Critical Thinking for Christians

[djeter]

I’ve been reading at least two or three threads here that would benefit from a reading of “Critical Thinking for Christians,” an essay by Peter Kreeft he penned a while back. Particularly for those who become lost in challenging secular epistomologies or scientific rationalism, you will find Dr. Kreeft will lead you back to the real meaning of critical thinking.

Here’s a favorite part for me:

*We should “live according to reason,” said the ancient Greeks, meaning not that we should be computers rather than human beings, but that we should be human beings rather than animals.

Reason is not limited to logic, though logic is one of the things that sharply distinguish human reason from animal consciousness. The meaning of that great old word “Reason” was arbitrarily narrowed to “calculation” beginning with Descartes and the Enlightenment (which I prefer to call the Endarkenment) and with the restriction of all approved thinking to what can be proved by the scientific method – which, of course, is self-contradictory since that very principle cannot be proved by the scientific method!

Confusing life with a laboratory is not what it means to live according to reason. Moral conscience, aesthetic appreciation, intelligent, responsible religious faith, intuitive wisdom, and even mystical experience are all part of the powers of human reason in the broad old honorable Greek sense of the word. Sometimes I think half the world’s problems would be solved if the whole world had to speak ancient Greek. It would be like Pentecost: an undoing of the Tower of Babel.*

Isn’t that great? More here:

payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/02/09/reading-selections-from-critical-thinking-for-christians-by-peter-kreeft/

dj

 

[Oreoracle]

We should “live according to reason,” said the ancient Greeks, meaning not that we should be computers rather than human beings, but that we should be human beings rather than animals.

Aristotle, perhaps the most famous Greek, asserted that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. He was so obsessed with using “reason” that he apparently didn’t have the sense to simply drop two objects of different masses from a roof and find out. Also, Aristotle rejected the idea of atoms because it contradicted his “reason,” and so the idea was buried for about 2000 years, until it was eventually proven to be correct beyond a shadow of a doubt with ample evidence.

To assert that something can be known “by reason alone” invites a myriad of errors like those of Aristotle. Evidence wins out in the end.

Reason is not limited to logic

 

[djeter]

To assert that something can be known “by reason alone” invites a myriad of errors like those of Aristotle. Evidence wins out in the end.

I think you have interpolated a few things from the quote, set up your strawdogs, and knocked them down. “Evidence” when restricted to that approved by the scientific method, does NOT win in the end. No one claimed Aristotle as the apostle of reason.

Logic, unlike reason, admits that it cannot determine the truth value of premises. Logic’s job is simply to guarantee the truth of the conclusion, assuming the truth of the premises. It doesn’t claim to know things “by intuition,” it only provides us with inference rules for valid arguments.

And if you follow the link some very interesting observations on following the children spawned by premises.

Descartes and the like did us all a favor by defining “reason” rather than using it without any explanation as to what they meant by it.

Problem was his definition became a restriction on the broader meaning of the word. Dr. Kreeft is simply appealing to an older broader meaning of “reason,” one that you find in Thomas Aquinas or other theologians.

This is a tired old argument. No system, be it logic, math, science, etc., can “prove” any of its axioms. To use a system, you must make use of its axioms, and so attempting to prove those axioms with the system itself is circular. Despite the fact that we can’t “prove” the axioms found in mathematics, we all still recognize the utility of math. Imagine that.

Tired old argument? Who’s arguing? I simply recommended a reading about Critical Thinking and included a selection. I think you have over reacted and your gratuitous “duh” figure also puts your insecurities on display. You appear to be another one of those atheists of the materialist school who simply cannot tolerate anyone suggesting that metaphysical truths can be subject to human reasoning. It’s that intolerance and insult mode of dialogue that tips the scales against you: “You shall know them by their fruits.”

dj

 

[Oreoracle]

“Evidence” when restricted to that approved by the scientific method, does NOT win in the end. No one claimed Aristotle as the apostle of reason.

What other consistent method is there for determining the truth value of propositions?

Problem was his definition became a restriction on the broader meaning of the word. Dr. Kreeft is simply appealing to an older broader meaning of “reason,” one that you find in Thomas Aquinas or other theologians.

This idea of “reason” allowed people to make unsubstantiated claims, some of which were later proven false by scientific observation. In the metaphysical sense, “reasoning” is just a fancy word for “guessing” or “intuiting.” It was just a way for theologians to exempt themselves from the burden of proof.

