Christians Need To Ask More Questions
To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 2 on DVD, visit summit.org.
So analyze what you see in here. Please ask questions of people. Don’t just let them spew whatever they want to spew. I’ll give you one example. One, I wrote an article on women’s rights in Islam because I did a debate on that and it’s called, Did Muhammad Believe in Women’s Rights? They changed the title and made it provocative. So I had somebody come after me and say that they ignored everything I wrote in the article and came after the Bible. And they started attacking passages in the Bible. I asked them a few questions and I said, “okay, let’s just throw out the Bible, no Bible. We’re not going to argue from the Bible anymore. I’m going to give it up.”
Now the whole point was women’s rights. How do you know women have rights? Where are you getting that from? I got nothing. Well, the human community just comes up with what it knows is good. [inaudible 00:00:59] And I went, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute, that hasn’t worked in the past because we see these societies that treated women horribly. That was the human community coming up.” Okay, so next, “Where are you sourcing this? In individuals? That didn’t work. What’s your material.” I threw out Charles Darwin for them. I threw out some Arnold [Chopin 00:01:18], Harold [Form 00:01:18]. It’s all very bad for women by the way. It’s all very bad. If you’ve ever read Darwin or some of the 1800s philosophers, atheist philosophers view on women. It’s not very good.
All right. So no source. Had no source, but was attacking me adamantly on the Bible. That doesn’t mean I don’t have to know my Bible to defend that. But you see what I’m saying? If they’re going to argue from women’s rights, they got to have a source for it. Ask people. What I did was help them to see that they didn’t have a grounding for their view. They thought women should have rights. They thought the Bible is wrong. How do they know that? Where are they getting that from? So important. Okay. That was just my one example there.
All right. You can also do this on Twitter. I use these questions on Twitter all the time. It’s fantastic. I so wanted to answer this because in my logic class we talk about truth and how it’s easy to define but hard to find. And I wanted to lay that down like, “Boom, here you go. I’m a logic professor. What, what?” Instead, I just said, “What do you mean by that?” Because, I didn’t think she really understood what she was saying. That should be easy if you have the truth. Wow. Is truth that easy guys? Is it really easy for you? No, it’s not. Instead of going after her, just ask her a question. What do you mean by that? She actually jumped to another tweet of mine rather than this one. This one was hard. Asking her questions, support. That was tough.
Here’s another example. Oh, the poor people that get stuck on the plane next to me. This was just a few months back, in March. This guy was a nervous flyer. And as soon as I woke up from my nap, he saw me trying to answer a question. Somebody had asked me,” Who made God?” And I talked to her and I was writing some follow-up stuff for her. And he saw that and he said, “That’s interesting. What do you do?” And I said, “I’m a Christian apologist.” “What is that?” I said, “Oh, I argue for belief in the existence of God.” And he said, “Oh yeah. I don’t believe there’s any empirical evidence for God.”
I knew what he meant. But does he know what he means? Because I’m a better minister to him if I push him in his reasoning. So I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “Oh, well we can only know what our senses tell us.” And then I said, “As you see, how do you know that?” This was his response. I said, “Okay.” He didn’t have anything. So I said, “What is your grounding for thinking your senses are giving you truth about reality?” And he cussed me out. He cussed me out right there in the exit row of a Southwest Airlines plane, so everybody could hear. And he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
So I asked him if I could share with him how belief in a personal creator deductively made sense that our senses would give us accurate knowledge about the universe He created so we could know the creator. The sciences we’re doing actually gives us truth. We actually know more about the one that invented it all. So invented, created. Anyway, the result of that, you’re looking at me like, “What happened?” He actually asked me if he could follow me down to the baggage claim. And then he asked me if… Oh, then he didn’t know what to do.
He asked me if he could follow me down to baggage claim, then he just looked at me. I said, “Dude, hug.” Gave him my card said, “We can keep in touch”. Do you see how many questions blew up his worldview? Like two. Two. I’m guessing he trotted out the empirical evidence thing to Christians before and they didn’t know what that meant. It was easy. Trotted it out like a party favor, done. Ask people questions. Push them to reason through, okay and engage.
Here’s where we’re going to rapid fire go through some of the material fallacies. I’ll give you some resources to where you can go out on your own and do these in more detail. I know some of you homeschoolers have already done some of this. In fact, you may have the sources that I have. So yay, praise God. All right. I’m going to introduce some fallacies, specifically material fallacies, not formal fallacies in the argument, because most people aren’t making formal arguments and they’re not making errors in the formal argument. They’re making errors in the content of the argument, which is called the material fallacy. So we’ll say it’s an error in reasoning, a place where someone’s made a mistake in their thinking.
So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to look at these on your paper and I’m going to show you some examples up here that I’ve collected over the years. Some of them are fun. All right, ad hominem. First of all, this list is not comprehensive. I’ve given you some more places to go to find them like Nathaniel Hunt’s [inaudible 00:06:21] book. You can find more of them there. This is not in order of appearance or frequency. Although it is because I put them in order of how my logic students are finding these. I counted up how many of these they’re finding in their papers and such, by analyzing a hot topic issue in America. And I put them in order according to how often I was coming across them from these logic papers.
So ad hominem. Number one, you can attack the person and not their argument. America will vote for you. I love it. Political ad campaigns. You already know ad hominem. It’s all over political ad campaigns. So attacking the person instead of the argument that they’re making. Now, this means that the person is not the argument. You’re not arguing the person’s character. It’s like they’ve presented, “Here’s my economic plan.” And you say, ” Yes, but you don’t like to kiss babies. So you’re an awful person.” So ad hominem. All right. I think you know that one.
The appeal to pity, ad misericordiam. Pity’s usually a good thing, but it cannot substitute for an argument. So let’s look at one. Commercials, especially ones that have to deal with animals are full of this.
I know how to sit, how to fetch and how to roll over. What I don’t know is how I ended up in here. But I know that I am a good dog and I just want to go home. When you buy Pedigree, we make a donation to help shelter dogs find loving homes. The Pedigree Adoption Drive, help us help dogs.
Right? So you don’t know if Pedigree is full of nasty chemicals that might kill your dog or it’s just help the dogies. This is appeal to pity. That’s what this is. It’s a good one too. So appeal to pity. The argument should be our dog food is actually the best dog food for your dog. Instead, it’s shifted.
Appeal to shame. Like pity, shame is often appropriate but it’s never a valid substitute for an argument. Toyota actually got in trouble over this commercial. It’s an appeal to shame. It’s very low. So crank it up.
I don’t tolerate dorkiness very well. Yet my parents still cart me around in a car that says “Hi, we’re the geek family.”.
This Highlander is more like it. Nice interior. It’s even got the optional Bluetooth streaming audio. Very classy Mrs. J. Just because you are a parent doesn’t mean you have to be lame.
See the stylish new Highlander at youtube.com/highlander.
Appeal to shame carting your kids around the dork mobile. Right? There you go. So an appeal to shame. Very good one too. Yeah, they got trouble for that because it appealed to shame. All right.
Straw man, changing or exaggerating an opponent’s position or argument to make it easier to refute.
Follow Christian Podcast Central on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see our ongoing discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers regarding worldviews.
(This podcast is by Summit Ministries. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central.)