance is eclipsed, we have somewhat lost the role of the religious sermon as fulfilling this kind of speech. Particularly within evangelicalism, there is a blinding to this in the idea that stirring the emotion is a sort of controlled and contrivabble act, leading to worship music, alter calls and even sermons with music in the background designed to cheaply elicit the emotion of the audience and convince them that business with truth and with God has taken place.

Nonetheless, the work of religious sermons is an overlooked place where something can genuinely be transferred, and a certain kind of rhetorical, one may even say lyrical speech that arouses conviction, in which the mind is unsettled and unhoused and awakened to the sense of an other in the ordinary intercourse of our experiences can occur. This is one of the many reasons why ordinary church and ordinary pastoral diligence matters, because although such moments happen rarely and in the most uncelebrated of religious contexts, they are of great significance. In a poem by R.S. Thomas titled The Chapel, in a building “ugly and without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it” such an exchange might occur, perhaps reflecting what all apologetics are, whatever they claim about reason and evidence, ultimately trying to achieve:

Here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.

There are two questions that stand before anyone wishing to make a case for Christian universalism. The first is what you might call the ‘currency’ of the gospel: how are people saved, what does it mean to be saved and when it comes to salvation in this life, who gets it. In other words, what must I do to be saved and how can we appeal to how someone else might be. Naturally within Christianity there are various nuances and conflicts over how any of this works, for some Protestants the answer is cast in a judicial terms, for the Orthodox church more in the language of process, Protestants and Catholics would disagree over the solas, the role of the church, and so on. But what everyone agrees on, and what must generally be accepted, is that either by conscious rejection of God in terms of belief or rejection of God’s goodness in terms of action, there are those who in life are not saved. No Christian rejects this idea.

What follows then is the question of how God relates to the ultimate destiny of everyone and everything beyond this ‘currency’ of salvation. What happens to those who reject God? At this point, there is a necessary change in approach. While the currency of salvation is and can be more directly expressed in explicit form, arguments about ultimate things rest upon more abstract arguments about how various claims about God’s nature and intents fit with how we interpret metaphorical language and how we balance what seems like contradictory claims. In terms of what we must do now, for all of us the currency of the gospel is what is immediate, but at the same time this currency is nested in the whole, and how we see that whole informs our ultimate understanding of God’s nature, an understanding that can have extremes of different depending on how things are cast. The question of gospel currency is pragmatic, it concerns what we must do, both to seek salvation ourselves and to appeal to it in others, and as being so it cannot be universal, it must seperate. The question of ultimate nature concerns how we think about God as a whole, and it must bring together.

These two aspects inform one another in ways that can entirely change the other. Let’s say you believe that after death, everyone is immediately saved and “hell” is just a metaphor for the bad consequences of sin in life because you feel is must be so to uphold God’s goodness. Clearly, the urgency and meaning of the gospel would be diminished, as would an explanation of those passages that seem to state otherwise. Yet at the same time casting hell instead as eternal conscious torment significantly changes our understanding of who God is. Can a God who would glory in the eternal suffering of the damned be good? Can eternal punishment for temporal sins be just?

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If you hear someone on the internet tell you they are an idealist, it has now become a cliche that at some point the words ‘Bernardo Kastrup’ are going to follow. Kastrup, a Dutch philosopher and engineer, has amassed significant fandom and has had growing influence upon the popular perception of idealism by appearing on unnumbered podcasts to defend his version which he calls ‘analytic idealism’: the theory that everything that exists exists within a ‘mind at large’ from which you and I are breakaway ‘alters.’ For Kastrup, everything we think of as being out there in the real world is nothing but ‘mental states.’

Like many of the popular ‘everything is consciousness’ theories that exist today, Kastrup spends much of his time taking aim at what is naturally cast as the enemy of such theories: materialism. In my observation one of the dangers of such approaches is often that the logic can appear to go something like “p1 materialism is false; p2 therefore my theory is true,” and most of the work establishing the theory is smuggled in under a critique of another.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean the critique can’t have a point, and so for some reason I decided to read and review Kastrup’s book that devotes itself to the subject of said critique, the subtly titled: Why Materialism Is Baloney. I had high(ish) hopes for at least a reasonable review of some of the main problems with materialism, but at the outset there are some alarm bells. The subtitle of the book is the egregiously ridiculous “How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe and everything” and when you open it there is a commendation from none other than “pioneer in the field of mind body medicine” Deepak Chopra. Uh oh.

Diving into the book things don’t get a lot better. The first chapter “the current worldview and its problems” contains a scathing account of materialism, which apparently suffuses our culture and is maintained by the “intellectual elite” and the “mainstream media” in spite of the fact that science does not justify it because science only observes patterns and regularities. In theory this is fine and I might be inclined to agree, the problem is that firstly Kastrup’s definition of materialism is extremely loose and generic, and secondly you quite quickly come across some rather egregious strawmanning of opposing positions. In the first chapter alone he dismisses illusionism in a paragraph referenced only as those people who deny consciousness exists and quotes Galen Strawson calling it a theory that should make us “a little afraid of the power of human credulity.” He then moves on to condemn panpsychism because, I kid you not, panpsychism claims thermostats would be conscious of you turning them on and off and “the problem with panpsychism is, of course, that there is precisely zero evidence that any inanimate object is conscious.” He then claims Strawson’s quote is ironic, because panpsychism is just “a modern articulation of animism” and Strawson should have “heeded his own advice” about credulity.

Then in the next chapter you get statements like this:

“Recent and powerful physical evidence indicates strongly that no physical entity or phenomenon can be explained separately from, or independently of, its subjective apprehension in consciousness. This evidence has been published in the prestigious science journal Nature.”1

Kastrup simply moves on with “if this is true…” without telling you what this evidence is, only that it tells you consciousness cannot be reduced to matter. If you look up the reference number in the back you get nothing but a name and a date, no article title or anything, and all I can find after much Googling is a paper about nonlocality and quantum entanglement, which seems to be telling you nothing about consciousness.

A few chapters later we return to this paper, which Kastrup now informs you wholesale disproves non-contextuality, which he says is the idea that the world is the same before you look at it and that looking at it doesn’t change, and he insists that you “must” accept because of this paper that the world changes instantaneously when you look at it, that the world has two states, state A before it is observed and state B after it is observed, and that we essentially have no access to state A, which he claims doesn’t exist because idealism.

Once again, neither the title nor the contents of the paper are mentioned, it is referenced to only as “the Nature paper” and Kastrup declines to tell you how it proves any of this, which is rather fishy. He finishes this section with another assertive statement: “the 2007 Nature paper contains strong empirical support for idealism...”

Eventually I dig out what seems to be the article, titled “An experimental test of non-local realism.”2 Fair warning I’m just some idiot and certainly not a physicist, but as far as I can work out it is essentially questioning the idea of locality in quantum physics, the idea that a particle is only influenced by its local surroundings, by attempting to disprove some hidden variable theories. The conclusion does not appear to be anything like what Kastrup seems to be saying, and it seems to have nothing to do with what he means by non-contextuality. I also happened to find another paper published not long after that criticized some of its definitions.

Again, disclaimer: I am entirely unqualified,3 but this strikes me as an attempt to co opt the weirdness of quantum mechanics into justifying something that is likely not so simple, and given the repeated reference only to “the Nature paper” with no mention of how it proves any of the things Kastrup says we “must” accept as “empirical support for idealism,” not even the title of the article let alone any of its contents being mentioned or referenced, I would say at the very least this is a questionable way to try and present scientific data. I can’t even know if Kastrup is interpreting something in it as support for his claim because he hasn’t even mentioned its content. Asserting something just means you “must” accept a set of claims is just a really weird way to engage with claims about scientific evidence.

After all this, he moves on to making a case for another view of consciousness, the ‘filter’ hypothesis. In this view the brain is something more like a radio receiver that filters an at large consciousness into something reduced down into the individual ego:

According to this filter hypothesis of mind-brain interaction no subjective experience is ever generated by the brain, but merely selected by it according to the perspective of the body in space-time…this selection process is akin to a filtering out of conscious experience, like a radio receiver selecting, from among a variety of stations present concurrently in the broadcast signal, that which one wants to listen to, all other stations being filtered out and never reaching the consciousness of the listener.

While this view of consciousness is expressed by some interesting people, in this context this is a great example of one of the things I find frustrating about some of these arguments. At no point has there been any definition about what we are talking of, just vague terms like “subjective experience” or just “consciousness.” The argument so far has assumed that there is something we cannot reduce to matter and assumed that this irreducibility is simply disclosed to us, and that from this it is obvious what we are talking about. I think personally there may be good reasons to think this, depending obviously on what you mean by matter, but there are several issues in the context of using it as a basis for your pet theory: 1. The epistemological problem of how we know what is disclosed to us about consciousness is a fundamental issue in philosophy of mind, and ignoring this is basically ignoring most of the issues with any of these kinds of positions and 2. the ambiguity in definition ends up allowing a huge amount of bad argumentation.

After all, if it already is obvious that consciousness discloses itself as irreducible to matter, whatever matter is here, then obviously materialism is false by definition because matter means ‘stuff’ and consciousness means ‘not stuff,’ which is really no insight at all. The point is, that’s what you have to establish, not what you get to assume for free, that’s a large part of the argument. Even if you think you must appeal to introspection, which indeed you may, you have to do some work to appeal to the critical reader’s ability to do so, e.g. in Philip Goff’s book Galileo’s Error Goff introduces things like the infamous Mary’s Room thought experiment as a way of drawing attention to the distinction. Otherwise you’re just saying “ok, so it’s obvious there’s this non-material stuff, ok, so materialism is false? Great.”

To just insert my view here: I see much of this to be a confusion about overlapping domains of language and the limits of what we can say about ontology, and I find it frustrating to hear the argument that “science says what stuff does, not what stuff is,” followed by, “so here’s a scientific claim about what stuff is” as if it isn’t an immediate violation of the category error you have just criticized. Kastrup goes on to claim that we can present “empirical evidence” for the filter hypothesis including, amazingly, the work of Carl Jung who apparently showed that there is a collective unconscious, the collective unconscious being the archetypal contents of the consciousness at large. He cites one of Jung’s famous anecdotes in which he found a patient looking at the sun and nodding his head who told him the sun had a penis that the wind came from, then Jung later claimed he found out there is some Mithraic myth in which a tube comes out of the sun where the wind comes from.

Problem a) this has nothing to do with consciousness, it’s an independant claim about some kind of shared or inherited memory, archetypical structure, whatever, but it’s not evidence the brain is filtering ‘consciousness’ because contents is not consciousness even if it wasn’t based on Jung’s characteristic obsession with everything being phallic and over egging connections between things. Problem b) the claim that has in theory been made for us to dismiss materialism is the claim that consciousness ‘is’ something that is independant of causal structure which only says what it ‘does,’ now you’re offering an alternative explanation of function. You are evading a set of claims by saying consciousness is what something is not what it does, then saying “here’s something it does.”

I should emphasise at this point lest anyone be in doubt: I am not a materialist at all. But I also think if one is going to attack a position it should generally at least be the best version of that position you can, yet Kastrup is repeatedly standing up his case with comments such as calling denial of his conclusions “a throwback to archaic prejudices that modern thinking should be able to overcome, or reflects a concerning lack of theoretical imagination.” He says the view that his evidence could be caused by the physical brain is “the product of shallow thinking at best and prejudice at worst.” And all this just feels a little conspiratorial, like ‘the reason everyone doesn’t agree with me is institutional power and delusion.’ Yeah, maybe, but that no more frees you from having to make a robust case than it does Candace Owens.

That is an unfair comparison, I grant. A little more saliently he then presents some evidence for his claim that various events in the brain that seem to be highly inhibitory and restrictive such as asphyxiation, near death experiences, psychedelics, and so on, produce what appears to be an ‘expansion’ in conscious experiences, to which I kind of feel like responding with…meh. Take psychedelics: there are interesting theories about why psychedelics experiences are what they are, some of the brain regions inhibited by drugs like psilocybin for example seem to themselves be inhibitory, and so what one theory suggests is that you are getting a huge amount of “unconstrained connectivity” resulting in the synesthetic experiences of a psychedelic trip, as if the conductor of the ego is restrained.4 Yet Kastrup claims this cannot be the case because “the researchers measured no increase in activity anywhere else in the brain. This way one still cannot explain the transpersonal visions of the subjects as an increase in the neural correlates of experience due to reduced inhibition.” But this just seems like willful denial of alternative explanations.

