On plausible deniability

If you have ears to hear, then hear; if you have eyes to see, then see

Image: this image was generated by Substack, one of four generated at my request, and is based on my verbal input “plausible deniability.” Subsequently, I re-entered the generation facility and asked it, once again, to generate four images. Each of the second set of images was different from each of the first four.

I would assert that to reproduce this particular image using that particular generation facility would be tantamount to impossible. On an evidential basis, that might lead the reader to question whether AI had, indeed, ever generated this image. You have only my say-so that it did indeed do so.

The AI itself raises a barrier of plausible deniability to repulse any contention that it had produced this image. Nonetheless, there would likely be widespread acceptance of the fact that it is an AI image, simply because people would assert that they know how AI works. They accept, perhaps, the irreproducibility of AI-produced images.

But many of them deny a God who works in a similar fashion.

This essay, in its initial form, was first published on Facebook on 9 February 2021, during the period now known as “Covid curfew lock-down”.

A defendant in a criminal prosecution has to be able to say one of two things in order to get off: either (a) it didn’t happen or (b) it wasn’t me.

The better of these is (a), it didn’t happen. “You shot the victim and killed him and are guilty of murder.” “No, because his wife poisoned him the night before and I shot a dead body. You cannot kill a dead man.” [EDIT (2 Dec. 2023): The case of Robert Roberson III in Texas has, since this was written, posed an interesting case of it didn’t happen. Mr Roberson has been on death row since 2003 having been convicted of the murder of his daughter in a case based on shaken-baby syndrome. The science on which he was convicted has been discredited, but he remains scheduled for execution for a crime, which he and his counsel contend, not that he didn’t commit but that simply never was committed.]

With (b), it wasn’t me, you must establish (i) an alibi — I was somewhere else, so it couldn’t have been me — or (ii) plausible deniability — it could have been me, but you cannot pin it on me because of a lack of evidence.

Plausible deniability is an important defence in a case involving, say, embezzlement, computer crimes, Internet crimes, political corruption and the like. If I purchase drugs on the dark net, I must ensure that the contact to the drugs dealer cannot be proved to have been made by my computer, even though it was my computer — I disguise my IP, use false or temporary e-mail accounts, pay in bitcoin, and take other precautions to establish that, though the drugs deal may be proved to have taken place, no one can prove that it was me who bought them. Politicians who order someone’s liquidation will do so by some discreet code and then inform their confidant that they want to hear nothing more about it — a few weeks later they read in the paper that the hit in question was found floating in a river after a mysterious car accident, and then resume eating their boiled egg.

Plausible deniability is viewed as an evil; it’s the means by which people can perpetrate crimes and get off scot free because they go undetected. I believe that every story has two sides, however, just as every stamp has a gummed side, every photo a negative, every right an obligation, every truth a falsehood; just, we don’t always get it right when identifying which is which.

In the Bible, Jesus said to His disciples, “If you have ears to hear, then hear; if you have eyes to see, then see.” I’m no theologian, but that does not disqualify me from working out what that means. One thing is sure: He didn’t say it for nothing. Jesus and Shakespeare (and porn films) never say anything for nothing.

When Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, it is nowhere recorded that, before starting, He asked the crowd, “Is everyone here a theologian, so they know how to interpret my words?” When He called Simon and Andrew in from their fishing, He didn’t ask them, “I see you’re out fishing, but you don’t happen also to know a bit of theology do you?” He took ordinary men and women, hookers, criminals and those despised by the people, like tax collectors, to His side precisely because it was those sorts of people that He wanted to talk to, and they were the kind of people to whom He addressed the Sermon on the Mount.

So, what did He mean with ears and eyes? Well, He could have meant something as banal as “Don’t go around with your eyes shut and cotton wool in your ears.” Many a doctor will tell you the same as he nurses your broken nose and sympathises with your not hearing the alarm clock, being late for work and getting the sack. Is that the kind of thing that Jesus said? Everyday tips and tricks for surviving in modern Judaea? Keep your eyes open every day and keep the doctor away? I doubt it.

Perhaps He meant, “I will show you special things and, if you are attentive, you will understand what they mean.” Like a burning bush, or raising the dead, or turning water into wine (and setting up as a wedding caterer). No, that can’t really be it, either, because it helps little when a burning bush is causing consternation, with the fire brigade running in with buckets of sand, to say, “Hold on, hold on, there’s special meaning to this!” Or when everyone quaffing Vittel at a wedding ends up in hospital with chronic alcohol poisoning for some inexplicable reason and you run in and say, “But there’s something deeper here” (and cause the surgeon to stuff the stomach pump down another five inches).

