How do you know what is right from wrong? How do you know what is good and evil? Perhaps more importantly how would you explain why something is good or bad?

In a conversation between Ezra Klein & Jonathan Haidt, Klein said,

Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad. This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.

‘No language for saying it’s bad’. That’s an interesting thing for a New York Times columnist to say. Things are no longer sins, just less optimal choices.

In reflecting on this Cal Newport recognizing he lives and works among the highly educated that many life decisions hinge upon access to data:

We hesitate to take a strong stance because we fear the data might reveal we were wrong, rendering us guilty of a humiliating sin in technocratic totalitarianism, letting the messiness of individual human emotion derail us from the optimal operating procedure. We’re desperate to do the right – read: most acceptable to our social/tribal community – thing, and need a chattering class of experts to assure us that we are.

As a Christian my moral intuition is shaped by the person of Christ and the Scriptures. And that’s enough. Knowing the why of it may help, it might not. It might intellectually satisfy, it might not. Yet I’ve noticed that when it comes to explaining the ethics of Christianity to non-believers I’m looking for the data too (and it’s there!) to show how the way of Christ leads to human flourishing.

In part because there is no reason for a non-believer to just accept what the Bible says. They haven’t yet yielded any authority to it. So showing them connections they can understand makes good apologetic sense. Draw a line from research to ancient commands and it does suddenly look like God knows what He’s doing, and has always known, and has baked this ‘intuition’ into how we’re made.

Yet in a highly consumerist and individualized world I see Christians also looking for the data to guide them. Yet the chattering class of experts almost always leads to greater community confusion. Which experts exactly and why those experts and what about these other experts?

Newport urges his readers to trust their gut,

Data can be informative, but a lot of parenting comes from the gut. I don’t feel right, for example, offering my pre-adolescent son unrestricted access to pornography, hateful tirades, mind-numbing video games, and optimally addictive content on a device he can carry everywhere in his pocket. I know this is a bad idea for him, even if there’s lingering debate among social psychologists about statistical effect sizes when phone harms are studied under different regression models.

Newport doesn’t explain, nor does he have to, why he ‘doesn’t feel right’ and how he ‘know(s) this is a bad idea’ but it is worth asking the question where people get their intuition from? Perhaps it is in the air we breathe¹.

Yet it would be great if Christians rediscovered their confidence that the way of Christ, as historically practised, is good because God says it is good, nice that it is to have social scientists confirming some of these things. Live boldly, live confidently, trust not in your intuition but in His guiding Word.

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