At this point I may be being deliberately skeptical, perhaps when an argument is being propped against a strawman I feel an odd urge to play devil’s advocate when in reality I am entirely sympathetic to the idea that a lot of this stuff hints at how poorly we understand consciousness or the mind. Nonetheless, there is a danger of conspiratorial thinking here. If you think these are scientific questions, then they are scientific questions, but there’s always a hint of suggestion that the answers are being rejected or ignored because of some predisposition towards an ideology. Now this may be a little true, but at the same time studies attempting to prove that, for example, patients with NDEs that contain out of body experiences can correctly identify things in a room have come to not a lot and there remains zero proof that NDEs occur without brain activity and little chance of any soon; so while much of what Kastrup is claiming is fascinating, it seems mostly anecdotal rather than empirical. No one is denying evidence over ideology, it’s just not that convincing or conclusive either way. What he is trying to do is say that if the filter theory was right, this is what we would expect to see, but I’m not sure there is enough clarity about what the filter theory is even proposing to make those kinds of statements meaningful.

In fact, you could come up with an argument fairly simply in which it would seem logical there would be some ‘expansion’ when the brain is more scrambled. There is a lot going on in the brain at any given time, and clearly much of what produces your conscious experience from all those goings on is going to be highly selective and inhibitory, filtering the huge amount of information processing into a single stream or narrative that we call consciousness. If attention and cognition are themselves inhibited, then why would that attention not in some cases overwhelm the conscious aspect of the mind with experience rather than the opposite? I’m not saying that’s a correct theory, I’m just saying I can make up an alternative as reasonable on the spot. Either way, the idea that materialists are rejecting the apparently obvious evidence this stuff is meant to provide out of “shallow thinking” and “prejudice” I think just isn’t the case. I think they likely believe that since science has explained many things that were previously mysterious, the same will be true here.

Another criticism Kastrup seems to have is that materialism implies that consciousness is a false or copied view of reality. Because all perceptions of what is out there are only representations or a “copy” of the outside world, ie he is claiming materialism is a kind of representationalism. He gives the example of Samuel Johnson kicking a rock to refute Berkley’s idealism and points out that under materialism the rock Johnson kicking did in fact exist in his head because he had no real access to the rock itself, only an internal “hallucination.”

This is true by some theories of consciousness, neuroscientist Anil Seth uses the phrase “controlled hallucination” to describe what consciousness is doing, and his work is partly drawing on the ideas of revered neuroscientist Karl Friston whose theories of active inference and the Free Energy Principle see the brain as making predictions about the external world that it models against sense data so that the role of any living organism is simply to continuously reduce the difference between its model of the world and the sense data it receives, the difference between which Friston calls Free Energy. He has said that although he is not philosophically inclined, his friends who are have described his view as a kind of transcendental idealism, something not so far from what Kastrup is pointing out.

Kastrup claims though that unlike materialism, idealism means that we can say that things actually exist. Materialism only gives you a “shadow…not really the real things but merely hallucinations inside your head” because “the real world is some abstract realm of interacting electromagnetic fields that you cannot even visualise.”

Yet I don’t see how Kastrup’s idealism isn’t going to have the same problem. If one was a Platonist of some form or some more complex form of theistic idealist, one could say that what exists out there are forms or objects or concepts we somehow have real access to via some form of participation and it is concepts all the way down in relation to a unity from which they derive, yet for an idealist who thinks reality at large is another mental state: how are we perceiving things across different mental states? Even if the brain is not a material thing but a pattern describing what is all mental, the statistical basis of Friston’s active inference would remain the same, in other words the ‘brain’ would still be inferring something across a boundary and representing it as a predictive state it is adapting itself to. Whether you call it mental or physical makes no difference here.

What Kastrup tries to do after this is argue that the ‘filter’ metaphor applies not to one thing filtering another but to mind filtering mind, by which the ‘ego’ filters or ‘localises’ mental contents. He says:

If there is a self-localization process taking place in mind that is in some-likely partial-way still perceptible from the perspective of ego, then this process will necessarily appear to the ego according to some form. In other words, there will necessarily be an image according to which the ego perceives this process, in much the same way that the process of combustion is perceived by the ego as flames; or the process of blood coagulation is perceived as clots etc. What I am thus claiming is that the brain is the image of a process of localization of mental contents.

Notice here that none of this has anything to do with ontology. Some time ago the argument begun with “science describes processes but can’t tell you what those processes are,” and now Kastrup is essentially describing those processes with a set of substituted words that offer little by way of insight. What does it mean that “combustion is perceived by the ego as flames,” and how does that explain anything? What is combustion? How is the “ego” perceiving it? Claims about “localization” and so on are actually claims of process, and in being so they actually offer little insight into what might be deemed as the central problems. This doesn’t resolve the epistemological problem or the problem of the “copy” world he objects to with materialism, since one still has the issue of how we know any of this if “flame” is actually “combustion” and “combustion” actually “mind.”

At some point, one has to simply step back and apply a ‘model’ in the way we explain things and observe which offer more explanatory avenue. A scientist assumes the brain is made of neural networks and cells and cells of smaller particles and that the brain is interacting with the world outside in way that can be described statistically and so on, a process that is, as Anil Seth calls it, “pragmatic materialism.” So what does Kastrup’s model add?

For example, one might consider that certain kinds of idealism could be aimed at resolving problems of intentionality within physicalism, or perhaps it may simply be aimed at addressing the hard problem that Kastrup brings up, but at this point Kastrup’s idealism seems to me to be creating more problems than it resolves. It adds little to science in terms of insight, it is very confused about whether it can or can’t say anything about process and cause, it isn’t really that ontologically simple because a lot of the terms are ambiguous, and it doesn’t help resolve wider problems with physicalism that a more sophisticated critique might apply.

In the next few chapters Kastrup goes through a set of metaphors for how mind relates to reality at large, including whirlpools, knots and so on, and I will spare you my commentary on the whole thing that I could spend pages picking holes in, but suffice to say I don’t find it massively insightful or remotely convincing. Many of the metaphors could be applied to a more physicalist view of reality, assuming we aren’t strawmanning physicalism, but most of them are simply just a bit fanciful. While in theory one could see a metaphor for the individual point of view forming from some ‘mind’ substrate, the problem is that Kastrup’s iteration of what exactly that ‘consciousness’ would be like has never really answered anything worth answering.

I will lay my cards on the table, I find Kastrup’s idealism to fall halfway between theism and materialism, a kind of impoverished theistic idealism blended with an attempt to make it more ‘sciency’ with terms like ‘ego localization’ and so on, that ends up with all the problems of both and none of the benefits of either. More than that, the fact that I’m not exerting myself to be charitable in regards to Kastrup’s claims in the book is probably something the book itself seems to invite because of its own uncharitable accounts of the alternatives and because of the insistence that anyone not accepting it is somehow deluded or addled by their culture. You as the reader feel almost insulted that you are skeptical of his arguments. Given the book claims almost laughably and frankly arrogantly that “true skeptics know there is no death and fathom the answers to life, the universe and everything,” I am left none the wiser.

In the final chapters Kastrup attempts to sum all this up, make some claims about consciousness continuing after death even though the “ego” doesn’t and so on, and offers some comments on meaning that involve ridiculous sentences like “mind at large, through us and other living beings, must try to find its way to its ultimate topology: a cosmic sphere of mind whose mirrored internal surfaces enable every thought and every experience in all existence to be recursively self reflected. And, even if it reaches that stage, it would still be left with the challenge of interpreting its own metaphor for itself.”

Kastrup is essentially here considering whether mind at large could somehow possess an at large meta awareness or not, and as you can see what this becomes with a strange inevitability is a form of quasi-theology. For religious people, the world already has a kind of idealist form, but their theologies are participatory, and involve symbolic language, ritual and forms of understanding that transcend knowing in other ways. By trying to bridge the scientific and the ‘religious’ Kastrup is, again, sort of stripping the soul out of both, giving you a theology that sounds utterly unappealing and a science muddled with unnecessary terms. If I were to employ Iain McGilchrist’s metaphor, (McGilchrist is someone who on the whole I think handles the relation between science and metaphor or broader claims a lot better) I would say this is an attempt to reduce a right hemisphere view of the world to an analytic, left hemisphere account that wraps all the edges up in a single theory of everything. Yet somehow, by the end of the book not only am I not convinced by his idealism, I actually don’t even want it to be true, it seems like an utterly unappealing worldview the best conclusion of which would basically be to ignore it and carry on. I’m afraid to say ‘materialism is baloney’ is baloney.

But I should finish with a charitable comment. This book was published in 2014, and Kastrup was less well known and his view seemed to be less developed. While he is still quite dismissive of opposing views, I wonder if he wrote this again he might not write some of the passages the same or even might not approve the same subtitle. It’s probably a general lesson that persuading people inclined to agree with you is easy, you just knock up some strawmen and bash them down, but persuading people who disagree or are skeptical is the hard part. Kastrup seems to have much more ability to do this at least to some degree in the podcast sphere, it’s a shame this book doesn’t make much ground for his case.

“Many people may hate intellectuals for their arrogance, lack of curiosity in nonsense, mocking tone, and so forth. But these are essential to being an intellectual.”
—Walter Veit

For those who don’t follow the general kerfuffle that attends philosophy Substack, Philosophy lecturer at the University of Reading Walter Veit has recently taken to the platform in earnest and has, well, here is a brief summary:

1. Writes an article about how we need to get rid of moral language like “right” or “wrong” or “duty” because it causes people to become “hooligans,” is responsible for the culture wars, all of which is because it reflects moral realism and “intuitions.” Says we need to be “moral nihilists” and utilitarians. Compares people who use these words to religious people who believe in myths and unicorns.

2. Claims the reasons his arguments in the above article are insult ridden and appear insubstantial is because it’s a “polemic” and you shouldn’t judge polemics for not being substantial.

3. Declines to respond to multiple people, even other antirealists pointing out what are actually empirical claims in his polemic are unclear and unsubstantiated and instead moves on to more articles taking swipes at other people (probably Philip Goff, again)

4. In spite of claiming the culture wars are bad because they lack pragmatic conflict resolution, publishes another article claiming the reason New Atheism was good was not because of its intellectual achievements but precisely because they mocked and insulted people, and claims we should revive that aspect of it.

5. Publishes an article condemning philosophers who paywall past articles or appeal for paid subscribers (including Philip Goff, if you haven’t worked out by now Veit doesn’t like Philip Goff) and uses what certainly appears like an appeal to the moral language he claims to want to banish, essentially arguing they are not fulfilling their duty, are doing something wrong and are, quote, “downright unethical.”

I made the mistake last week of thinking Veit was interested in any substantive engagement, which turns out to not be the case, so I’m afraid I may now be a little more blunt. There are two problems going on here, the first is with Veit’s actual arguments and what certainly appears to be hypocrisy and confusion, the second is with Veit’s attitude and engagement. These problems are connected because it is harder than it should be to work out what Veit is actually claiming, since, as his love of New Atheism makes clear, and as the above epigram states, he seems to believe polemics are the means by which a philosopher should engage with the public. The problem, as it happens, is that unlike someone like Christopher Hitchens who at least had a piercing wit, Veit is just not very good at polemics. He may imagine he sounds like an erudite philosophy professor dispensing cutting remarks for public consumption, but the reality is his points are often muddled and he reads more like a fourteen year old on r/atheism at 2am.

So let’s take Veit’s article on moral nihilism. A big problem here is Veit is completely unclear about what he even means in his hurry to condemn people he disdains. He claims we need to banish moral language, but the only examples he gives are “rights,” “wrongs,” and “duties,” and importantly, the reason he wants rid of them is not just the words but that the words signify moral realism. He doesn’t explain how or why, he just compares them to unicorns and myths, implying they reflect silly and false beliefs.

