Let us Reason Together: Thinking about Thinking

Mark Roberts

Everyone loves a forceful, compelling argument that leaves an opponent with no choice but to agree. “You’ve already agreed A = B, right?” “But look here: B = C. So your contention that A does not equal C is wrong!” Reasoning using carefully framed premises can indeed be very powerful. Peter does precisely this in Acts 2 with a sermon that proves Jesus is the Christ and results in 3000 baptisms. However, it is possible to be tricked in the reasoning game. Let’s see what we should watch for when we hear arguments framed and asserted.

In Matthew 4:6 Satan tells Jesus to throw Himself off the temple because according to Psalms 91:11-12 angels would catch Him. Quoting Scripture makes it look like a strong case, but the devil erred “not knowing the Scripture.” What he was doing was making a general rule apply to every situation. Psalm 91 contains praise to God for His help in time of need. To use that to buttress the argument that God must always bail His people out of every trouble won’t work - it is making more of Psalm 91 than its author intended. This kind of argumentation happens all the time. “Doesn’t Proverbs 22:6 say if you train a child right he won’t depart from that way when he is old? Well, look at their child. He isn’t living right so they obviously didn’t train him properly!” Again, Proverbs 22 promises general truths, not something that can be applied to every situation at every time. Proverbs 13:1 says a “a wise son accepts his father’s discipline.” Would that apply to a child whose father comes home drunk and beats him? We need to be careful about making more of a general principle than God intends.

Sometimes a similar mistake is made when apples are mixed with oranges. By this I mean comparing what shouldn’t and doesn’t go together. Bible critics like to poke fun at the Bible by saying “I can prove suicide is God’s will. Judas went out and hanged Himself and Jesus said ‘Go thou and do likewise.’” This may make an audience laugh but it ignores the differing contexts of the passages where Judas’ hanging is recorded and Jesus’ command to “go and do likewise.” Putting those verses together to make suicide scriptural is absurd and unfair to the Bible. You may have heard someone argue that since Paul told Timothy to drink some wine it is okay for Christians to drink socially today. But Paul’s recommendation to Timothy had to do with a physical ailment (see 1 Tim 5:23). One can’t manufacture permission to drink alcohol socially out of what Paul said about the medicinal use of alcohol! Those two things don’t go together. Jehovah’s Witnesses are fond of attacking Jesus’ deity with an argument from James 1:13. James affirms “God cannot be tempted with evil” so the Witnesses then ask about the temptations of Christ. If Jesus was tempted with evil He can’t be God, right? Wrong! James is writing a passage about humans and human temptation. You can’t pour James’ admonition about the temptation of humans onto the special and unique case of God in the flesh! We must be careful not to misuse Scripture by combining what doesn’t go together.

Finally we need to be careful of faulty premises. If someone says “Believing in Jesus is like believing Easter Bunny” this is the error being made. The argument is that since there are some (superficial) likenesses between Jesus and the Easter Bunny then they are alike in every way and should both be rejected as myth. But are Jesus and the Easter Bunny alike in every way? There is evidence for Jesus’ existence outside of the Bible. There are eyewitnesses who claim to have seen Jesus and wrote down their testimony. Some people gave their lives rather than recant their belief in Jesus Christ. These things don’t necessarily prove Jesus is who He said He was, but they do set Jesus apart from the Easter Bunny! As Geisler notes in his fine book on reasoning “Analogies can be used to present very strong and effective arguments, but analogies are good only when there are strong similarities, and only nonessential differences between the two things being compared” (Geisler, Come Let Us Reason, p. 109).

In biblical discussion we need to stop, listen and think carefully about what we are being told at the outset. Premises that run out unchallenged at the beginning doom us to never be able to overturn bad conclusions with God’s Word. Think about it: if you accept that Jesus and the Easter Bunny are alike you will never do anything but sound like you’re affirming your belief in a child’s fairy tale. To help someone understand God and His Word I must expose erroneous starting points at the beginning. May God bless us to use the sword of the Spirit in a wise and helpful way.

[Editor’s note: this article concludes my series on Thinking about Thinking. Thanks to all who commented and were encouraged by it. —mdr]