I was thinking this morning about how some things that are common knowledge to a lot of people today were new to me at one point. One example is when I learned what a straw man was. Almost everybody these days knows what you mean when you accuse them of the straw man fallacy, but I was in my late 20's before I ever knew. I first heard about it when reading something about apologetics. As I was thinking about this, I began to reflect on how I had changed for the better in many ways because of my interest in Christian Apologetics.
One thing that changed is that I became a better thinker. I was first introduced to the notion of self-refutation when I read Relativism by Greg Koukl and Francis Beckwith way back in the late 90's (I think). After that, I became a fan of Stand to Reason and began to read Greg's commentaries and listen to his talks. One of those talks was called "Clear Thinking Christianity." This talk made me realize that it wasn't enough for me just to read arguments and assess their validity. I needed to be intentional about learning logic and critical thinking, so I subjected myself to the painful task of reading books and articles on those topics.
As I developed my critical thinking skills, I began to see how silly some of my beliefs were that had nothing to do with Christianity. And I began to notice my own biases and sloppy ways of thinking. I'm really embarrassed about what I'm about to tell you, but it's the clearest example of how apologetics helped me. In 1996, I moved to Austin Texas and started watching Austin Cable Access. That's when I first heard of Alex Jones who had a TV show on Austin Cable Access. He was only a local thing back then, and hardly anybody had ever heard of him. But I totally got sucked into the whole conspiracy theory genre. Those were exciting times for me. I was so into it that I'd try to win other people over. My new found critical thinking skills exposed the whole genre of conspiracy theory for the fraud it was. I recognized how vacuous the method of argumentation was. It is because of Christian Apologetics that I was rescued from the likes of Alex Jones.
Studying apologetics has made me a more skeptical person in general. I think I have a better grasp on how fallible we all are and how bias affects our ability to reach accurate conclusions. This has made me more cautious about coming to my own conclusions, but it's also made me more sympathetic toward people who disagree with me. I'm not as likely to call somebody an idiot or think they are unreasonable just because they don't see things my way. I recognize now how a person's background beliefs can influence how they approach new information, and it makes it easier for me to see things from other people's point of view.
When I was in elementary school or middle school (don't remember which), I took a standardized test, and it said I had poor reading comprehension. That used to really bother me. I always did a lot better in math and science than I did in history and English. On my SAT, I did a lot better on the math part than I did on the verbal part. So I guess I've always struggled with reading comprehension. Apologetics turned that around for me. Watching how people dissect arguments, put them in syllogisms, and analyze them taught me how to read a paragraph or argumentative essay and get to the bottom of what people were saying and what their arguments were. If you read posts of mine like "God Is Impossible," you can see how I've implemented these skills. Being able to get to the bottom of what somebody is saying, and figuring out from what they said what their argument actually is has made me a much better reader. This has improved my ability to learn things from books on any subject.
I've also become a better writer and communicator. I'm afraid my writing and communication skills have waned in the last few years due to lack of practice or just brain atrophy from getting older, but I did make some pretty big improvements a long time ago. Some people are better communicators than others, and I've tried to imitate people who I think communicate very well, like C.S. Lewis, Greg Koukl, and William Lane Craig. It has also helped to use trial and error to communicate clearly. I use my apologetic knowledge in on line discussions and debates, and sometimes I get misunderstood which forces me to come up with better ways of communicating. Through practice, I've made improvements.
Skills in apologetics have helped me noticed bias in the media and sloppiness in political discourse. It's actually been really discouraging because there's very little careful thinking that goes on in political discourse. There's a lot of guilt-by-association, poisoning the well, loaded language, insinuation, begging the question, and every manner of fallacy that goes on in the news and in political discourse. It can be exhausting to try to apply critical thinking to it because you get bogged down pretty quickly. The lack of fairness and charity that goes on is just cray cray.
There's one more thing I wanted to say in light of having brought up the straw man fallacy and also in light of getting to the bottom of what people say vs. misunderstanding them. I don't think we should accuse people of the straw man fallacy lightly. I think the automatic accusation of straw man whenever somebody misrepresents you is uncharitable and unnecessarily antagonistic. When you accuse somebody of straw manning you, you're essentially accusing them of dishonesty. When people misconstrue your view, it's not necessarily because they're being dishonest. I doubt it's even dishonest most of the time. It could be that they genuinely have a misunderstanding. The charitable thing to do is give them the benefit of the doubt, assume it's an honest mistake, and gently try to clarify your point of view for them.
It's rare that people accuse me of misrepresenting them because I try very hard not to. It has happened, though. When it does, I apologize and try to get clarification from them on their view.
There have been times when I've attempted to clarify myself to people, and they'll turn around and accuse me of dishonesty as if my "clarification" were really a change of position. If after clarifying myself a person still insists on the misrepresentation of my view (as if they knew what my view is better than I do), then I'm happy to accuse them of the straw-man fallacy because in that case, they are intentionally misrepresenting me. If they won't accept correction, then they're just being stubborn and unreasonable. But short of that, I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. Charity does a better job of making a conversation productive than antagonism does.
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