Yet it’s hard to see a difference in actual practice and implication between saying something is “wrong” and saying something is “downright unethical,” which Veit directly says about professional philosophers paywalling articles. He certainly implies they have a duty to act a certain way. No doubt he would protest that he only uses “ethical” to refer to the position of his subjective values, but so what? How is someone not versed in his views meant to pick up on that? Is it clear? Why can’t I use “right” or “wrong” and say it merely reflects subjective values? in fact, where is the evidence in the first place that right or wrong actually signify that a person is claiming to have intuited a stance independant moral fact such that a clear difference could be established between “so and so is wrong” and “so and so is downright unethical” such that we can say the former is moral language signifying moral realism and the latter is moral nihilism signifying antirealism and merely expressing a subjective value? I would bet if you ask a bunch of people to clarify the difference between “morally wrong” and “downright unethical” the last thing any of them would say is that one means there are things that are right and wrong and the other doesn’t.

Not only that, one can give many examples of words like “duty” being used in a way that doesn’t imply moral realism at all. I don’t think the idea that I have duties at work does, and one could argue the idea that I have a duty to my country doesn’t necessarily. Part of the interest of any serious discussion would be to consider what you think people mean by such words, not assert what you think they mean and call them stupid. It is plainly just as definsible to say “philosophers have a duty to the public good” while only implying a duty according to the values of the role they have taken rather than referring to absolute realism, as it is to call people “unethical.” In fact, I would argue the former is less in line with realism and the latter implies it more. Let us be blunt: This is an unsubstantiated, confused, hypocritical claim, especially when it is used to mock people as if they believe in unicorns.

But this seems to be Veit’s modus operandus. It’s pretty clear across Veit’s positions that many of his claims are those of mere convenience, held when it suits him, discarded when it doesn’t. In any given context, he wants to be able to imply the rightness of certain things, and in any given context he wants to be able to screw pragmatism, engage in polemics and insult people. He wants to condemn metaphysics and expects everyone to assume his metaphysical assumptions. He wants to sweepingly condemn people for using moral terms, without examples, specifics, or any empirical evidence to support what are empirical claims but he wants to be able to claim people should do things. He is allowed to refer morally without implications but act pompously towards others as if their language and their language alone reflects “intuitions” and somehow he is morally superior because he is purporting to be expressing the far more noble “subjective values,” even though in practice there seems to be little difference, since Veit certainly seems to believe with a fairly absolute conviction that his subjective values are better than everyone else’s.

What’s so absurd about all this is that none of it is really about either metaethics or about pragmatism. Whether or not moral language really reflects non naturalist realism, whether or not moral language really causes conflict as opposed to allowing a common vocabulary by which we express values: these are both interesting and empirical questions within philosophy. The absurd irony is that Veit condemns philosophers in another article for engaging in flights of fancy instead of doing essentially scientific work. Yet Veit has done none here, here’s offered no empirical support for any of his assertions, has declined to provide any when criticized, and is by any measure behaving and arguing in a way that is driven by something one might as well call “intuitions” if we are throwing the word around, and is being obstinately unscientific. If I wanted to make an argument that we changed the colour of all the road signs because it would make people drive better, I’d expect to have to make a case that a) current signs are causing problems in the first place, with specifics, and b) the proposed change, with specifics, would solve anything. If I just smear people for not accepting my view what have I achieved?

Then, most importantly in all this, we come to the issue of philosophical reputation. One of Veit’s themes is sanctimoniously condemning huge swathes of philosophers for various crimes that are apparently violating their duty as servants to “objective truth.” (Sorry, not duty, “subjective values,” but if you haven’t worked out by now there’s no discernible difference.) In a lengthy article, Veit condemns all philosophers using paywalls on articles or even asking for support because to do so is “unethical;” he condemns the “unethical behaviour” of people like Philip Goff for daring to have a footnote where they ask for paid subscribers, saying it is “dangerous for the public reputation of academia as a whole” calling it “hypocrisy” and in order to “preserve the integrity of academia itself” he is going to donate his tiny amount of paid subscriber money to shrimp charities. Yet I don’t see how this could even be hypocrisy in the first place, if Goff or someone had condemned other people for asking for subscriptions then did it then maybe, but he hasn’t so even were it to be unethical I think the accusation of hypocrisy is wrong. Also it’s not unethical anyway, writers can do what they want, we know nothing about their personal financial circumstances and can only judge their motives on what they say and do and write, and I for one see nothing incongruous or questionable about Goff’s motives at all. If you want a related case that is more significant to public philosophy, arguing peer reviewed papers shouldn’t be behind an academic paywall would actually be a much better case to pursue.

So let us genuinely ask a question. Which is doing more damage to the reputation of philosophy: Philip Goff, who engages with good humour, responds to criticism, and who just happens to have a sentence at the end of his articles asking for subscriptions; or Walter Veit, who pumps out insult riddled polemics, engages without any charity whatsoever and with no attempt to consider any position but his own, who appears to disdain both the public and other philosophers, and whose arguments give the appearance of someone with a grasp of their subject as shallow as a children’s paddling pool in a heatwave, and thinks we should celebrate that arrogance and mocking approach? It seems to me pretty obvious it is Veit who is doing damage to philosophy and soiling its reputation, and I say that as someone who has no conviction whatsoever that there is something it is like to be an electron.

And I actually think this last point is a real problem. Let’s say Veit really does believe moral language causes conflict, culture wars and hinders problem solving, and humanity and society would be better without it. This is in some degree and empirical claim he has not evidenced, but let’s say he has some evidence. How do you go about it? Again: just make a clear case. For example, Veit in another article says things like “for knowledge is a common good that humanity should share.” He repeatedly uses the word “should,” to demand what other academics should do, which I submit no ordinary person would read any differently from him saying he thinks it is right. How, in his view, is this any different in actual practice? His articles seem to be merely creating conflict rather than solving it, so how can it be claimed to be pragmatically or practically different?

Note he has also said nothing about context. Does this refer to ordinary people? Policy makers? can Veit even show that in those contexts people are using moral language? If you consider many of the debates in UK parliament over assisted dying for example, the appeals are to the implications of the policy as much as to generic “its wrong” appeals. Of course people have emotional convictions about it, but often in such contexts we seem to recognise that to cross bridges and persuade the other side we have to make practical arguments, so to what and to where is this condemnation being applied? If it is to all values as a whole can he defend the idea his own don’t at some point ground out at a just so we must assert or believe or smuggle in under the pretence of objectivity? I doubt it.

If he did explain, this would offer clarity, define his position, and if he believes it would make the world better, actually provide practical solutions. Instead, he compares moral realists to dogmatic religious people, claims the only reason philosophers don’t agree with him is they are clinging to their careers, claims without evidence realism and moral language makes people hooligans, then moves on. Who does this help? Who is this for? The public? The public would be none the wiser, so other philosophers? Even other antirealists have since distanced themselves from Veit’s view and the rest have just been insulted, so who?

In one of Veit’s articles he claims there are two type of philosophers: swallows, who fly around in metaphysical flights of fancy and achieve nothing, and moles, who diligently help the work of science and actually achieve stuff. Let’s say this were true. I submit that in spite of Veit believing himself to be a mole, in this metaphor Veit is neither of these. Veit is, in fact, a third part of the metaphor I have just added: a pigeon. Pigeons achieve neither the vast migratory scale of the swallow or the solitary tunnelling of the mole, but instead they flap around and crap on stuff. Like the pigeons that flock in many of our cities, the end result is just an annoying mess that someone else has to come and clear up. So much for the public reputation of philosophy. I hope this foray will become an example of how the public, certainly in contexts like Substack, are actually far more read and have a far bigger appetite for substantive content than it might superficially appear. There are clearly philosophers or even scientists on this platform who have earned respect with how they have engaged, some of whom I have learned from and who have benefitted the general engagement on the platform. Sadly Walter Veit is not one of them. In this case “stick to your day job” may well be the best response.

In his work Varieties of Religious Experience, William James considers a movement around during his time that he calls “the religion of healthy mindedness.” At the outset he is describing what might just be called an optimistic personality, considering those people who are simply inclined to see the world and its contents as resolutely good. Yet specifically he looks at those for whom this is adopted not as a mere reflection of psychological disposition but as an adopted belief drawn from claims made by religious figures about an “infinite spirit” with which the believer comes to realise they are already one, that love and happiness are already the ground of reality and that in believing so they are suddenly freed from certain mental anxieties. Within this philosophy reality is wholly good, free from evil, and all you have to do is believe it.

These religious movements still exist widely today. Figures such as Rupert Spira, a contemporary spiritual guru and seller of ‘nonduality’ is essentially marketing the same thing, one of his books is titled “you are the happiness you seek,” and his philosophy is fairly simple: consciousness is peace and love and happiness, you have but to realise you are one with it and you will have infinite access to it and never need suffer, well, suffering again because upon realising all consciousness is infinite and loving everything will be, well, infinite and loving.

One can clearly observe that what Spira is selling has much in common with what James is referring to, a stage or state of religious experience that since it persists could be said to be a feature of our psychology or of religious ideas in general. James’ diagnosis of it is hard to disagree with: he refers to it as “once born,” in the sense that it constitutes a kind of stage of religious experience, but because it simply ignores or postpones the reality of the human condition that its adherents at some point have to face up to it cannot properly be called ‘religious’ in a profound sense. Its revelations are not akin to the more serious religious states of the mystic or saint, but instead James calls it the religion of “mind cure” or “mental hygiene.”

One might wonder, though, whether this really is a universal psychological and religious phenomenon as opposed to something unique to the Christian West. James makes a mention of its relation to Hinduism, but even he suggests Hinduism is better understood in the category of properly religious rather than a naively optimistic philosophy. Spira himself seems to believe his philosophy is drawn from Vedanta, yet the generalised shallowness of his prose is hard to claim is related to the complex and at times impenetrable poetry of the Upanishads and “everything is happiness” would be to say the least a simplistic derivation of the atman-brahman identification.

So are these experiences universal, or dare one wonder if they are in fact reflections of highly enculturated notions drawn far more from Christianity than from either universal psychology or some set of universal religious ideas. One of the limitations of James’ great text has always been that even if it is not ‘Christian’ it is clearly better described as varieties of Western religious experiences. Yet James was something of a perennialist, while he was a pluralist in the sense of considering all experiences through the same lens, he considered that a single set of mystical experiences lay at the core of all religions. Of course, he was limited by his scope of research and so that he didn’t show what he drew together to reflect the phenomenon of religion more widely is not a discredit to his work, but it does leave a question open about how much more widely applicable it is.

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I was a teenager in the peak of New Atheism. Like many my age brought up in a religious home, there was a brief period during my adolescence in which it appealed to me. If there is anything positive to say about a movement that made mockery and condemnation of religion its currency, it is that for those brought up in a particularly fundamentalist religious background the public authorising of saying or thinking things that enabled a breaking away from it came for some with a great sense of liberation and release. While for some this may mean a permanent gratitude to its protagonists, for me the phase was fairly short. This was in part because my upbringing was positive in many ways, and the Christianity I knew far more wholesome than others may have experienced, and so it seemed transparent to me that at least some of the claims that religion is always bad were borne of ignorance as much as familiarity. So it was that ultimately, rather than a sense of freedom from stifling repression resulting from my lack of belief, I felt a much more mixed sense of loss. Not only that, while the ‘debunking’ attitude of Dawkins and co may have appealed to my teenage desire for rebellion and self-expression, I am someone who has had what you might call existential anxiety since as long as I can remember; in other words I thought about big stuff a lot. As much as freedom from propositional God might have had some appeal, it seemed an unavoidable fact that the New Atheists were ushering everyone off a bus then leaving them at the bus station under the assumption everyone would know where to go. Morality, culture, meaning, purpose, and all the things religion had coordinated for as long as human beings entered behavioural modernity: these things were apparently obvious and of course the world would be better, more rational, more moral, and more coherent once superstition and false belief had been banished from the garden.

Whether New Atheism was successful even by its own standards is up for debate. It is only in very recent years the downward trajectory of religious adherence in Europe and America has flattened out a little, but in spite of Christian claims of a ‘quiet revival’ or ‘amazing rebirth,’ there is little sign of it going in the opposite direction. How much of this was due to New Atheism as opposed to New Atheism merely being a surface phenomenon that reflected something already going on is questionable, but one thing is clear: whether New Atheism had any role in accelerating religious decline, the general New Atheist view of religion and their hopes for what would happen when we got rid of it has failed wholesale. One might argue New Atheism came to an unceremonial end around 2017 when an unknown Canadian psychology professor named Jordan Peterson rented out a theatre in Toronto and gave a series of lectures on the psychological significance of the biblical stories. Whether he had anything to say of substance beneath his claims, he didn’t dismiss the New Atheists highly propositional and unpragmatic view of religion as much as the sheer unprecedented popularity of his lectures showed that the view had no interest to a generation, a generation of young men that were roughly my age: the adolescents of New Atheism.

