Developing a Well-Formed Thought life: What Is Logic?

 

 

Logic studies the methods that we use to analyze information and draw valid conclusions. As Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks put it, “Logic really means putting your thoughts in order.”1 “Logic is the study of right reason or valid inferences and the attending fallacies, formal and informal.”2 “Logic is a way to think so that we can come to correct conclusions by understanding implications and the mistakes people often make in thinking.”3 According to Irving M. Copi and Carl Cohen in their Introduction to Logic, “Logic is the study of the methods and principles used to distinguish correct reasoning from incorrect reasoning.”4

 

The  study of logic incorporates a number of elements. At the most basic level, logic examines propositions, arguments, premises, and conclusions. The focus is the use of right thinking to come to correct conclusions. Logic incorporates the study of proper thinking as well as mistakes in thinking (fallacies). Through processes of deduction and induction, inferences are made with the aim of coming to correct conclusions.

In addition, logic also sharpens the use of our language and allows us to articulate our idea more precisely and cogently to others. Christian’s should be very concerned about precision and clarity in communication. As we desire to glorify God with our minds, we ought to seek to formulate the proper structure of arguments. As such, learning to do so allows us to be more careful, methodical, and systematic in the presentation of the truth of Christianity as well as other true ideas.

Logic is built upon four laws:

1. The law of identity (A is A) – A thing is what it is.  “A Rose is a rose.”

2. The law of excluded middle (either A or non-A) – “Either a rose, or not a rose.”  But not sort of a rose  (Think about being “sort of pregnant.”)

3. The law of non-contradiction (A is not non-A) – “A Rose is not a non-Rose.”  Here we see that there can be no contradiction in the idea and have it be coherent.  (Think of a square circle.)

4. The law of rational inference – (If P, then Q.  And P.  Therefore, Q.)  “If it’s raining outside, then it’s wet.  It is raining outside.  Therefore, it is wet.)

These laws are foundational to all thinking and reason. One cannot object to the laws of logic without employing them in the objection itself. These laws are grounded in the nature of God.  God is the basis of all truth as the basis of ultimate reality.

Sequacious reasoning is the correct flow of thought.  It is developed using essential elements derived from the basics of logic. In general, everything else is built upon these elements.  The first element is the proposition.  A proposition is something that is either true or false. Think of an indicative statement (a statement that something is a certain way).  Such statements may either be affirmed or denied because they are either true or false.  Other utterances such as commands, questions, or exclamations are not true or false and so they are not propositional.

Arguments are tools in logic that allow us to take propositions and put them in an order which allows us to arrive at a conclusion about something.  When you have a number of propositions that lead to a conclusion, you have an argument. The conclusion of an argument is that which follows from the supporting propositions, which are called the premises of the argument. The telltale words for premises are called premise-indicators:  “Since, because, for, as, as shown by, as indicated by, the reason is that” are some premise-indicators.

A conclusion without its supporting premises is not an argument.  The conclusions of arguments can often be recognized by telltale words or phrases. The words that point to the conclusion are called conclusion-indicators.  For example, “Therefore, hence, thus, so, accordingly, in consequence, consequently, as a result, it follows that, we may infer, which shows that” are all words or phrases that often point to the conclusion of an argument.

When identifying arguments, it’s helpful to make the distinction between arguments and explanations for things.  The key here is the intention of the presenter.  Just because we see some indicator words, it doesn’t mean we are reviewing an argument.  An explanation is meant to illuminate or give insight into a state of affairs.  An argument is used to support the truth regarding the facts of a state of affairs.  Skillful thinker must discern the difference between explanations and arguments by looking closely at the context and intention.

Arguments come in two kinds—they are either deductive or inductive. These are important terms to differentiate. When an argument is deductive, it means that the conclusion follows from the premises necessarily and conclusively. When a deductive argument is valid, it means that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.  Think about that…

An inductive argument, on the other hand, is not a conclusive argument. When an argument is inductive, it means that that the conclusion may be true to a certain degree of probability.  That probability may be very high, so high in fact that its all but logically impossible for it to be false.  For example, we hold that unicorns do not exist in the actual world.  We know this aposteriori (via inspection), and we could certainly provide a decent argument for it.  Nevertheless, since it is logically possible for God to create a unicorns, the conclusion is sufficient, but not necessary as it is in deductive reasoning.

Copi clarifies:

A deductive argument is one whose conclusion is claimed to follow from its premises with absolute necessity, this necessity not being a matter of degree and not depending in any way on whatever else may be the case. In sharp contrast, an inductive argument is one whose conclusion is claimed to follow from its premises only with probability, this probability being a matter of degree and dependent upon what else may be the case.4

One way to look at this is as follows: in a deductive argument, no amount of additional information can change the conclusion of the argument. In an inductive argument, the conclusion may change when new information is discovered. Deductive arguments are certain, whereas inductive arguments are probable to some degree.
When an argument is structured correctly, it is called a valid argument. When an argument is not correctly structured, it is called invalid. An argument cannot be true or false, only valid or invalid. Truth or falsity only applies to statements or propositions. The conclusion of an argument can be true or false (because the conclusion is a statement), but the argument is only either valid or invalid.