Tired old argument? Who’s arguing?

Kreeft, apparently.

I simply recommended a reading about Critical Thinking and included a selection.

You quoted it because you agreed with it, did you not?

I think you have over reacted and your gratuitous “duh” figure also puts your insecurities on display. You appear to be another one of those atheists of the materialist school who simply cannot tolerate anyone suggesting that metaphysical truths can be subject to human reasoning.

Consider two people who claim to be using “reason alone” as their deductive process. One claims to “just know” that Allah exists and the other claims to “just know” that Thor exists, but they can’t both be correct. Without requiring them to use evidence, how do we resolve their disagreement “with reason alone?”

I’m not a materialist, I just acknowledge that allowing people to make claims without supportive evidence DOES NOT WORK. We cannot resolve disagreements without evidence.

It’s that intolerance and insult mode of dialogue that tips the scales against you: “You shall know them by their fruits.”

Ad hominem.

 

[JP2Admirer]

I guess the first question that needs to be asked is, “How do we define truth?”

I have always been taught the adequation of the mind to the thing. So, score one for the scientific method. (I do, however, think it is a mistake to jettison Aristotle completely because his physics were wrong. Indeed, his physics were not mere speculation, but based upon observation without the aid of modern instrumentation.)

The problem with metaphysics, I take it, for an atheist is that its objects are completely of the speculative realm? So, theologians can “invent” categories as a basic will to power, or something of the like?

Here is my problem with the thesis that because metaphysical objects cannot be tested merits their complete denial. First: If we use premises as drawn from experience, and then use the instrument of logic to formulate conclusions, that doesn’t automatically disqualify something as being untrue.

So, for instance, let’s take the basic category of “substance.” A substance is the intelligible content of a thing. We can draw this from experience, simply by saying, “there is that cup over there, it is something.” Well, “What is it?”

So we claim a nature or essence for that thing as “cup.” It has to be something because it is not nothing. So experience furnishes us with the idea of substance.

Now we can take substance and make claims about it based on experience and logic, i.e. reason. That cup is singular, it is an individual. There must be something about it that separates it from other things. Well, it is a body. So, it is individuated from other bodies because it has its own particular dimensions which it shares with nothing else. We know that it has a nature because it shares similarities with other things of its nature – there are other cups. However, it is not other cups. So what makes it different? Its matter. Okay, so matter is a principle of individuation.

I won’t bore with the way we reason about that object, but if we push it far enough we must come to some reason for its existence. It must have an act, suddenly we run into metaphysical principles like act and potency. These principles are drawn from experience and experience verifies them. But once we’ve arrived at the principles we can then use those principles to verify things about reality.

Metaphysics is not completely empty. While indeed there have been theologians, because of the difficulty of the science, have abused the science by placing assertion in the place of demonstration, (Bonaventure committed this crime, as did Ibyn Syna (sp) and others) this does not mean the science itself is empty. It just means that it is difficult, and open to major confusion. And the nature of it complicates things as well because the nature of being ultimately has a say in how we are to order our lives; so the temptation is there to pervert the science to arrive at our own predetermined ends.

In short, metaphysics is not empty speculation, because it’s claims are verified by the way things exist in reality.

Whether or not Thor or Allah are real gods; there is nothing in me that would want to say that one or the other is true or not true, until I know something about them. We could then verify those claims using experience and logic to see who was telling the truth.

Furthermore, this whole thread seems moot if we are going to deny the validity of logical truth claims – we are arguing using reasoning without recourse to experience. That logic has its principles in experience, yes, but the conclusions are based on the instrument of reason.

 

[Touchstone]

I think you have interpolated a few things from the quote, set up your strawdogs, and knocked them down. “Evidence” when restricted to that approved by the scientific method, does NOT win in the end. No one claimed Aristotle as the apostle of reason.

Uh, I think Aquinas did. He was “The Philosopher” to Aquinas, and Aquinas went to great lengths to defend his apostle of reason, from the Franciscans’ anti-hellenism, and from the Averroist takes on Aristotle by guys like Albertus Magnus. IIRC, one of Aquinas’ last gigs was being called back to Rome (or was it another city?) to battle various heresies against Orthodox Aristotelianism.