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I have generally avoided the moral arguments that take place here on Substack. Since I don’t really care whether there are big fat stance independant intuitions or even think such debates are necessarily resolving anything, I have generally preferred to be one of the quiet quietists on many of the debates. As it is such debates are generally outside of my domain, since I am a Christian and have a commitment at the least to certain theological ways of speaking about my obligations to what is right, but recently philosopher at the University of Reading Walter Veit published what he self-confessedly called a “polemic” titled “To hell with moral realism” and a subsequent article titled “the end of moral philosophy,” both arguing for the dispensing entirely of morals and moral language, justified by a stream of what are probably best described as insults towards philosophers and ordinary people who cling to such language. As someone who spends most of my time thinking and writing about religion, my inner Smaug was awoken by Veit’s repeated comparison of moral belief with religion, with myths, and fairytales, all of which are apparently pre-scientific hindrances to rational thinking that should be “consigned to hell.” Veit thinks not just that morals aren’t objectively, stance independently real as some anti-realist philosophers would argue, but that moral language both reflects belief in said objectivity, and should be got rid of and replaced by a kind of amoral utilitarianism aimed at resolving conflicts between subjectively held values.

When suggesting moral language is nothing but an expression of moral realism and that it should be dispensed with, the obvious question would be what moral language and beliefs are doing. Does the moral language of ordinary people reflect absolute moral realism, how should we think about it? What is its value? The answer, according to Veit, is rather depressingly the New Atheist stance towards ordinary people’s beliefs, which is that they are stupid and wrong and need updating according to science. He says rights and wrongs and duties are “leftovers from a pre-scientific age in which dogma and myths ruled over evidence and reason,” and he claims “humans are largely irrational and addicted to their own intuitions, which we had to overcome in order to develop modern science,” resulting in the “dogma of moral realism” which is expressed in the culture wars, for which realism is apparently responsible, causing people to behave like “irrational hooligans.” (I note Walter presents neither any evidence that the culture wars employ the language of objective morality nor that said language is their cause, I assume because the simplicity of the latter claim is enough to render it fairly explanatorily useless.)

Walter’s disdain at those who don’t share his views is not only reserved for the ordinary people apparently addled by moral language but, guess what, all philosophers who don’t agree with him. He compares people who speak about morals to “religious zealots standing in town squares with annoying loud speakers” and the only reason philosophers don’t accept his views is because it “would mean that their job here is done and that they’ve wasted much of their lifetime defending theories that aren’t even close to truth” so they “desperately cling to their alternatives,” again, “like the vast majority of religious leaders.” Thus moral language of rights, wrongs, duties, and so on are “like unicorns, gods, and other fairy tales, they should be consigned to hell.”

One might point out at the outset that the actual arguments here are threadbare, that smearing people who think there are morals is to say the least not exactly a good PR move for someone who wants to argue for self declared moral nihilism, and most obviously that such comments rather transparently reflect gripes, annoyances and prejudices held by the author rather than clear eyed logical conclusions, an ironic fact given Veit is claiming we must dismiss our “convictions” and “deeply held values.” His basis for this certainly appears from his clumsy polemics to be at least in part his own convictions and deeply held values.

When it was pointed out that most of the essay is thin on argumentation, Veit responded that “criticizing a polemic for being polemical is a bit pointless,” a defence that might sound better if it was actually a half decent polemic in the first place or wasn’t written by an actual professional philosopher attempting to market the end of morality to the masses with the wit of a fourteen year old who’s just read The God Delusion for the first time. When I responded that this was pointless, he claimed there in fact was an argument after all: “Premise 1: The main arguments for moral realism depend on intuitions. Premise 2: Intuitions are unreliable. Conclusion: The main arguments for moral realism are unreliable.”

This is rather incongruous given his claims, what Veit was arguing is that we get rid of moral language, become moral nihilists and replace it with some form of cold utilitarianism, something which is as much a claim about the role of moral language as it is about the existence of a certain kind of moral reality. The above argument is adjacent to this, since some might argue ordinary people are merely using moral language rather than making absolute moral claims, or question whether they even have intuitions let alone if that even means anything. Clearly at the outset, one of Walter’s problems arises from his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of certain terms in order to dispense his polemics. One of these would be “intuitions,” which he claims are both the ground of moral realist arguments and also “unreliable.” We are “addicted to our intuitions” and intuitions are what we have to “overcome in order to develop modern science.” Yet the problem with these claims is that “intuitions” doesn’t really mean anything here. If we take it to mean something like a “hunch” then it’s ridiculous to say we had to overcome it to achieve modern science, after all, how many theories and ideas in science started because someone had a hunch they pursued? The hunch itself is not a fact until it becomes something, but it may often be useful, and reflects nothing more than the fact that we aren’t the conscious initiators of our ideas. Some hunches are wrong, some are moments of inspiration. Either way, it’s hard to argue ordinary people see morals primarily as hunches especially in a way that constitutes something that would also interfere with science. So what does it mean? What is unreliable? If intuitions means that we just know some stuff as basic, then there are ways it’s trivially true, as some of Walter’s arguments for his alternatives later assume. Without clarity though none of this means a lot.

The point is, if the whole premise of your argument not just for arguing that morals aren’t real but that moral language both reflects moral realism and is a hindrance to progress is because you think ordinary people express belief in intuitions as revealing objective moral facts and “intuitions are unreliable,” then you are required, rather ironically, to actually defend what you mean by “intuitions,” and show that people believe all that. You yourself would be arguing ordinary people think morals are stance dependently real because of their intuitions and that this is what moral language reflects. In making his claims Veit ties common moral language to the kinds of claims made by certain philosophers he is taking aim at, thus he binds himself to their claims in a way that means he has to defend their basis before claiming they are faulty. If, on the other hand, you recognise that “intuitions” is a hazy and polysemous term that could mean all sorts of things from hunches to emotions to instincts to basic valenced experiences to goodness knows what else, we end up at square one. Throwing in comments like “scientists teach their students that intuitions are unreliable garbage” is helping no one and further reflects Veit’s own inability to see past his annoyances, since a) no scientists are wasting their time saying things like this and b) if they did said student would likely reply “what are you talking about?” to which said scientist would either have to say they don’t know, or refer to something else to which “intuitions” refers.

One might say there is something analogous to religion here, which Veit’s swipes suggest he has an equally low view of. Let us say that propositionally you come to reject theism because you consider some argument for God’s existence false, or perhaps you decide we can at best be agnostic about it because the arguments are not propositionally convincing. Does it follow that all belief in God is nothing but philosophical propositions, that all religion is doing is serving as pre-science, housing factually incorrect beliefs, and must immediately be dispatched? Well, you might reject its propositions, but anyone who wants to make an account of what we are to do about religion has to explain what it actually is and is doing. This seems obvious, we assume, but neither evolutionary nor cognitive accounts of how religion arises are that satisfying let alone widely agreed on, and it must be emphasised that the person who claims to disbelieve in God is not left with nothing, they are left with something that most humans that have ever existed partake in in some form, and whose forms of thinking persist even beyond its bounds. If you reject propositional accounts of God, by definition continuing to view religion through the lens of propositional accounts of God will only hinder your understanding of it. The same is true of morals: if you reject claims about moral realism, you can’t “explain” moral language with “morals don’t exist,” because you have explained nothing. If God is not an explanation for religion, something else is, if absolute morals are not an explanation for moral language because they don’t exist, something else is. “People used to believe stupid stuff” is woefully incurious and reflects not their blindness but yours.

The problem with morals is even more complicated because if we reject God we might still be left with religion and its psychological and cultural components, if we claim to dispense with whatever objective morals are, we are still left with the domain most people understand as moral under a different name. Even calling oneself a “moral nihilist” is still a kind of moral language, and as we will get to, utilitarianism still rests on ‘moral’ foundations. Thus there is a slightly muddled double argument here: if the argument is nothing more than that in some contexts we might be better served if we were less emotional and more pragmatic and more precise with our language and expressions, you aren’t going to have much trouble getting people to agree, although writing a hand waving polemic to claim our language needs to be precise and less emotional might be too hypocritical to be taken seriously; if the argument is that your deeply held values about the wrongness of killing babies or something is only justified if you can come up with a scientific reason why it is the case and that all language about its wrongness is a fairy tale like believing in unicorns, then you have a problem with converting what you claim are “subjective values” into something justified by the lofty language of science in a way that is remotely workable.

Does utilitarianism step in here to save us? Veit believes so, he argues the solution to these problems is the shotgun wedding of moral nihilism with utilitarianism. He claims we need both, because moral language is unhelpful, again citing the culture wars as an (unproven) example of something apparently caused by moral language, and that utilitarianism provides us with what we need, which is “conflict resolution, social coordination, and cost-benefit analysis.”

Yet the rather obvious problem is that utilitarianism can’t just be applied as conflict resolution or cost-benefit without some basis because most people don’t want to hold their views for reasons they will accept are merely their own subjective values. If someone thinks torturing babies is wrong, they don’t think it’s wrong for them and merely want to be left alone to not torture babies, they likely think it’s wrong for other people to torture babies, and if some psychopath wants to, they want them to be stopped. So the mediation here is not whether we can pragmatically stop these two people arguing or work out which solution is cheapest, it’s whether we have some principle or legal view like rights that enable us to agree it is actually ‘wrong,’ unless you think the removal of moral language will cause people to stop thinking others should be bound by what they feel, in which case you really are arguing for an immoral society. A utilitarian would argue it is wrong to make a baby suffer on the basis of its foundations, which most people would accept as the case, but Walter wants us to be moral nihilists and the assumption that it’s obviously wrong that a baby suffers sounds a lot like a reference to a shared ‘intuition’ which sounds a lot like an agreed upon moral fact, within our society at the very least, and we can’t give it ‘rights’ because rights are in hell with unicorns. Even if we take the idea that some utilitarians do that consciousness gives us a kind of pre-loaded moral colour palette, with all the problems that entails, you still have a claim for an ‘objective’ premise upon which what follows is scaffolded. The point is, even to utilitarianism, the “moral nihilism” is adding nothing. I remind you, moral nihilism does not mean mere deference to pragmatism, Veit claims “that this would be an amoral society is no objection. For we would all be better off if we cast off the yoke of tyranny that is morality.”

You'd think at this point having made such an obviously inflammatory statement Veit would offer some justification, but no. He simply declares that such a conclusion renders metaethics redundant and that most moral philosophers are merely clinging on out of desperation and denial, with another swipe at the religious thrown in for good measure. Nothing about the many problems with utilitarianism, nor about how you combine its ground floor assumptions with nihilism. Indeed, one wonders if Veit in reality means very little of what his polemics suggest, in another article he sounds far more like a routine, albeit contradictory utilitarian: “pleasures and pains still exist, as do preferences. Things can still be better or worse for humans or other animals from their own point of view, irrespective of whether morality exists. And we can, of course, care about these interests…The idea that things can’t be ‘good’ for someone from their own point of view, unless moral realism is correct, is a common error committed by philosophers. When I speak of nihilism enabling a better world, I don’t imply any objective evaluation of the world in moral terms, just that individually we would be better of and should prefer it on pure prudential grounds.”

Is this really “moral nihilism” given you fairly obviously require a subjective basis that is both agreed upon and requires some common reflection? Aren’t you just smuggling in the objectifying of subjectivity and hoping no one will notice? Will people actually go along with the nihilistic basis? He says “Of course, I am not denying that an embrace of nihilism may promote selfishness in some individuals. But it is a mistake to think that there is a necessary link here. If you have an altruistic prosocial psychology, none of that will change if you become a nihilist.” He goes on “If things can be better or worse for individuals, independently from morality, then we are free to ask whether morality itself is harmful.”

So basically, if you’re selfish it might make you more selfish but if you’re nice it might not. Great, but not particularly helpful or empirical if you want to argue for an entire society sloughing the scent of moral beliefs or claim “better” and “worse” is somehow “independant from morality” as if you’ve somehow fixed it by adjusting the terms slightly so they sound more functional. Not to mention an obvious flaw with the argument is that there is no empirical evidence Veit has provided that such a change actually would lead to these or any consequences in any direction, nor is there even any for the claim that moral language is the problem in the first place other than that Veit has a distaste for it. One would think the irony of arguing for the objectivity of something you subjectively and reflexively believe would not be lost on him, but alas no.

