Tag Archives: logic

The process matters

8 Replies

file0001372359562Nick Gill and I were having a conversation on Facebook yesterday, discussing articles that support and oppose certain positions that we hold. (each of us taking a different side) Both agreed that there are articles that agree with our views that we find extremely distasteful and articles that reach opposite conclusions from us that use good arguments and sound reasoning. I made the following comment:

At this stage of my life, I’m much more interested in how a person reaches their conclusions rather than the conclusions themselves. Conclusions matter, but if I’m using unsound means to get there, others can follow those same paths and go just about anywhere.

Nick suggested that I share that thought on this blog, so… there it is! What do you think about that statement?

The limits of our logic, pt. 2

8 Replies

Just a few more thoughts about logic and faith. The comments yesterday were very helpful; if you haven’t read them, I encourage you to go back and read them.

Bryant said that logic is an expression of wisdom, and spiritual wisdom should produce spiritual logic. Guy separated logic itself from an overdependence on the outcomes of logic. I see some validity in what both of you are saying, but I also think that we need to step back a moment and look at the Bible.

The Hebrew approach to truth is not to come from logic to truth, but to let the truth govern and inform our logic. Because of this, some of the “logic” in the Bible doesn’t seem very logical. Let’s take an example from Paul, who was actually one who often reasoned in non-Hebraic ways. Look at Galatians 3:16

“The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ.”

By Western standards of logic, that makes no sense. We chuckle and say, “Well, Paul slipped one in there.” Actually, from a Hebrew way of thinking, this made perfect sense. The rabbis make all sorts of arguments based on the shapes of letters in Hebrew words, on etymology, and on minor elements that seem unimportant to us. I’m not sure how the Galatians took it, but a Hebrew would have been impressed with Paul’s insight.

Read the book of James. Drives me nuts. Outlining the book of James is a nightmare. That’s because James writes with Hebrew reasoning, not Greek reasoning. Ideas don’t have to be connected. Thoughts don’t flow one from another; they jump and skip and turn back on themselves.

Greeks sought to prove religious truths. Hebrews accepted the truths and reasoned based on those truths. The Saducees, embracing Hellenism, felt free to reject the parts of faith that “didn’t make sense.” That’s what I see many wanting to do today. Hellenistic thought has dominated the West for so long that Westerners tend to think it’s God-ordained, that it’s the only way of approaching truth.

Again, I’m not anti-intellectual, and it doesn’t take much reading on this blog to see that I use logic frequently. But I still think there’s a strong need for us to recognize and respect the limits of our logic.

The limits of our logic

10 Replies

God has come up on the short end of a lot of syllogisms lately.

“I can’t believe in a God that would…”
“I can’t accept that God would…”
“A loving God would never…”

From the disaster in Japan to the question of what happens to the unconverted after death, God has been pushed into the back seat and human logic has taken the reins. If we can’t figure it out, then it’s just not true. If we can’t fully understand and explain it, then it must not exist.

It’s an exaltation of the human mind, a return to the principles of the Greek philosophers. Alexander the Great would be proud, knowing that his quest to spread Hellenism across the world is still affecting the ways we interact with one another.

The irony, of course, is that I use logic all the time on this blog. And in my daily life. I reason with people. I work through patterns of thinking. I use the tools which my modernistic upbringing provided me, logic being one of the main ones.

I think it requires faith to accept that some things are unknowable and incomprehensible for us. I know that it takes courage, for such a view is ridiculed today as shallow and provincial. Could that be why Jesus said we have to be willing to be like a child to enter the Kingdom? It certainly fits with the teachings that the world will hate us and the intellectuals of this world will scoff at our gospel.

The other extreme, of course, is to reject all scholarship, to lock yourself into “the traditions handed down by our fathers.” I’m not advocating that. But I do think that we need to see the limits to our logic. Reason can take us only so far; we go the rest of the way by faith, or we never complete the journey.

When someone says, “I just can’t accept…”, they are being honest and accurate. When they say, “No thinking person can accept…”, they are peddling that which farmers offer us to spread around our gardens. One view accepts personal responsibility; the other places the blame on the concept itself.

Fact is, at some point we choose to believe. Or choose not to believe. And we do that for a wide variety of factors. Logic is one of them, but it is almost never the chief factor. Those that desire not to believe will often point to logic as the reason, but it’s rarely as objective as that. More often than not, we choose not to believe in God or some aspect of God’s nature because of our own wishes and desires, the way we wish things were.

Having thrown logic out the window, I guess I’m rambling a bit with this post. The main thing that I’m trying to say is that I think it takes a lot of courage to say, “I don’t know” or even “I can’t know.” Some see it as a cop out. I see it as accepting the limits of our logic.

Bacon on the side

1 Reply

I’ll share with you some insightful words that I read the other day. John Mark Hicks is doing a study on biblical interpretation in Churches of Christ (hermeneutics is the scholarly term). In the third post in this series, as he discussed the use of Baconian logic in our hermeneutic, Hicks stated:
The irony, of course, is that the Bible as a narrative of redemption is no longer the ultimate truth here. Rather, it is the systematic conclusions of an inductive-deductive method that finally gets us to the truth–it collects the scattered truths (facts) of the Bible, unearths what the Bible only implies, assembles together, collates them, orders them and produces a system (”sound doctrine”). The truth as given to us in the form in which Scripture offers it is thereby insufficient. We need to induct the facts, deduce the new truths, arrange them, systematize and order them into a presentation of the Truth.
Is it any wonder, then, that though Scripture never offers us the “five steps of salvation” or “five acts of worship” members of Churches of Christ in the mid-20th century were as certain about these as they were that Jesus died for their sins. Their certainty was derived from their confidence in the method–generated by the Enlightenment, popularized by natural science and applied by human wisdom. And, at the same time, they thought their method was “common sense” or even the Biblical method itself.
Wow! That perfectly describes my experience. Our divisions aren’t about what the Bible says; they are about what we say about what the Bible says. At some points the conclusions became what mattered. Vary from the brotherhood approved conclusions, and you’re a liberal at best, a heretic at worst (not sure where “change agent” fits on that sliding scale).
In the beginnings, the Restoration movement was about NOT dividing over inferences, about letting the Bible be our only guide. At some point, we decided the Bible wasn’t complete enough as written; we felt the need to cut and paste and fill in the gaps with syllogisms, proof texts and “necessary inferences.”
Maybe it’s time for us to have a back to the Bible moment.