So what do we see, that we don’t otherwise see when our eyes are not attuned to it? Well, perhaps He meant something like, “Attune yourself to the right wavelength” or “Get the whole picture” or even “When a bunch of things happen and look like one almighty coincidence, then they’re not; they’re a coincidence of the Almighty.”

I am convinced that my life has been saved by Providence at, at least, several junctures in my life. Twice when opening a car door; and once when darting out of a Brussels side street in my car and missing an oncoming tram by — and I do not exaggerate — the skin of my teeth. In fact it was the skin of my teeth that opened my eyes.

I once wrote and drew a scurrilous defamation of my Latin master and was so indiscreet as to do it in my general jotter, which pupils always had with them at each lesson. For some forgotten reason, in a jocular portion of a double Latin period, Mr Briggs strode up to my desk and grabbed the jotter to my frozen horror, and a bit to that of David Throssell, who was sitting beside me and had already giggled at the cartoon I’d drawn. Briggs leafed through and regarded each and every last page of this damned jotter, pumping my blood pressure up to breaking point and all of a sudden, miraculously — at the very page in question — turned his gaze to me as he swiftly leafed over, not one but two pages, then looked back and leafed to the end, and plopped the jotter back on my desk, leaving me and David breathing very fast sighs of relief. It’s banal. It has no reason. And it’s plausibly deniable. And it’s one of millions of such occurrences on a daily basis across the globe. However, its commonality should be no object to its divine intervention, if divine it be, since surely that would just up the chances that you, too, had been chosen divinely — i.e. “What’s so special about you?” is a less pointed question when it becomes “What’s so special about me?” or, even, “What’s so special about anyone?”

What was so special about my Uncle Bill? He and Aunt Peggy long ago took my parents to Niagara Falls in Canada and Bill showed them a fenced off spot and said “I was standing on that a few weeks ago. Now it’s at the foot of the escarpment.” He could easily have been on it the day it dropped. Or the day before. Or ten years before. He must make the connection. Not anyone else.

I got angry at Ryanair’s check-in charge of 55 euros, and baulked, refused to pay and walked out of the airport, back to my car in pouring rain. Every effort by me to check in online, using an iPhone and a portable computer, failed. With 15 minutes to go before take-off, I gave up. No taxi would take me the five kilometres to my car, and lose the chance of a fat fare into Charleroi. The teeming rain made it a perfect storm. When I finally arrived back home and came into the house, I had an overwhelming feeling that everything was all right. I’d chucked an airfare of 158 euros down the toilet due to my baulking at a 55 euro check-in charge, and was unaccountably happy that I had done that. I could not explain the wave of relief that wafted over me, as I sat down to my dinner. And, two weeks later, Covid-19 lock-down was ordered in Spain, where my flight had been headed.

The obvious questions are “What about all those who do die in car accidents, or who do crash into trams or who did fly on Ryanair’s flight to Alicante or did perish when the escarpment collapsed or do get punished by indignant schoolmasters?” And there I can offer no answer. Except this: the reason I cannot answer these questions is precisely because of plausible deniability. If God wanted to keep anything not of this world apart and unfathomable for us here to understand — because it is not meet and right that we should, because we are incapable of comprehending it (we’re struggling already with quantum physics, guys) — then just why wouldn’t He have made the means by which He interconnects with us so plausibly deniable? (Warning: this is in fact a terribly circular argument, but we like lifecycles and weather cycles, so why not this one?) God is balance. But He can’t keep balance if we keep tipping His scales. He needs to tare them every now and then — by my calculation, around about once every millionth of a second.

In the Middle Ages, much injustice was done based on prejudice, bias, superstition and revenge. Someone just needed to murmur, “She’s a witch,” and a herb gatherer was in for a hard time. Suspicions of sexual misconduct got you a red hot poker up the backside. And if you owed someone and didn’t pay, they could always find a way to trump up a charge against you. A crucible of suspicion.

And then came the Enlightenment: philosophy, justice, courts of law (proper ones, not like Thomas More’s), reasoning and deliberation. Science and the principles of cause and effect. The Enlightenment brought so much improvement, but it brought also one major step backwards: we learned to trust evidence and deny feeling.

Evidence: he buys me flowers and a ring = he loves me.

Feeling – He looks over my right shoulder when he says it.

Evidence: I’m so lucky, this guy has asked me to be his chauffeur because he says I look real cool and drive fast.

Feeling — He has a plan of Fort Knox in his living room, I wonder why.

The Enlightenment largely stripped us of our sixth sense; but the fact that failure is the destiny of prosecutions for want of sufficient evidence doesn’t mean that all and everything else must fail for want of it. Yet it does.

“I just don’t feel at one with you, honey, I just don’t feel it’s working.”