Anyway, I am going to do something I haven’t done that much recently or really at all: put my ‘Tom Holland’ hat on and defend wholesale ‘the Tom Holland argument’ in a context where I think it is actually of some value: against naive views such as Veit’s. For those unfamiliar, Holland is a popular historian who has argued that much of our modern society’s values are dependant essentially upon Christian moral assumptions, that our assumptions about altruism, concern for the weak and so on are derived wholesale from Christianity, and that many modern rights movements find their origin in Christian history: basically like it or not we’re all Christian in our moral and cultural thinking.

I have written plenty about the problems with this argument, although I actually think many of the problems are problems for Christians who want to strap it to a moral argument for God’s existence. For those claiming to have a view of the world that claims we can do better ‘morally’ as a society if we get rid of ‘morals,’ the assumption that prosociality and altruism are just tenants of psychology that utilitarianism can bootstrap has a few problems, among which is the sheer scale of difference between our own values and those of other societies both historically and globally. Holland establishes his argument by pointing out how radical Christian claims about the evaluation of the weak were in a Roman context in which Caesar was worshipped as the son of a god and boasted of slaughtering a million Gauls. While his argument that it must therefore be Christianity or Rome we inherit is weaker when applied to the modern world, part of his point is that we often don’t internalise how if pluralism or relativism really are the case, viewed naturalistically through the lens of the historian our own assumptions about morality are highly contingent facts of history. How many of our assumptions are really ‘Christian’ has much to do with semantics and is debatable, but that moral nihilism assumes we can grant a set of ‘obvious’ facts about wellbeing and subjective values upon which we can base utilitarianism is simply an absurd claim. That we could think otherwise and that millions of humans have thought otherwise is one of the most basic facts there is, a fact which, ironically, many antirealists might base their case upon. Holland’s claim that a lot of modern atheism and its concomitant assumptions are a naive form of Christianity may be too much, but insofar as they proclaim to erect on a scaffold something that actually rests upon a set of contingent facts, they are surely a naive form of something.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that Veit includes so many swipes at religion in company with his swipes at moral realists. In both cases, many of the assumptions about our dismissal of certain beliefs are essentially confusions over language. Much of the debate over intuitions for example rests on the assumption that there must be or not be some ‘thing’ that an intuition ‘is’ that we can say ‘doesn’t exist’ or is ‘unreliable,’ in other words it seeks to convert a word with a variety of meanings into a kind of scientific proposition or a function that can be accepted or rejected. Thus, for someone like Veit, moral language must go because it hinges on a factual claim nested in its language that can be proven false, and said language is therefore a pragmatic impediment to the scientific business of conflict resolution in regard to how we make things ‘better.’

Yet even a term like ‘better,’ which Veit seems to assume to be obvious, could be placed on the same scientific table. What is better? Where is the thing that is better? How is it measured? Self-reporting? Self-reporting is unreliable and rife with priming and context and culture and everything else under the sun, you can’t just claim that people who say something is better know something is better, better for who and when and for how long? Aren’t you just appealing to the same agreement as those who claim everyone has intuitions, that we just know something and it’s good to act on it? Are we even transparent to ourselves at any given time? Would porn addicts claim they are happier or miserable? Bonnie Blue, popular OnlyFans model, who is currently pregnant, recently hosted a “golden baby shower” at which she…I’ll leave you to work out what she and the group of men she invited did, but in interviews about it she declares herself happy and thinks it is good. Is it? Is it better? Will she regret it in a decade or two? Will society regret they didn’t ban it? Perhaps there is no such thing as ‘better,’ just as there are no ‘intuitions’: perhaps there are just a bunch of beliefs people have and things people say.

Nonetheless, a belief I have and a thing I say is that such a view of concepts within moral language or indeed religion are pointless. I think language is doing things, and reflects shared values in ways that are neither ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ and that relate things that matter to us to experiences that are not sayable in other kinds of language. As Wittgenstein put it “Here one can only describe and say: this is what human life is like. Compared with the impression which the thing described makes on us, the explanation is too uncertain.” For countless thousands of years religious dispositions and enculturated beliefs have shaped how we relate to one another and to reality through forms of language that are metonymic, containing a whole they speak of without saying. There are some who have a relentlessly reductive view of the ability of science to make all things explicit, dispense with superstition and bind the universe of our experiences in the laboratory, so we can build with them our own Babel. First, of course, they must dispense with the myths we have told ourselves for so long: that there is such a thing as goodness, that it looks like something when it is breathed upon our lives, that there is no true freedom outside of our obligation to pursue it, and that it matters to the state of your soul that you do. Myth it may be, and perhaps Veit will succeed in consigning it to his utilitatism nihilist hell, but until then, so help me, I believe it.

Here in the UK, well known footballer-come TV presenter Gary Lineker has once again made headlines not for his opinions on football but for his political views. Lineker, previously the highest paid presenter at the BBC and having just spent the summer presenting a popular show at the world Cup for Netflix, is a millionaire, and has said that he wants incoming prime minister Andy Burnham to tax him and people like him more.

This is not the first time Lineker has garnered attention over his views, he previously attracted controversy for comparing the previous government’s plans to redirect immigrants to Rwanda to the policies of Nazi Germany, and after another similar controversy ultimately left his presenting spot on the BBC in order to be free to express his political positions on social media without the risk of breaching their impartiality guidelines. While he no doubt had plenty of offers elsewhere and so was hardly giving up either work or income, for Lineker, “speaking out” about political issues is something of great importance, worth leaving a job over.

Lineker’s views are in theory perfectly moral, and while there is no reason to assume his concern for the plight of refugees or desire that taxation better redistribute money is genuine, he has been criticised for ‘champagne socialism,’ the idea of identifying with certain views that imply a radical redistributive view of economics without having to actual concur any sacrifices oneself. After all, Lineker is a multi-millionaire, he could give his money away and spend his time and resources trying to help people, yet his main avenue of action is complaining about the government on Twitter. Because of this for some it’s easy to just condemn him as a hypocrite, but again, at the very least the motivations behind his views do not seem entirely insincere. A more interesting question is how it is that he and many others have come to associate the right avenue for moral concern for the lesser to be political advocacy rather than personal action.

Fans of the ‘Tom Holland argument’ would no doubt contend that as misdirected and vestigial as it is, Lineker’s concern that we and the government make the poor and the vulnerable our concern is essentially a Christian one. Whether this is true by historical cause or by analogy, it’s an interesting reflection of the way changes over the last century or so have not just secularised but politicised what is or was a moral impulse once filtered through Christianity. Once many social organisations and charities were both organised by the church or by altruistic Christians driven by their belief. As economies have grown and Christianity has disintegrated, many of these things have become instantiated or at least entangled with the state, such that if in 2026 a wealthy person like Gary Lineker is concerned for the homeless or for refugees, his instinct is not to spend his own money setting up a charity that gives the homeless a place to sleep and help to put their lives on track, but instead to take to social media and appeal to the government to sort it out, because to us it is a given assumption that politics is where such problems are to be sorted out.

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Since I have been writing on Substack, I have picked up a fair few readers who are atheists. Strange, I suppose, since I am a Christian and I write mostly about things related to Christianity. To some Christians this is a sign that I must be doing something wrong, especially since some of what I write involves criticising bad apologetics and popular Christians. Indeed, Substack’s Catholic miracle-monger Ethan Muse has accused me of “countersignalling Christians for social clout from atheists,” being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and claimed I am “ankle-biting for brownie points” against his miracle claims.

To be clear I wish to open no further hostilities here, I am not writing this as a defence against such accusations, there are many people whose opinion about my work I care about deeply, Ethan Muse is not one of them. Rather, it’s interesting to consider why I would actually feel worse if at least some of this wasn’t the case. I grew up in the Baptist church, I know many people I grew up with who never had any period outside of the church, who never pulled at the threads of their faith, who were baptised at about twelve and have never looked back. Strangely, as someone who did pull at the threads and found the rather long way back many years later, although I have some envy for the simplicity of such faith and its undarkened perimeters, I find myself often having more in common with honest unbelievers than with those to whom certain ways of thinking are off limits.

Of course, it’s not all unbelievers, there are plenty of those who disdain religion, think it poisons everything and retain the Dawkinsesque view of theism and all that it entails, and as someone whose upbringing contained many things that are good and many examples of Christians to whom I still look up, I find this view of religion to be as willful as any dogmatic belief. But there are plenty of unbelievers who are open minded to religion, interested in arguments about it, perhaps have had mixed upbringings they still carry, or who are just generally curious. I also have found that, unfortunately, most Christian apologetics is blind to these people, in fact, one might often wonder who most Christian apologetics is actually aimed at at all.

One of the problems I have always had with a lot of apologetics is simply that in reality it is marketed to Christians. This seems strange since it’s meant to be designed for convincing unbelievers or defending faith against them, but most of its audience and consumers are Christians, and so the content skews to the kind of arguments that flatter those who already know what they think and want confirmation of it rather than those who don’t. In the age of YouTube and its incessant need for clickbait, this has only fueled enormous industries and more popular figures arguably doing the same but worse than the publishing industries were churning out a few decades ago. Apologetics is thus often full of gotcha arguments, takedowns, claims about why some argument is ‘obviously’ the correct one, yet anyone who has ever been on the other side of such content knows if you disagree with the argument in the first place all it will achieve is aggravating you. Thus, a lot of apologetics is simply clumsy and alienating. It is literally not doing what it claims to be doing, it claims to be seeking to win over the other and actually plays upon and widens us and them dynamics, as well intentioned and innocuous as it might appear to be.

This can be added to when one believes that faith is a lofty and rationally superior position, akin to simply realising a correct scientific theory is true. This belief has fostered unending wings of the apologetics industry, from the creationists and the discovery institute to people like Muse and his incredulous recourse to accusations of bad motives if his reams of evidence doesn’t convince people. After all, if faith is simply the same thing as choosing the right theory and is rationally obvious when the evidence is compiled, then why do unbelievers not accept it? The answer must be that they just haven’t seen the incontrovertible evidence, and if they have it must be either their lack of rationality or their bad motives. If one is a believer who eye rolls at the idea that Jacob’s ladder is ascended by piling up rational evidence, then what can someone like Ethan conclude but that they be a wolf in sheep’s clothing? There is no third option. To this view of belief, all the above kind of atheists must simply be lumped into the category of those who disdain religion because they want to, and suddenly everyone is an enemy.

Yet there is a state that I think both a certain type of believer and unbeliever have in common, which is a moment of honesty in regard to how much can be concluded by such claims, not rationally but personally. When I was a teenager, I went through a period of genuinely wanting to have the faith of those around me and believing that if I just read enough evidence for the resurrection at some point something would click and convince me and I’d have it. Disappointingly one arrives at the conclusion that evidence is not enough, at some point you simply make a decision and when you are struggling to make that decision you are rather glaringly aware of the fact that there are both Christians and atheists who claim to believe what they do because of unswerving commitment to where evidence leads, but who actually just believe what they believe.

This is not to say that such arguments are meaningless, that evidence is not real or doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But when we are talking about a claim such as, say, the resurrection, we are talking about the violation of every law of biology, physics, chemistry, and every experience of life and death that every one of us has ever known. What does it mean to ‘prove’ such a thing, let alone believe it? More than that, what does it mean to believe the claims of Christianity that surely lie beyond scientific proof, that you have a soul, that angels exist, that you will live forever, that the primary thing in life is not whatever incongruous bundle of evolutionary leftovers happen to dictate but partaking in becoming like God and delighting in Him forever? There is a point at which all the rationalising and arguing about such things becomes “so much straw” as Aquinas is meant to have said, like deaf people squabbling over whether Brahms is superior to Beethoven.

Granted, some people simply like such discussions and find them interesting, and defending events such as the resurrection is a perfectly legitimate thing for a Christian to be doing, as is arguing for and defending a rational basis for faith. Yet another issue is that often the fervency of belief in the rightness of the ends of arguments combined with the fact that the predominant audience of apologetics is Christian often leads many of these arguments to not only not recognise their limits but actually get away with being bad.

