The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
I have worked in academia for much of my life, and I have never heard a professor use that expression, nor did anyone tell me he ‘feared the Lord’ before he told be the results of his thinking. Should a thinker fear the Lord, or is that term just Biblical nonsense?
People don’t talk much about thinking. Sometimes someone will say they are an ‘independent thinker’ or a ‘critical thinker’, but what is really meant by these terms? I believe that bad ideas come from bad thinking.
Clear thinking is a requirement for a Christian. Christians should strive to be good thinkers, because Satan is the father of lies. If you tell a lie, even if you think you are helping, you aren’t helping. Christ needs the truth.
Thinking is more like a hunt or search than it is a deduction ala Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was a fictional character and a poor thinker in my opinion.
Some people, who wish to convince others of their superiority, might say something like this:
I state facts and draw logical conclusions.
Let’s break that statement down examine it in more detail, in light of Proverbs 1:7.
I state facts …
The problem is, which facts did you state, and which did you leave out? Let’s list some thinking fallacies of this type.
- The lost keys fallacy.
Let’s say you are a drunk, and you lose your keys. Where would you look first? The answer is, of course, under a street lamp, because the light is better. It never occurs to the drunk that better lighting has nothing to do with where the keys are.
A lot of people fall for the lost keys fallacy when they think. Just because you know something does not mean that it is necessarily relevant to the problem at hand. Thinkers tend not to believe that something outside their knowledge might have a bearing on a problem.
This is extremely common in academia and industry, where a person decides that a problem can be solved using his ideas or knowledge. For example, an engineer might decide that a safety problem at a manufacturing plant requires an extra layer of protection, and orders up a new widget. In fact, worker training is often more effective than another widget. Another way of saying this is that
“To the man with a hammer, everything becomes a nail.”
Sometimes this can have tragic consequences. When a political decision is made, often there is a faulty background, leading to a wrong conclusion. There is a saying,
“Correlation is not causation.”
Something might appear to be the cause of a problem, but if it is not the cause, then the solution might make the problem worse.
The root of these problems is a lack of humility, or pride. Pride goeth before a fall. We all know it but we do not humbly beseech the Lord for guidance. The engineer understood the widget and did not look anywhere else for a solution; the academic found a correlation that looked reasonable but was not the actual cause. In both cases they made mistakes.
Going along with this is the sin of vanity. Smart people tend to be vain and they also tend to be unaware that they are vain. They think they know everything important, so how could they have possibly missed something?
You should always keep an open mind, and be ready to learn things outside your comfort zone. The broader your education, the less susceptible you are to the lost keys fallacy. Strive for humility in your life. It is your best ally if you want to think clearly.
- I’ll make it fit.
Suppose you have a hypothesis, an idea about why something happened. Let’s say you have 10 facts and it explains 9 of them. The temptation is to make it fit, to ignore an inconvenient fact.
An example would be a scientist who, to make his theory fit, ignores a fact. I know of an example of an ice age theory that required a mountain range to move. The thinker was sure it was correct except for this minor detail.
An idea should fit all of the facts before you accept it. If you watch cable TV news, you can see people arguing their positions, which means you have to ignore a fact or two. Generally speaking, the most vehement arguer, often augmented by the host, usually wins. This is for entertainment purposes only, although some people actually believe they learn something from it.
A hypothesis where most of the facts fit, but which is contradicted by one fact, should be rejected. In mathematics, this is called a counterexample, and it disproves the hypothesis.
- It’s all about me (or us).
Thinkers cannot help glorifying themselves. A high number of male, middle-aged writers, for example, write themselves into their plots as the middle-aged protagonist, and almost invariably he’s a stud bedding women half his age who swoon over him. A number of authors of non-fiction will tell you, in the middle of the book, how great they are and how under-appreciated they are.
Would someone this conceited brush off criticism as being irrelevant? Of course, and moreover he’ll constantly quote his earlier books. Inconvenient facts are left out.
The desire to reach for a conclusion that makes you or your group look good is nearly universal and nearly irresistible. It is not confined to middle-aged authors, although the phenomenon is quite amusing, particularly their appeal to young ladies. Everyone’s a star in their own mind, and the desire to show off your knowledge is universal. Like the lost keys fallacy, it has no relevance to solving a problem. It’s just ego-pumping.