Tired old argument? Who’s arguing? I simply recommended a reading about Critical Thinking and included a selection. I think you have over reacted and your gratuitous “duh” figure also puts your insecurities on display. You appear to be another one of those atheists of the materialist school who simply cannot tolerate anyone suggesting that metaphysical truths can be subject to human reasoning. It’s that intolerance and insult mode of dialogue that tips the scales against you: “You shall know them by their fruits.”

dj

For my part, I’m all for subjecting metaphysical claims and hypotheses to human reasoning. The term “metaphysical truth” is a squirrelly one – try to nail down what qualifies a metaphysical ‘truth’ from an ‘untruth’, sometime! – so that’s a problem, but nothing wrong with taking a claim and putting it through its paces to test it and see what it can do.

The results aren’t good, though, in terms of performance. Science, which has nothing more than metaphysical conjecture that nature might be amenable to modelling and empirical analysis, intelligible in some structured way, is as close to a “metaphysical truth” as I can think of. Most “metaphysical truths” I run across (it’s a bad signal right up front when someone uses the term “metaphysical truth”) aren’t even wrong (or right), they are just empty, unfalsifiable musings – see Thomistic ideas of esse, for example.

In any case, the net-net of narratives like this that I read from Kreeft et al is that “critical thinking” is fine, but we really ought to be more lax and credulous in our critical thinking to accomodate Christianit. Critical thinkers should be a little less critical – hey, metaphysics is fun! – in their critical thinking.

I dunno. That’s seems off, self-defeating as a recommendation. Kreeft may be right that we really should think “more broadly” about reason, but the Enlightenment fortified in a profound way the “criticality” of human reasoning and analysis. Maybe that was a mistake, but either way, Kreeft’s recommendation points toward less critical thinking modes as the path to more truth.

-TS

 

[Areopagite]

Aristotle, perhaps the most famous Greek, asserted that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. He was so obsessed with using “reason” that he apparently didn’t have the sense to simply drop two objects of different masses from a roof and find out.

Yes, very shameful. Although maybe he did try that … and the lighter thing was something that caught air resistance. Just saying.

Also, Aristotle rejected the idea of atoms because it contradicted his “reason,” and so the idea was buried for about 2000 years, until it was eventually proven to be correct beyond a shadow of a doubt with ample evidence.

Can you tell me where he rejected “atoms.” I’ve heard this before and haven’t bothered to see the exact passage.

Now, what I’m thinking is that he rejected the Democritean theory of atoms or simply rejecting the philosophy of atomism. And right well he should have! What the Greeks called “atoms” was ridiculous. They had little resemblance to what modern physicists call atoms today.

Democritus (as well as the Atomist philosophers after him … like the Epicureans) believed that atoms were shaped in such ways that they could hook onto each other. You would technically have to believe this if you are an atomist, because if atoms are held together by an invisible force, then you admit the existence of something that isn’t an atom … but an immaterial act. The early Atomists knew they couldn’t admit to the existence of such forces, and so they said atoms had hooks. Also atoms had to be indestructible, otherwise, that meant they were made up of smaller particles and hence wouldn’t be an atom in their definition (because “a-tom” mean “in-divisible”). They also said that more solid objects were made of atoms that had more jagged and defined hooks … whereas more fluid objects were made of smoother and less-hooked atoms, such that the atoms would not hook on to each other as much giving it its nice fluidity.

Just read Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. I’m not making this up. Sadly, though, if you are a materialist, Greek atomism makes more sense than modern atomism, even though Greek atomism has been disproved.

Do you blame Aristotle for rejecting that notion of atoms?

I don’t think Aristotle ever denied that matter could be subdivided into little particles that scientists would one day call “atoms” (a misnomer, technically, because we can divide atoms). Aristotle simply denied the atomist doctrine that ONLY atoms exist.

But, please, point me to the passage where Aristotle talks about this … because what do I know?
Touchstone;6271976:

Uh, I think Aquinas did. He was “The Philosopher” to Aquinas, and Aquinas went to great lengths to defend his apostle of reason

Aquinas believed that Aristotle was the greatest philosopher ever (which is of course true) … but Aquinas didn’t believe Aristotle was right about everything. The word “Apostle” carries with it a sense of inerrancy, does it not? Hence, Aquinas didn’t believe Aristotle was the “Apostle of Reason” … oh, I apologize for such quibbles. I couldn’t help it.