Is criticizing those bad arguments “countersignalling Christians?” Well, yes. Except that whichever way you look at it, bad arguments are bad arguments. If I have some maths theory I think is true and a bunch of people are popularly claiming to be proving it and making arguments that don’t prove it to large audience, I have reason to criticise them not only for being wrong but also for discrediting the theory. If I have a movie I think is great and a bunch of people are evangelising it by misrepresenting its contents, I likewise have reason to feel that they are doing harm. In both cases, such discrediting hinders what is true and hinders people’s perception of it and access to it, and belief that all allies are to be flattered less we cross signal is juvenile. If someone like Jonathan Pageau wants to claim New Testament parables are metaphors for immigration policy at deliberately sensitive times in the political environment, for example, I think one has good reason to point out he is doing violence to Christianity’s goodness and its truth.

But besides the Pageaus of the world there are also plenty of perfectly well meaning Christians who are seeking popularity in the online sphere accompanied by questionable arguments. Someone like Glen Scrivener for example is an evangelist come YouTuber whose primary thing is the ‘Tom Holland argument,’ something I have had plenty to say about, in such apologetics contexts because of how ridiculous it has become. In a trivial illustration of this, Glen recently posted a short about British politics and democracy, claiming the idea of democratic representation comes from John Wycliffe. In doing so he used a quote Wycliffe never said to claim Wycliffe believed something he never argued for, to claim something that is, at best, questionable. That our idea of what democracy is has been fed by Protestantism may be defended historically in complex terms, that democracy comes from Wycliffe is historically false. Given its nesting in a wider habit of argument that legitimises these kinds of fast and loose employment of historical fact, I think it should be criticised as what it is: wrong and not useful. To pretend it is right and expect everyone to ignore it who is also a Christian because the ends may justify the means would be dishonest, even if the ends did justify the means. Given the means may also be the incidental discrediting of arguments from history, this isn’t even valid anyway. No doubt I or anyone may be guilty of going too far in such criticisms, but this is something that would be wrong not because of cross-signalling as much as because of character, something we all fall short at in an online environment where no one’s incentives are what they might wish them to be.

Ultimately, then, what I would hope for and I think what many people actually want in the age of the algorithms, is some kind of actual honesty in one’s thinking, as hard as that is for any of us to genuinely achieve. The reality is I have often found I can have better conversations with those who don’t believe and who I sense are genuinely honest in their lack of belief and perfectly open to discussing it than with believers who claim to believe because of conviction about arguments, but who reveal themselves as immovably dogmatic. That is not to say there aren’t dogmatic atheists and honest Christians, of course there are both. There are industries designed to flatter those uninterested in opening themselves to criticism and simply want arguments in favour of whatever they already think, and perhaps for some people they really do shift the needle for onlookers, but they bore me.

The reality is that internet evangelism is a unique phenomenon, perhaps only comparable to the publishing industry that preceded it. Those who work in churches or conduct real world evangelism, who do outreach of various forms, know that in reality where sometimes we forget we all reside, all arguments are mediated through people, and people come in their various stages of life with various needs, sharing the same longing for a meaning that coordinates all things and that authorises an ultimate good as a real force within their life. The primary vehicle of such truth will always be example, as it has been for me at doubtful moments when the accumulation of arguments could take me no closer than the Wicket-Gate at the edge of town. Arguments come in and out of vogue, but people remain people and God remains God. The best we can hope for at the outset is that we be honest about what matters, that none of us need walk the pilgrim’s path alone.

In Genesis 3 the first man and woman are presented with a single choice, not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die. Their freedom from the consequences of evil seems to lie in their ignorance of it, and when the serpent persuades them to eat from the tree suddenly their eyes are open and God says, in one of the strangest lines in the text: “behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.” Man is then cast from the garden “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

What exactly ‘knowledge of good and evil’ is has always been a mystery of Christian theology, perhaps a strange merism of consciousness itself, but what it implies is an expansion of choice and with it, responsibility. When Cain, one of the first two humans born into the world, has his sacrifice rejected by God, God tells him that sin is crouching at his door. American Author John Steinbeck in his novel East of Eden famously makes great emphasis on the Hebrew word Timshel in the phrase “it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” According to Steinbeck’s character Lee, Timshel is actually best translated as ‘thou mayest’:

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel — ‘Thou mayest’ — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’ — it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?…Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win….I feel that a man is a very important thing — maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed — because ‘Thou mayest.”

As lofty as this prose may be, it’s hard to argue this is what you find in the rest of the Old Testament. There is great emphasis on accountability for iniquity, less on the idea that man can climb the ladder at Bethel by his own free will after he has been banished from Eden. That ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ is hardly a whole compass of moral self-knowledge is clear by the need for the revelation of the law, which constitutes a further act of moral knowledge previously absent. In some Christian theology, the inadequacy of the law for salvation and thus the inadequacy of our will to keep it is what makes the crucifixion a necessary act of grace, the cross as the tree of life that completes something of the fractal pattern of moral revelation and salvation through the course of the bible.

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I grew up in a conservative religious home. For most of my formative years in the evangelical baptist church, I knew a kind of religion that I suppose those outside of it in the secular world would have labelled ‘fundamentalist.’ That the Christians I knew spoke about religion as a set of facts to be believed akin to a science theory was not a view exclusive to the religious; this was the era of New Atheism, in which Richard Dawkins famously claimed we could reduce religion to a “God hypothesis” and put it on the scientific chair for examination, proving its historic and scientific claims to fail in the lights of modern rationalism. Whichever side you were on, the popular view of religion was that its entrance first went through a set of rational if not scientific claims about the world, and everything that followed hinged upon those facts first being accepted or rejected, akin to our acceptance of rejection of the theory of evolution or the law of gravity.

Yet the problem with this is that it does little to help us understand or even approach what religion is and what it is doing, nor does it help our contemporary problems with it. Many claims of Christianity are unknowable to a certain kind of science: that there is an unseen realm that we inhabit, that we have souls, that we can speak to God in prayer, that death is not the end of our existence; even that two thousand years ago a person resurrected from the dead. Science can say nothing of these things, by its lights they are already at best beyond its reach, if not false. So it is that without the kind of epistemological certainty we might demand, and since modern life offers its consolations this side of the grave, the response to religion for many decades has been and for many still is one of apathy.

Yet if these things are unknowable, and if many throughout history have claimed to know them, then we must find at least some ways to think about them differently. Science is but one way of seeing and interacting with the world, and if the claims of religion were to be true it would only be a partial one, as William James put it:

I believe the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true…science and religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure house to him who can use either of them practically.1

One of the reasons James’ Varieties of Religious Experience endures as such an extraordinary text, is that the ability to remain non judgemental about the propositional content of belief is something most of us find hard to do. Upon facing a belief, we wish to assert above its outcome our own belief or judgement about its factuality as we already believe it, and so finding the kind of suspended agnosticism that would allow James’ pragmatic attitude to be entertained is rare.

Part of what this shows is that like it or not we all construct beliefs about the world that lie beyond proof and that are hedged against something, and the religious position is not a result of a certain kind of philosophising but rather a disposition judged by its fruits. Let us take, say, the problem of evil, which for the philosopher is a logical problem that must be solved in order to vindicate a proposition. But for the religious believer this is not so. People have turned to and clung to religious belief in spite of extraordinary suffering and when facing extraordinary difficulty, which tells you that its truth is worked out less in its propositional reality than its experiential reality, something we believe in or struggle with through personal experience and lived reality as much as accept or reject like a maths problem. Evil already exists, we find God not as a propositional answer to its axioms but a personal one by which we navigate the path through it. If there is a God, and if evil is a contingent part of reality, the vindication of that belief must not be the abstract question of the philosopher but the personal question of Job.

You may also take a more complex religious phenomenon such as prayer. In theory a skeptic can simply reject the idea as an errant belief in a causal relation between prayer and outcome, yet this doesn’t really encompass what prayer is doing or say anything worthwhile as to its value as an act. My Grandmother had a list of people by her bedside she prayed for regularly, and while she clearly hoped her prayers for their wellbeing would be answered, from the outside what changed was not sovereign intervention but her disposition towards others in their difficulty. Prayer gave her more reason to seek and wish for the good that she prayed for, gave her more concern and and a greater sense of duty towards others, something that is clearly far more than a belief in the causal efficacy of petition. Even within a religious context the more prayer leans towards a belief in causal agency the more banal and ‘unreligious’ it oddly becomes. I still remember as a child hearing a youth pastor give an illustration about how they prayed for a sheltered parking space when it was raining and hallelujah one happened to be there, and even then finding it not just an obvious attribution of cause to coincidence but a reflection of an almost silly view of a God who is content to let slide famine in Africa but will intervene to find a youth pastor a dry place to park.

Yet even this banal example illustrates something of the way attention can change our perception of the world. While the seeking of coincidence to fulfil a belief in a causal agency in such a simple context may be hard to maintain, when that agency is cast as a goodness to which we seek to be aligned the result is an attention to, noticing of and concern for the good in the world as we experience it. Prayer becomes part of how we, to paraphrase Dante, align our will and desire with the love that moves the sun and other stars.

While much of New Atheism may not have cared for such a more complex view of religion, Daniel Dennett was unique in having a reverence for William James, and before he wrote his book Breaking the Spell, he conducted a series interviews with religious people to simply ask them about how religion changed their lives, he wrote that the interviews were:

Moving, to say the least, and I learned a lot. Some people had endured hardships that I could not readily imagine myself surviving, and some had found in their religion the strength to make, and hold fast to, decisions that were nothing short of heroic. Less dramatic, but even more impressive in retrospect, were the people of modest talent and accomplishment who were, in one way or another, simply much better people than one might expect them to be: it wasn’t just that their lives had meaning to them — though this was certainly true — but that they were actually making the world better by their efforts, inspired by their conviction that their lives were not their own to dispose of as they choose.2

As much as he is maligned, it is a testament to Dennett’s character that he both did this and included such honesty in a book that is mostly negative about religion. One can imagine neither Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens doing such a thing, and clearly their view of religion suffered for it. Naturally though, we are still inclined to respond that even if religion of a certain form may improve someone’s character, enable them to endure difficulty, grant them experiences of meaning or a persistent sense that reality is good in spite of any circumstances, none of this makes it true.

One of the issues with this approach though is that on some level we still have no idea what religion actually is by this approach. It sounds obvious since it is intimately familiar to us, but viewed naturalistically and through the lens of evolution, religion presents us with many mysteries. To a skeptic, it is merely a precursor to modern epistemologies such as science, a way in which past humans errantly read the world for causation and falsely believed things like sacrifices produced favourable events or that rain or drought or sickness came from a divine agency. Yet while this may satisfy those wishing to dismiss it, it is a poor explanation of a phenomenon. Evolutionarily behaviour has a reason, and the ubiquitous emergence of certain religious ideas and the foundation of all human society as concomitant with belief in some form of supernatural aspect to the world is not explained by casting it as a precursor to methods we have developed that we claim disprove it.

What this tells you is that even for a naturalist attempting to understand and evaluate religion in its origins, casting a propositional judgement upon it hinders understanding of it rather than casting light upon it. Indeed, if I put a ‘Tom Holland’ hat on, one can argue that it is at least a Western if not Christian view of the world as a whole that our judgement of other religious ideas is not one that automatically assumes at least some form of aspectual pluralism but instead simply judges things according to our own assumptions and dismisses them accordingly. One could argue that the difference between a Spanish Catholic believing that the Mexica worshiped demons and an atheist believing they worshipped nothing and were wrong are essentially assessments of the same universalising tendency.

It is clear that religious language is to say the least highly polysemous: rituals and beliefs contain multiple concepts and abstractions whose outcomes are less about fact content than outcome. For William James religion begins with man ‘in his solitude’ and the founders of major religions are the recipients of particularly transforming experiences that are furnished with theology and ritual. For a naturalist and perhaps through the lens of evolution one may argue the source is much more psycho-social, and the outcomes of religion are in their role across societies. If both are true, religious symbols stand for something that will always be difficult to reduce to precise claims, and they reflect and participate and consolidate particular experiences and outcomes, something that at the same time we must concede are blended with notions of causation that still do impinge on primitive notions of causality we can genuinely call outdated or obsolete, even if stating where one ends and the other ends is difficult.