- Pointing
No matter what the problem is, it is always possible to point to someone else and claim he is worse so you are not responsible. This is especially true in politics. Pointing is always wrong, because your sins are never forgiven just because you find a greater sinner. Sins are only forgiven through sincere repentance.
Pointing is a substitute for thinking, since it places the burden elsewhere and shields you from unpleasant thoughts. It’s not your fault.
- Stopthink
Stopthink is from George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell was an atheist and socialist, but he despised the old lefties who covered for Stalin. It was written in 1948 (he got the name by switching the ‘4’ and the ‘8’), and the Ministry of Truth, where history is rewritten every day, was the BBC, where he worked. American readers can get the equivalent truthfulness by watching CNN or PBS. Rewrites happen at the ‘major’ liberal universities, who pass on their conclusions to the lowly folk out in the boondocks, where lesser universities exist. 1984 was satire, not some future prediction of calamity. Stopthink and Doublethink were his description of liberal thought patterns.
While Orwell was talking about liberals, no one should think he is immune to stopthink, nor should he practice it. Orwell was probably thinking about the Holodomor, where 5 million Ukrainian Christians were killed by Stalin from starvation. Liberals stopped thinking about it, because it was so horrible and did not fit with their concept of what they stood for. They wished for a communist government, and 5 million dead Christians wasn’t part of The Narrative the old commies believed in.
Stopthink comes about because you identify so closely with a cause that you cannot process any information contrary to the cause. It is extremely dangerous, and it is a mistake to think that if you are not a liberal you are immune. When you think of yourself, do not call yourself a liberal or a conservative. Just call yourself a Christian. As Jesus said:
“No one can serve two masters. He will either love the one and hate the other or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”
Matthew 6:24
For ‘mammon’, you can substitute ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, or anything you like. You cannot serve both. If you serve Jesus, that must come first and always. Think of yourself as a human being, not a political being
Stopthink makes you susceptible to propaganda and lies, because you have no defense against falsehood. If you think your leaders never lie, or at least shade the truth a bit, you have not been paying attention.
Even if you get all of the relevant facts in hand, you can still make an error.
“… and draw logical conclusions
- Ill conditioned problems.
Basically, an ill conditioned problem is a problem where, even if all of the relevant facts are at hand, there are not enough of them to draw a firm conclusion. It might be better to give an example of an ill-conditioned problem.
Scientists working on a fossil dinosaur family tree have recently done a study of all known fossil dinosaurs. They attempted to put them into a family tree, and to test a new, proposed dinosaur tree against the current one. The results were inconclusive. Both trees had about the same explanatory power, meaning there was no reason to pick one over the other. You can read about it in the following link:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-fossils-are-redefining-what-makes-dinosaur
This is a much more common problem that people think. The only way of resolving it is to gather more fossils from more species. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes would look at a piece of data, a walking stick, for example, and determine everything about the owner of the stick. His guesses were not really logical; his real name should have been Sheerluck. That is no way to go through life.
Needless to say, the prideful, self-important man never tells his audience that this result has a low probability. Like Sherlock Holmes, he boasts that since he did it and it is logical, it must be right.
- Paradoxes
Usually, in logic something is either one thing or another. Something is either white or it is not white. Notice that I did not say white or black; if it is gray or speckled it is not white.
When a proposition is neither true nor false (or both true and false) then it is called a paradox. Here is an example.
I’m humbler than you.
Unfortunately, by boasting you have just proven that you are not humbler than me. However, if I think that, then maybe you are humbler than me, because now I’m boasting (in my head).
Unfortunately, spiritual problems and theology are laced with paradoxes. In addition, you have a limited data set to draw upon (the Bible plus any prophecies and revelations you think are true). Your paradox is ill-conditioned and there is no way of finding more facts. I believe that a huge number of theological disputes between Churches fall into this category.
Notice that in all of these examples, the virtue of humility helped the thinker avoid errors. As the Preacher says, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” I would put it a different way:
Humility is the price we pay to live in a sane world.
