03 Nov 2025
Where does knowledge come from? How do we decide that one explanation is better than another? These are foundational questions across every field of human inquiry.
In The Fabric of Reality (TFoR), David Deutsch presents a powerful defense of Popperian epistemology — the view that knowledge grows through bold conjectures and the systematic elimination of errors. Deutsch argues that this framework is one of humanity’s four most fundamental explanatory theories, alongside quantum physics, evolution by natural selection, and the theory of computation.
In this article, I will outline what I understand Popperian epistemology to assert.
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30 Oct 2025
In The Fabric of Reality (TFoR), chapter 3, David Deutsch mounts a direct critique of inductivism.
This is worth understanding because inductive reasoning is still widely used to form beliefs about reality, and it gives the illusion of justification and plays no role in how genuine knowledge is created.
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28 Oct 2025
Christians believe the Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God - the foundation on which their faith and doctrines rest. Over the centuries, however, scholars have identified thousands of variations in the surviving manuscripts. Most variants are minor; a smaller subset involves added or omitted lines and paragraphs.
To recover the earliest attainable form of the text, theologians, historians, and philologists use Textual Criticism - a scholarly method that compares manuscripts to determine which wording is most likely original and to understand why changes occurred.
The existence of significant variants raises a difficult question: How can anyone be certain that the Scriptures we read today are truly the Word of God? If the content of revelation itself must be reconstructed through human comparison and inference, then certainty about what God originally revealed becomes dependent on those human processes.
Among the available scholarly tools - historical study, archaeology, linguistic analysis - Textual Criticism remains the most systematic and widely accepted way to examine the textual foundations of Scripture.
Yet, as Jersey Flight argues, this reliance on scholarship and publicly assessable evidence introduces a paradox: if something external to the Word of God is required to verify it, then its claim to divine authority is placed in question.
The very act of appealing to evidence and human reason to confirm revelation suggests that, at least epistemically, revelation is not sufficient to confirm itself.
If one accepts Jersey’s argument, then it is not merely the authority of Scripture that stands in doubt, but the entire Christian edifice built upon it.
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24 Oct 2025
In his book, How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil explains the relationship between life expectancy and vulnerability. In short, the more we extend our life expectancy, the more we increase our vulnerability to comorbidities of old age.
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23 Oct 2025
This week, I took part in a roundtable discussion hosted by Home Affairs on uplifting the cyber workforce.
One idea that came up several times was that the industry could benefit from a clear Cyber Skills Framework that employers, universities, TAFEs, graduates, and professionals could all align on.
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