In modern times there are some who have made these observations yet use the idea for dubious conclusions. To large audiences both Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau make some form of philosophical argument that claims religion to be participating in something symbolic rather than literal, and Peterson in particular may make some of the criticisms I have above. Yet their fault is the same, in assuming that in replacement for scientific analysis they can offer symbolic interpretation they too claim to unravel the polysemy of religion with a clarity that rather conveniently maps onto culture wars, such that the person of Cain is really an allegory for Marxism and Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast is really an allegory for immigration. (I wish I was making those examples up.) They represent interesting examples of how the wake of one view of religion has in some quarters been replaced by another, not necessarily to its improvement.

There are some things that by certain lights will always remain unknowable. That doesn’t mean we cannot know them, but rather that the grasping rational mind will never be able to state their truth in the way we might wish. Those who are religious have always claimed a kind of knowing subsumes that uncertainty and that the clarity of experience in which it participates is enough to consider the leap of faith beyond the increasingly dominant rational mind to be redeemed. What they know is that our world is phenomenal and metaphorical before it is propositional, and as much as the ‘sect’ of science has become dominant, the phenomenal world remains stubbornly immovable as much as we may medicalise it. Even our attempts to optimize or medicate negative states of experience tells us we are bound to a particular givenness when it comes to the world we all inhabit, we all know something of the possibility of encountering the world as meaningless, unconnected, valueless and hopeless, and we all have in some degree sensed what it is to encounter a world brimming with meaning, universally connected and intimately meaningful. Perhaps it is the case that the latter state is merely the result of arbitrary function that need have no relation to facts about what reality actually is, and perhaps those atheists who claim to believe on one hand our most vaulted hopes will be dust in the vastness of eternity and on the other than we can still eat drink and be merry reflect that experience need say nothing about truth. Until they are proven right, the fact that religious belief still offers something that aligns with the hierarchy of our experience, and that like Dante’s ascent to the Empyrean we may still cast off the shackles of self in order to encounter the absolute as immovably good, with all that may add to our lives, is a fact that must at the least be observed.

None of this is to argue the claims made by religion either historically or metaphysically don’t matter, only that there are other ways we can approach them. I think, at least personally, there is something freeing about the recognition that there is something more than rational to religious belief. I am often critical of Christian apologists and their overeager claims, and perhaps, to return to where I started, that comes from being exposed to an evangelical industry growing up that presents the idea that Christianity is built on a scaffold of philosophical, rational, historic and even scientific arguments, and if you just compile enough of them and say them convincingly enough you should win people over. That you don’t always win people over must cast unbelievers as somehow irrational, a problem that leads to many unnecessary condemnations of science or popular scientific theories, that probably spurs the entire anti-evolution movements in the US, and so on. Yet to realise this view of religious propositions is at best aspectual is to turn apologetics into a defence rather than a proof, something that softens its insistence that you need be convinced by it and lowers its hostility towards unbelievers. The more apologetics has taken to the online world the less Christians seem to recognise how important a role example plays, how important a role social and community culture plays in drawing people into participation, and how important the pastoral and moral aspects of faith are. In all my years of being around Christians, what has kept me from abandoning it in my most doubting moments has never been how convincing their arguments are, it has been the example of people who have something akin to what Dennett observed, an immovable conviction in the goodness of God rooted in the person and work of Jesus that genuinely spills out into a life lived and a reminder that we don’t construct the argument for religion rationally, we first live it by example. If for many in a time where rationality predominates ‘act like it’s true’ is as good as we can do, then perhaps it is still something we can do that is good.

In a recent interview with Ross Douthat for his New York Times podcast, Orthodox writer Rod Dreher was asked about the consequences of the decline of Christianity and why we should worry about a post-Christian world. His response was a refrain you will hear often: “I would direct people to Tom Holland’s book Dominion.”

Likewise when activist and associate of the New Atheists Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion to Christianity in an essay for UnHerd, she first declared that the reason we need Christianity is because it has built our societies and without it we are at risk from “formidable forces” ranging from authoritarianism to wokeism. Once again, she says this is shown by Tom Holland in his “marvellous book” Dominion. She says from it she learned “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.”1

It’s an oddly common refrain then: Christianity is declining, our societies are suffering because of it, I learned this from the wonderful book Dominion. It sounds convincing, but the problem is that Tom Holland never made this argument. In fact the argument of Dominion is a far more radical one than any of these soundbite really seem to internalise, Dominion is not an argument that Christianity gave us some good stuff and its expiring now we’ve stopped being Christian, rather the argument of Dominion and the subsequent arguments Holland has made is instead that Christianity so saturates the soil of our assumptions and instincts that everything that we think morally and culturally is ‘Christian’ in derivation, so much so that we might as well think of the modern secular world and the changes that we are experiencing as a kind of reformation within a Christian society.

In the book Holland charts the way Christianity has shaped many things we take for granted, although even Ayaan’s description seems to miss the point. She says, again: “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.” Take that phrase “apparently secular”: in it is the assumption that there is a distinction between Christian things and secular things, and that we wrongly assume that freedoms and so on are secular when actually they are Christian. But for Holland there is no distinction: secular is a word that comes from the latin word for century, employed by Augustine in the City of God to describe the transience of Rome as opposed to the eternal Kingdom of God, picked up by the church in the eleventh century emphasising the role of the church in relation to Kings and Emperors, employed in the enlightenment and up to the modern era: for Holland secular is a Christian category grown from Christian soil.

Holland even argues in Dominion that what Ayaan in her essay calls the failing “liberal order” can essentially be thought of as the separation of Christianity from what came to be deemed as its more regressive aspects, citing things like the Beatles and their “all you need is love,” sexual rights movements and so on as essentially Christian in derivation.

In fact what characterises much of Dominion is not the idea that there is a stable and unmoving Christianity from which various things bloom, but more like the idea that Christianity is a reforming, evolving set of ideas synonymous with the development of the West. This is what makes it possible for him to argue that we should still call many of the things going on in the modern world ‘Christian’ even though they may seem long disconnected from Christianity and their connection to it may only be one of analogy. Part of what Dominion seems to essentially argue for is a broadening of the word ‘Christian’ to make it more synonymous with a word like ‘Western,’ such that all of the ideas that shape the modern world, be they antagonistic towards a more conservative Christianity or even to Christianity as a whole, should still be given the label Christian.

His argument seems to be that the modern world presents Christians with a kind of paradox. Many of our liberal ideals are drawn from Christianity, many of them contradict Christianity, and liberalism itself constitutes a kind of Reformation like those that have convulsed Christianity throughout its history, like those of the eleventh century, like the Protestant Reformation, like the Enlightenment which Holland also casts as Christian: modern liberalism is another of these convulsions, except that what it sweeps away is the beliefs of Christianity from which it seems to come. There is thus no ‘going back’ to a stable point, such change is a defining feature of Christianity, he describes this process of the twentieth century:

The concept of progress, unyoked from the theology that had given it birth, had begun to leave Christianity trailing in its wake. The choice that faced churches — an agonisingly difficult one — was whether to sit in the dust, shaking their fists in impotent rage, or whether to run and scramble in a desperate attempt to catch up.2

The nature of Holland’s argument then is to see Christianity not as a single idea: while the central image of the cross no doubt defines it, various interpretations of Christian ideas have convulsed history, giving us everything from abolition to feminism, even humanism and certain forms of atheism, he writes:

Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St Paul. Then there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that sent Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the world.3

In a notion of Christianity that includes within it “the revolution that killed God” is the absense of the kind of essentialism that conservatives are arguing for, after all, to go back is to reject the notion of progress that Holland sees as derived from Christian theology, to claim we can is to do something Holland does not: to seperate a ‘real’ Christianity from its various influences as they reach into every part of the marrow of the modern West. For the ‘Dominion’ argument there is no such separation, it’s all Christianity. The most glaring irony that illustrates this may well be that one of the things Ayaan complains about in her essay is “woke ideology.” The title of the last chapter of Holland’s book and the crescendo of his claims about the Christian nature of the West? Woke.

A paradox then, that these figures are claiming we need Christianity to counter wokeness and referring to a book that argues wokeness is fundamentally Christian. The confusion rests on a mingling of theology and history, of an argument from cause with an argument from goodness. In Holland’s thesis is not just the claim that good values come from Christianity, it is that the values that come from Christianity are not remotely self-evident, and that our belief that they are is itself the result of the conditioning of Christianity. For those wishing to reclaim something that seems to be slipping away from our societies, Holland gives you only a weathered history, akin to thinking we can save the evolution of our species into another by looking back at our past evolutionary history. To search for the magic point where things went wrong will, by the lights of such a view of history, always be futile.

Then again, who knows, perhaps Holland is right. Perhaps what we are experiencing really is another reformation within an ever evolving Christianity, and those arguing we return to it as an essential source has something in common with Reformers arguing the problems of an errant church be solved by Sola Scriptura. In both cases the instability is solved by an appeal to a basis for a reforming principle that places something at its heart to which we can return to solve our problems, to the Reformers the scriptures as the sole revelation of God, to the conservatives Christianity as a sole source of the values that construct our society. The issue is that for the Reformers, the problem to be solved was already theological and they could make clear claims about the relation between scripture and theology, yet for the conservatives the claim remains a general complaint solved by an essentialism whose relationship to it is ambiguous. Does the principle at the heart of Christianity tell us to love the stranger and the alien or to cast them out of Christendom lest they dilute its cultural essentialism? For Rod Dreher it seems the answer is clear, for Tom Holland, as far as his argument goes, Christian history has given us both. The answer of Dominion isn’t what these figures want it to be, instead it is straightforward: conservative or liberal, pro or anti-immigration, it doesn’t matter: you’re Christian either way.

Whether or not you believe the evangelical claims that there is a ‘quiet revival’ or a ‘surprising rebirth’ of Christianity going on, there seems to be little question that religion is present in the public discourse in a way it hasn’t been for some time. Decades ago in the zenith of New Atheism, to admit you were religious in the secular world was to admit to being a bit weird, irrational and against the tide of a culture and society that had dispensed with religion and no longer needed it. Yet today religion is increasingly appearing as a feature in the discourse everywhere from politicians and their refrains of “Judeo-Christian values” to becoming an aspect of self-help and even a part of the package of optimisation protocols by popular wellness gurus.

In one such example podcaster and neuroscientist Andrew Huberman recently talked in a podcast with Chris Williamson about how he prays and reads the bible daily. Apparently, this has given him an enduring sense of peace due to surrendering to higher power outside of himself. Huberman claims that the only way people can endure trauma is to develop some sense of surrender, and the main way in which addicts seem to be able to recover is through some notion of God or higher power and the giving up of top down control to something outside of themselves.

According to Huberman, it is “no coincidence” that the bible and Christianity contains the seven deadly sins, which are apparently all about thalamus control, and that prayer or a notion of a higher power somehow allows the prefrontal cortex to resist these impulses. He says he is “in a very serious prayer practice daily now” and that as a scientist his “neurobiology seems to be able to be responding to this really well, and I don’t think I’m alone with that. In fact I think there are too many burdens in life for anyone to be able to navigate life extremely well without these notions of higher power. I don’t think people can do it.” He said the one thing that he wished he had done earlier in life would be to “stop resisting the voice in my head that says I think there’s a God and I’m going to pray.”

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If you even vaguely follow what is going on in the conservative sphere of culture and politics, it cannot have escaped your notice that a single refrain has become popular among everyone from politicians to cultural commentators. It goes like this: Christianity built the modern West, our society’s prosperity stands upon its values, our society’s decline is due to our abandoning of those values, and so to save our society we need to recover “Judeo-Christian values.”

At the recent ARC conference, Jordan Peterson’s Davos style gathering of conservatives in London, UK politician Nigel Farage made a guest appearance. Farage is widely touted to be the next Prime Minister given the seemingly unstoppable rise of his Reform party, he was interviewed by ARC organiser Philippa Stroud and it took him all of 53 seconds to bring up the phrase “Judeo-Christian culture.” He went on to complain about Labour politician Alistair Campbell’s comments in the 90s that “we don’t do God,” as if to imply the problem at the root of our society’s ills is that of a loss of religion.

When you try to drill down to what any of these figures actually mean, the results are usually mixed. Farage is himself not a Christian, no longer even nominally so: he has previously said he refuses to attend his local church because of its “woke agenda.” When you look elsewhere at the ARC conference, Jordan Peterson has given multiple speeches claiming he is going to diagnose the “defining characteristic of our civilisational moment” and “make the foundational principles of our civilisation conscious, explicit and propositional.” What he claims, or rather what you can discern as a claim from a stream of largely incoherent biblical allusions, is that reciprocal sacrifice is the defining characteristic of our societies, he says “the dream that has enveloped us for thousands of years of Judeo-Christian civilisation is the celebration, the worship, the deification of the principle of reciprocal voluntary sacrifice that makes us free and abundant.”