Finally, when an argument is valid, and all of its premises are true, it is called a sound argument. This is the kind of argument the skilled thinker is looking for.

 

More to follow…

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1 Norman Geisler & Ronald Brooks, Come Let Us Reason: An Introduction to Logical Thinking (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1990), p. 11.
2 Ibid., p. 12.
3 Ibid.,p. 13.
4 Irving M. Copi & Carl Cohen, Introduction to Logic, 11th Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2002), p. 3.
5 Ibid., p. 6.

Karen Armstrong Divorces Faith from Knowlege. Wall Street Journal dual with Richard Dawkins.

Trying to divorce faith from reason in seeking to answer the new atheists, Karen Armstrong flys south as she also divorces faith from knowledge. The implications are disastrous. As believers, we must not capitulate with those who attempt to relativize faith in order to preserve it. Rather, we should pursue the development of solid rejoinders which refute the ideas of men like Dawkins. Much better rejoinders are available.

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

The Wall Street Journal commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question “Where does evolution leave God?” Neither knew what the other would say. Here are the results.

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.  Read more…

Perception May Be the Ultimate Reality, but Is It the Ultimate Truth?

 

Recently I watched an online debate on the existence of evil between Deepak Chopra and Mark Driscoll on NBC’s face-off.  In addition to these two guests were an ex-prostitute, who came to give personal testimony to the objective demonic influence in her industry, and a catholic bishop who persistently relegated these experiences to her perception.  The assertion was repeated more than once, "Perception may be the ultimate reality, but it is not the ultimate truth."  In other words, there may be objective reality, but we can’t know it because we are all trapped behind our perceptions.  Perceptual reality, according to the skeptic, is all we can actually know.  Ultimately, objective truth about reality is epistemically unattainable.

Sound good?  Many seem to think so.  I just have one question (okay, maybe several) regarding a teeny tiny little inconsistency that keeps coming back to weigh down my mental makeup bag.  That is, I can’t help but wonder that if perception is personal reality, and everyone is trapped behind their perceptions, then what about those prescribing this skeptical view of knowledge?  Are they themselves also not trapped behind their perceptions of reality?  If so, how then do those who prescribe the view actually know this ultimate truth about everyone not being able to know any ultimate truth? 

It just puzzles me you see, since everybody is trapped behind their perceptions of reality.  Nevertheless, the epistemic genius of the skeptic is really mind boggling.  I mean, how cleaver are they to have figured out a way to get outside of their own perception in order to help the rest of us understand that nobody can get outside our own perceptions. 

But, since this view sounds so good, my perception of it must be true.  After all, skeptics ultimately know best.

TL

Why Theology Needs Philosophy!

In 1993, Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada California, opened its doors to the first students in its new M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics.  What was the vision that inspired and discerned more clearly the strategic role played by philosophy in the task of theological education?  Dr. William Lane Craig answers this question in the current issue of Sundoulos, the alumni magazine of Talbot (my wonderful alma mater).

Why Philosophy?

Let me suggest three reasons why philosophical study ought to play an integral part in theological training.

 

First, Christian philosophy is vital to transforming our post-Christian cultural milieu. In America we now find ourselves living in a post-Christian culture that is increasingly coarse, superficial, promiscuous, and profane. Beneath it lies the widespread conviction of religious relativism. There is no one true religion, and to assert that there is to expose oneself as arrogant, coercive—even evil. In the absence of objective truth, religious belief becomes a purely private matter of subjective feelings.

 

Such a cultural context is antagonistic to the mission of the Church. In order to speak the Gospel effectively, the Church needs an intellectual milieu where the Gospel can be heard as an objectively true alternative; otherwise it will either be dismissed as superstition or appropriated only as “true for me but not for you.”

 

The Church thus faces, as Charles Malik emphasized in his inaugural address at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, two tasks in our evangelism, saving the soul and saving the mind; that is to say, not only converting people spiritually but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Malik declared,

 

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.¹

The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and in the scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as bigoted or irrational, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint.

 

It is the awesome task of Christian philosophers to help turn the intellectual tide back to a milieu in which Christian faith can be regarded as an intellectually credible alternative. Since philosophy is foundational to every disciple of the university, philosophy is the most strategic discipline to be captured for Christ. Malik himself realized this. He emphasized,

 

It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of antiintellectualism. For example, I say this different spirit, so far as philosophy alone—the most important domain for thought and intellect—is concerned, must see the tremendous value of spending an entire year doing nothing but poring intensely over the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle, or three years over the City of God of Augustine.