“Look, didn’t we have a great time in Florida, aren’t the kids happy, look at our great jobs. Don’t you want to give it another try?”

“You’re right honey, I’m sorry, I don’t know what made me feel that way.”

He’s right, he doesn’t know. But he felt it, didn’t he? The guy’s wife has unwittingly invoked the criminal defence of plausible deniability.

And so did Jesus. He had to. Suppose He’d said to His disciples, “Right, every second Tuesday, you’ll all be getting a signed, notarised parchment giving you instructions from the Lord, and telling you where to preach, where to go to, what to say, and whose dust to shake from your feet, ok? And don’t forget to acknowledge receipt, please, for record-keeping purposes.” God’s, or whoever’s, messages do not come in notarised parchments, they come in little things that sometimes make you sit up and pay attention (like avoiding hitting a tram by the skin of your teeth). By looking with your eyes and listening with your ears. Often, if not always, they will be in a form that, when you explain them, fall squarely into the category of plausible deniability.

They can, more often than not, be explained away by “you’re mad” (madness being defined as “seeing things”, “hearing voices” and being driven to distraction for no apparent cause whatsoever). Psychologists are the greatest supporting evidential source for plausible deniability (and God probably thanks them for it). For no psychologist faced with an apparent raving lunatic can truly know whether the cause of the madness is a dilation of some vein, or a direct voice talking to the patient from heaven (and perhaps even dilating a vein or two for dramatic effect). Or, if not madness, then coincidence.

I went to bed tonight at 11.30 p.m. and was tired, so soon dropped off. As I did so, I thought I heard a dog bark. Not loud, but in the distance. Nonsense, though: it was a scuffing noise when I drew up the duvet. Then some wax in my ear dislodged as I snuggled down and it sounded a little like a growl of a dog — a coincidence: after all, it’s true that I was already thinking of dogs.

At 12.56 a.m., I heard a dog bark. No, not from the neighbours and not with an echo as if in the room, but a dog, bark. Woof! I awoke with a start. Looked at my phone. 0.56. Ten to one. I listened.

There was no more dog barking. I sighed, but was no longer sleepy. I was thirsty, and wanted a cup of tea. I came downstairs and remembered the teapot was in my office. When I came into the office I saw the window was open, not wide open, but I had unlatched it in the daytime to get fresh air and omitted to relatch it. It was simply sitting against the frame. But it was indeed me who had unlatched it earlier.

Here, the streetlights go out at 12 and come on around five or six. It’s black dark and there’s a security light on a sensor outside at the back. Sensor lights are fine, but at 1 a.m. in Veltem, no one’s looking out for them going on or off and, if they are, perhaps it’s Graham putting his rubbish out. Nor indeed am I looking out, as I sleep in the front, where the street is pitch black. People are not allowed at the moment (this was written during the Covid lock-down) to go out at night, but in Veltem, who’s to check? You can walk down my street in the middle of a curfew night with a blazing torch of pitch and tar and no one will be any the wiser.

So, was I warned by some force that was with me? Earwax? A scuffing duvet? And supposing I was, then why? Because a footpad was creeping up my driveway? The sensor had stopped working in the arc light? A wild cat was about to jump into my office? To forewarn me to be careful because there’s a criminal coming, in a couple of years, and that’s how he would otherwise have got in? Or to get me back behind my computer to write this post about plausible deniability?

Aye, there’s the rub. I have ears to hear and I believe I heard something, a dog. Maybe it wasn’t a dog, but a gunshot; and maybe the three dog manifestations were, indeed, just a coincidence, for I have no evidence to lead before this court of opinion. But I don’t really need to lead evidence, because no one is on trial here, least of all God. If I believe He spoke to me, then I can delude myself and thank Him, or ascribe to odd coincidence or blind luck the fact that I closed an open window in the middle of the night. However, the simple fact is this: that a window that was open is now securely locked, and however it came about is really unimportant. To you. But the fact that it is an important fact to me, is a matter for me. One between me and God.

We always call people back when we miss a call or e-mail or text message. Because our devices notify us unequivocally of the call. But, how many of us would call back if, instead, they said “There is a possibility, but we cannot verify it, that there might have been a message for you from an identified caller, but we’re not sure it was him or, indeed, whether the call existed at all, but your sixth sense directory maybe has the answers we don’t”? You know where I’m headed here.

There is no fruit or benefit to anyone to answering comments on this, but I will still try to, if you have any. It is superstition and coincidence versus slander and badmouthing, or even recriminations. I post it simply because I had an inkling that day, that someone, somewhere may be wanting to open an eye or ear; and I wanted to share this experience and my thinking on it. Perhaps it may help. Help you. I do not think it will do any harm. No.

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