One assumes this to be a vague reference to the cross, but it hardly fulfils the claim to make our civilisational foundations propositional. Reciprocal sacrifice of some form is certainly a necessary feature of any cooperative endeavour, and certainly sacrifice lies at the heart of Christianity, but is that really the foundational principle of our “abundance”? Was the industrial revolution the result of “reciprocal voluntary sacrifice”? Was the British Empire? Is modern capitalism and all of the economic prosperity of the modern era, the decline of which the ARC conference seems to mostly be bemoaning, the result of “reciprocal voluntary sacrifice”? It seems the answer is most of these things are the result of self-interest combined with various forces of economics. One may argue Christian principles have played a role in the formations of values that have curtailed, restrained and organised that self-interest, but without specifics as to any claims being made, all this is meaningless noise.

Even when you find attempts to make this claim more comprehensive by Christians themselves, the results are a muddle. In 2022 UK evangelist Glen Scrivener published a book titled The Air We Breathe, drawing heavily on Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion he argued that Christianity is the historical source of “equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom and progress.” Unsurprisingly for a book claiming such generalisations, the arguments are not very good and largely rely on a constant emphasis of the brutality of the Roman world, setting up a dichotomy of historial cause where it is either paganism and power or Christianity and compassion. Like Tom Holland, there is essentially a claim that there has only ever been one original idea, that of the persistent essentialism of a set of Christian notions, and all ideas subsequent that can be in any way shown to be analogous to it must be derived from it or be cheap imitations of it.

That such radical determinism is not exactly compatible with a claim about its truth is something those employing Holland’s arguments tend to ignore. What also must be ignored is that such a claim contradicts the pragmatic argument for Christianity that much of this relies on. For a pragmatic argument to work we must assume some means by which we make our evaluation of its values, and since the argument is not just that Christianity gives us our values but is the sole reason why we consider those values to be good, any such pragmatic argument is circular. If one is going to be so radical as to argue that Christianity alone gives us notions of compassion we take for granted and that if we were born somewhere else it would be alien to us, one can’t then say that Christianity is inherently universally true. It’s like arguing ice cream is universally delicious by arguing that we only consider it delicious because of some gene unique to our particular inheritance. It’s ‘truth’ is credited to its contingency, not its truth.

But let us say we accept the idea that the influence of Christianity is that which emerges from its moral radicalism in relation to the Roman world. In its context this is a legitimate argument: in the age of divi filius that Christians proclaimed as God someone who died the humiliating death of a slave and preached a message of radical self-giving morality towards ‘the least of these’ is not only contextually unique but historically influential. Putting aside the far more dubious argument that we abstract this into a generalisation and credit anything similar to it as deriving from it, no doubt if we are to claim such a thing as ‘Christian values’ then at its core the moral idea would be that one could find God in exposed babies on rubbish dumps or lepers in hospitals, and that our condition in eternity depends on how we treat the stranger, the outcast and the lowly.

Strange, then, that those proclaiming the need for ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are not referencing any of this. Instead, they are referencing a notion of cultural coherence, the notion that ‘Christian values’ are what are expressed by a society at large, by a certain uniformity or shared set of ‘values’ which might include anything from laudable things like family or community values to a far more generalised notion of cultural nationalism, all of which are entangled with notions of prosperity and economic flourishing. Since all this is fundamentally about a kind of nationalistic unity, it therefore becomes centred not on the moral issues that one might call Christian, but on the politicization of the things deemed to violate the purity of the cultural essentialism that we have lost, namely immigration, cultural dilution and thus anything or anyone those appointing themselves gatekeepers of said essentialism consider to be bad.

Thus, you are able to talk about Christianity in a way that conveniently need have nothing to do with the morals of the New Testament. Any appeal to the goodness of Christianity has now merely become an appeal to a cultural or national essentialism that is labelled as Christian but whose instantiation reflects nothing of the moral ideas that define Christianity as unique. This is important in making sense of appeals made even by public Christians to the apparent connections between things that may seem anti-Christian, ie rhetoric about immigrants, and Christian ideas. As I wrote about a while ago, Jonathan Pageau, also a speaker at aforementioned ARC conference, posted a video claiming that the parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22 is not about salvation but a metaphor about conformity, and so can be applied to immigration, because Christian countries apparently have a right to cast out those who don’t “conform to the culture.” Given the parable ends with “Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” and given that Pageau posted this in the middle of the prominent ICE action in the US, you can see how questionable the implications of such a bad reading are. This is not just a bad reading of the text but a mere employment of it to justify the identification of the “body of Christ” with “Christian nations,” something that is actually astounding given that Pageau in other contexts identifies the body of Christ as being the exclusive domain of the Orthodox church, but here he is happy for it to be metaphorically extended to nations deciding their immigration policies.

The same is true for someone like Farage, who has recently defended himself for receiving significant financial gifts as a politician, claiming not only that he needs it for things like security but that anyone attacking him for receiving millions in personal donations is malignly motivated. That they are obviously politically motivated is neither here nor there, the point is, Farage is hardly of the view that the accumulation of wealth is a dubious thing burdening him with the Christian responsibility of charity, his emphasis is merely that he has never broken any parliamentary rules. He claims in calling a by-election he is not distracting from criticisms over his finances but instead “it’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment.”

Again, one hardly has to do much to point out that there isn’t much by the way of Christian values here, or that when Farage utters the phrase “Judeo-Christian values,” he is actually not referring to anything that has anything at all to do with the New Testament, but is instead referring to a form of cultural Britishness deemed to be in decline due to “the establishment.” Such an appropriation of Christianity is now common, activist Tommy Robinson, also known for his campaigns against immigration put it:

I’ve seen the attacks on Christianity, and I’ve also seen the decay in British society, and the fall of Britain has come from the fall of belief…what built Great Britain? Christianity! What built everything about us, that makes people want to come to it and made it a success, was built on Christianity. Since that descended, since it’s been coming under attack, since people have left it, it’s left a void. And that void is being filled. And if we want to understand and remember who we are, as part of out identity. I say to people, even if you don’t believe in Christianity, you don’t have to believe in Jesus, that’s what built us as a nation. That must be protected. That’s part of our identity.

Here the idea is far more transparent, given Robinson says “you don’t have to believe in Jesus,” and given the claim is to an “identity” rather than to a particular belief, value, idea, concept, or any such particular illustration of whatever “Christianity” is meant to mean. The claim again is to a kind of national essentialism that ironically frees you from any adherence to those things Christianity might act upon as a conscience. All that is to be maintained above all else is the culture, whatever that is. Even looking at those outside Christianity making cultural arguments about immigration, the claims are equally as generalised. In a podcast with Christian nationalist Andrew Wilson Konstantin Kisin compared culture to him inheriting a watch from his Father:

The argument for tradition…British conservatism is about tradition and history…you can argue for the tradition of a society and their multiplication through time from a non-religious point of view which is like what we have is good by definition a priori because that’s what it is, it’s our country it’s our society and we want to make more of that…it’s good because we’re already here, where we are is a product of where we come from…if my Dad gives me a watch right it’s not necessarily the watch and its unique qualities that make it special, it’s the fact that I got it from my Dad, so the culture we got from our ancestors is worth valuing because it’s where we’ve come to as a civilization. There is a sentimental value to that, it’s connected to the passing down from generation to generation, why is that important? From an evolutionary perspective the point of life is to recreate itself…

This may be worse than the religious generalisation, but it nonetheless tells you something of what those employing Christianity to refer to an inherited essentialism are arguing for. The word ‘culture’ goes entirely undefined, and given that it could refer to anything from laws to the films you like or the food you eat, this discussion ranges from the dubious to the absurd. Even if we are referring to habits and dispositions, the nature of generational change will mean that unless what it is that is essential is defined in some way it may well be lost anyway. At least Jordan Peterson’s claims to “make the foundational principles of our civilisation conscious, explicit and propositional” acknowledges that unless we do we are just blustering about nothing, whereas here we are merely complaining about immigration on the grounds that it dilutes an undefined cultural inheritance based entirely on sentiment rather than practicalities. After all, he says “it’s not necessarily the watch and its unique qualities that make it special, it’s the fact that I got it from my Dad,” which suggests the watch might not tell the time for all it matters.

So when I say I reject ‘Judeo-Christian Values,’ this is what I mean. I reject those who appoint themselves gatekeepers of a non-existent cultural and nationalism essentialism, lazily employ Christianity as a defining feature of that essentialism, then complain about everything from immigration to “woke” casting in movies because it may be deemed to stain the purity of that cultural inheritance in a country that has long since ceased to be Christian anyway. Not only do I think many of the arguments are nonsense, I think they hinder practical progress on real issues and excuse attitudes of callousness and indifference as long as the side in question is deemed to be winning, leaving anything we might actually call Christian values long on the side of the road.

This is not to argue there are no Christian values latent in our society, nor that Christianity has not in various complex ways influenced our societies, nor that there is nothing at stake to be lost in our shared existence. These things are true, although complex, and as the arguments of people like Glen Scrivener and his hero Tom Holland make clear, how exactly those values are to be delineated is contentious. More to the point, they were brought into the world not by those who believed in secondary values or the culture they produced but by those who believed the story at the core. After all, to Christians there is an essentialism that underlies everything good that comes from Christianity, and that essentialism is the person and work of Jesus and the saving work of God in a believer becoming transformed into his likeness. Perhaps an issue here is that Christians entering a certain kind of cultural sphere become shy of speaking so directly, and instead feel they must speak in a secondary language about culture and values instead of a primary language of the New Testament, that unless Christ is raised our hope for the reality of anything those values signifies is in vain. If there is something at stake here, it is not the dilution of culture, it is the dilution of Christianity into a culture war where it becomes something less than its own message.

In this article I intend to argue that the thought of the third century theologian Origen aligns with a notion of Sola Scriptura as expressed by the Protestant Reformers. This may seem at the outset problematic for several reasons. Firstly, Origen’s view of scripture clearly has little alignment with views of scripture that are now commonly adjacent to Sola Scriptura where it is found, in particular literalism and its conflation with a subsequent view of inherency. As I wrote a few months ago, Origen believed there were clearly errors in scripture, but that those errors were part of the process of its disclosure, indicating a ‘spiritual’ or what we might call metaphorical interpretation. Secondly, the distinction we commonly understand today between Catholic authority and the Solas of Protestantism did not exist, Constantine had not yet dreamed the Chi-Rho and so by arguing that Origen aligns with Sola Scriptura against claims made by the Roman Catholic church as we know it, some degree of anachronism is inevitable.

Thus, what I am observing is that the presence and absence of certain ideas suggests Origen had a view of Scripture nearer the Reformers than the notion of a need for an infallible interpretive authority, that Origen believed scripture to be a complete unity that is self-disclosing to the individual seeking to understand it, that he does not suggest anything about the need for church as interpreter other than the kind that might reflect those further along that path of disclosure, something that suggests authority but not infallibility; and while Origen held to the apostolic tradition and succession, again it is not about an infallible interpretative authority.

I add, this is not meant to be an argument for Protestantism per se, merely a point of observation about Origen’s view of scripture, one that no doubt plenty of modern Protestants would raise their eyebrows at aspects of anyway, as they certainly would at other aspects of his theology. If we are going to be engaging in Patristic retrieval there must be some diligence, and it is important not to make such arguments out of an overeager desire to merely appropriate a Church Father for our “side” on the basis of quotations with no reference to context. Examples of this abound, in a recent video on Pints with Aquinas titled “Sola Scriptura Is Dead,” Catholic Professor Dr. John Bergsma tried to claim Origen supported the notion of Catholic infallibility, purporting to quote Origen in support of his argument against Sola Scriptura, claiming Origen said “the scriptures are more truly written on the church’s heart than on the page.” But the quote actually comes from Benedict XVI quoting a catechism that calls this quote a “saying of the Church Fathers,” it cites Origen’s fifth homily on Leviticus, but the quote or anything like it is not to be found there, and his employment of it does not reflect Origen’s views more widely. We mst tread with some caution if we are to avoid an approach to retrieval that isn’t retrieving anything.

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