This is not a popular message for seminaries. J. Gresham Machen in his article “Christianity and Culture” observed that “many would the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taught by its popular exponents” instead of confusing students “with a lot of …names unknown outside the walls of the university.” But, Machen insisted, the scholarly method of procedure

 

is based simply upon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is to-day matter of academic speculation begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires., In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.²

Like Malik, Machen also believed that “The chief obstacle to the Christian religion to-day lies in the sphere of the intellect,” and that it must be attacked in that sphere. “The Church is perishing to-day through the lackof thinking, not through an excess of it.”

Second, Christian Philosophy is an integral part of training for Christian ministry. What is ironic about the attitude that doubts philosophy’s rightful or important place at a seminary is that it is precisely our pastors and evangelists who are in need of this training. Machen’s article was originally given as a speech entitled, “The Scientific Preparation of the Minister.” A model for us here is a man like John Wesley, who was at once a spirit-filled revivalist and an Oxford-educated scholar. In 1756 Wesley delivered “An Address to the Clergy,” which I wish all future ministers would read before commencing their seminary studies. In discussing what sort of abilities a minister ought to have, Wesley distinguished between natural gifts and acquired abilities. And it’s extremely instructive to look at the abilities which Wesley thought a minister ought to acquire. One of them is a basic grasp of philosophy. He challenged his audience to ask themselves,

 

Am I a tolerable master of the sciences? Have I gone through the very gate of them, logic? . . . . Do I understand metaphysics; if not the depths of the Schoolmen, the subtleties of Scotus or Aquinas, yet the first rudiments, the general principles, of that useful science? Have I conquered so much of it, as to clear my apprehension and range my ideas under proper heads; so much as enables me to read with ease and pleasure, as well as profit, Dr. Henry Moore’s Works, Malbranche’s “Search after Truth,” and Dr. Clarke’s “Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God?”³

Wesley’s vision of a pastor is remarkable: a gentleman, skilled in the Scriptures and conversant with history, philosophy, and the science of his day. How do the pastors graduating from our seminaries compare to this model?

I can personally testify to the immense practicality and even indispensability of philosophical training for a ministry of evangelism. My ministry involves not just scholarly work, but speaking evangelistically on university campuses with groups like Campus Crusade for Christ. Again and again, I see the practical value of my philosophical studies in reaching students for Christ. The conventional wisdom is that “You can’t use arguments to bring people to Christ.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this said. I suspect those who say this just don’t do a lot of campus evangelism. The fact is that there is tremendous interest out there among unbelievers in hearing a rational presentation and defense of the Gospel.

Very often I’ll be invited onto a campus where a local professor has a reputation for eating Christians for lunch in his classes, and we’ll challenge him to a public debate on some issue like “Does God Exist?” or“ Christianity vs. Humanism,” or “Who Was Jesus?” or some such topic.And I find that hundreds and sometimes even thousands of students will come out to hear these debates. Frankly, I don’t know how one could minister effectively in a public way on our university campuses without training in philosophy.”

 

Dr. Craig, we couldn’t agree more!

 

William Lane Craig (D.Theol., Ludwig-Maximilliéns-Universität Munich, Germany; Ph.D., University of Birmingham England) is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot. Bill and his wife Jan reside in the Atlanta area, from which he carries on an incredibly productive ministry of professional and popular writing, speaking and debating around the world. He also maintains a web-based ministry, reasonablefaith.org.

Your Mind Really Matters

 Believe it or not, the development of a well-formed thought life is actually contained in the first and greatest commandment.  In Luke 10:36 (Matt. 22:37) Jesus commands us to love God with our heart, soul, strength and mind. Jesus is actually quoting the verse from Deuteronomy.

However, evangelicalism has sought to be culturally revelant and reach out to the post-modern generations, we have become over-focused on our relationship and personal experience of God.  We’ve lost the understanding of how important it is to love Him intellectually and to glorify Him through our capacity of reason. In a nutshell, in pursuit of our hearts, we’ve totally lost our heads!  

Anti-intellectualism is a serious issue in the American Church.  We must recover a more balance approach to our faith, and this ought to include the pursuit of a well-formed thought life.  Developing the skills necessary to better reason through our worldview and articulate it effectively to a lost and dying world is vital.  God gave us the capacity of reason so that we would be able to love and worship Him with our minds.  It is through ideas that we tear down falsehoods that are set up against the knowledge of God.  A well-formed thought life enables us to better understand the nature of our ideas and what consequences they may have.  

Further, and more importantly, this is the way God intended us to be. Having a well-formed thought life translates into well being because it entails thinking more accurately about ourselves, the world, and God.  Knowing Him and His will for us is the ultimate prize.

Oh…one final thing…if your mentally deranged, you’ll most likely need a different website. But feel free to poke around in the absent minded category!