Let's say you want to design a super suit that will allow you to survive in outer space, under water, a burning building, and Antarctica in winter. You design it with materials you think can withstand high temperatures and low temperatures and maintain a constant pressure inside whether the pressure outside is higher or lower while keeping the occupant comfortable. You want it to be flexible so the person can move around in it. You want it to be strong so it doesn't rupture. You want it to be air tight while providing breathable air. And you want it to be able to maintain these properties through a wide range of temperatures and pressures.
Let's say you design and build this suit based on your knowledge of materials and the conditions under which you expect the suit will have to hold up. Once you've built it, how do you know it will work? Would you just assume the suit was good to go and allow somebody to take it out into the field? Would you happily put the suit on and walk through a burning building or jump into the ocean without having tested it? I suspect not.
Since you want it to keep people comfortable in space, you'd want to make sure it could do the job before somebody uses it for that purpose. You would want to test it. One way you might test it is by pressurizing it to see if there are any leaks. Since space is a vacuum, you want to make sure it can withstand a pressure differential of at least one atmosphere. What you would definitely not want to do is pressurize it half way and just assume it'll be good the whole way. In fact, you would probably want to raise the presurre inside to well beyond what you think is necessary. That gives you a margin of safety. If it can withstand a presurre differential of 10 atmospheres, then you'll feel much better about it's ability to work with a pressure differential of 1 atmosphere.
In other words, you want to stress test your suit. Before anybody steps into it, you want to see how far you can push the suit before it breaks. You want to come up with worst case scenarios to see how the suit holds up. The more rigorous the testing, the more confident you can be that the suit is safe to use. You test the suit by trying to make it fail. If it fails under testing, then you either abandon the design altogether or you attempt to improve upon the current design. Then you test it again. You keep doing that until the suit proves itself reliable under extreme conditions. Ideally, you want to make sure it's fully operational under conditions that are even worse than you think it will ever have to endure out in the field.
This is a procedure I think should apply, not just to super suits, but to your beliefs and your worldview as well. You don't want to believe something that's false. You want to believe what's true and right.
This procedure should apply to arguments as well. If you are designing a case for some point of view you want to promote in the public square, you don't want to just compile a random collection of arguments and start posting them on the internet. Instead, you should want to test them to see if they are good arguments. This applies whether we're talking about Christianity, politics, or any situation in which you hope to persuade another person of your point of view.
The first step in testing your case is to try to come up with counter-arguments. Look for holes or flaws in your own reasoning. Try to think of what it would take to falsify your point of view. Come up with the best objections you can think of. See if the arguments can withstand your own best attempt at refuting them.
You have to be honest with yourself in this process. If you were designing a super suit, of course you would want it to succeed. But it would be dangerous to go easy on the testing just so you don't have to watch it fail. In the same way, it would be reckless to "test" your case against what you know good and well are flimsy rebuttals. It would be reckless to test your case against an easily refutable strawman version of an objection. So you need to think of the best objections you can. If you know of some popular response to your argument, try to think of the best version of that response. If it's a weak response, then steel man it. Try to improve upon it.
This is how the scholastic philosophers like Anselm and Thoma Aquinas used to write. They would begin with an initial argument, then raise objections against it, then raise objections to those objections. They would continue this process, refining their view as they went along, until they finally arrived at a conclusion.
Modern analytic philosophers do something similar. A good example of that is in Alvin Plantinga's book, God, Freedom, and Evil. He spends several pages going back and forth trying to come up with a way to show an inconsistency between the theistic set containing the statements (1) God is all knowing, all powerful, and wholly good, and (2) Evil exists. He would raise some possible statement that when added to the theistic set would generate a formal contradiction. Then he would shoot that down and either adjust the statement or come up with another one. He continued this procedure until he ran out of ideas. In the end, he said that while the elusive proposition might yet exist, it would not be easy to find.
Once your case appears to hold up well under your own scrutiny, see how well it holds up against your friends' scrutiny. Somebody else who is on your side might be able to come up with objections you didn't think of. I used to be part of a private Christian apologetics group on Facebook many years ago. Most of them were pro-life, and I was, too. I wanted to test the pro-life case by having a devil's advocate debate. I took the pro-choice position and tried to come up with the best pro-choice case I could to see how the other person would respond. I hoped that he would be able to refute my arguments because I thought it would be a learning experience for me. It would enable me to improve my case for the pro-life position. I found a volunteer, and we had a formal mock debate.
I've had devil's advocate debates on debate.org, too. I do them partly as a learning experience, and partly for the fun of it. The good thing about defending a point of view opposed to your own is that it forces you to step in another person's shoes and try to see things from their perspective. It can be an effective way to gain a better understanding of their view than you might if you were just reading what they had to say, all the while raising objections to it in your head. Instead, you'd be reading what they had to say while thinking, "What are they actually trying to say?" and "How can I make this work?" You'd be reading for understanding rather than reading to respond, which often leads to misunderstanding.
In the past, I've called popular Christian apologists, philosophers, and scientists on their radio shows, sent them emails, or commented on their blog posts, raising objections to some talking point or argument I might agree with already to see how they would respond and hopefully learn from them.
Once you test your ideas under friendly fire, a third step would be to test them in the real world. This blog exists primarily for that reason. I express a lot of opinions on this blog in hopes of getting some interaction with people who are interested in the subject matter. I want to hear from people who disagree with me. I want them to push back. I also want to hear from people who agree with me in case they want to push back or tell me they think I'm on the right track. I also want to see how they will respond to my critics and how my critics will respond to them. I want different perspectives because I can't think of everything, and I don't know everything.
This blog used to get a lot more participation. I rarely get comments anymore, and I kind of feel like I'm talking to myself. This has caused me to sometimes be a little more risky about what I post. Yesterday, for example, I posted an argument for God I had just come up with. It's probably a flawed argument or somebody else would've already come up with it. But I didn't see the harm in posting it and offering my own initial thoughts on it. I included an objection I thought of, but I figured other people who knew more than I did might have something to say.
When I actually want to make a case for some point of view in order to persuade other people, I want to make sure I have the best case that I can have. I want to be able to articulate it in a way that's clear, easy to understand, and compelling. I don't want it littered with weak arguments. In sport debating, I might use weak arguments for filler or to waste the other person's time, but if I really want to persuade people, I only use what I personally think are the best arguments. They have to be arguments that I myself find persuasive. If I want to have a case like that, it has to be something I've tested against my own attempts to refute, against my team or tribe's ability to refute, against the objections raised by random people on the internet, and against the smartest people I can engage. If you ever want to write a book or an article, or if you want to pursuade your family or people you meet in the wild, I recommend testing your case first. Refine your apologetic by subjecting it to the fire of criticism.
Most people don't do that. Whether we're talking about Christian apologetics, abortion, climate change, gun control, or a host of public policy issues, most people simply look for anything that will confirm what they already believe. They're not interested in anything that might challenge their point of view. They're often dismissive. When I see people on line arguing with each other, I don't usually get the impression they're really listening to each other. I don't get the impression many people are interested in anything anybody else has to say. They treat each other with derision rather than curiosity. Sometimes, I think people avoid opposition out of fear and anxiety. If they are emotionally invested in their point of view, they don't want to find out that they're wrong. But I encourage you not to be afraid of the big bad critic. If you want to know the truth, it does you no good to simply seek to confirm what you already believe and avoid opposition. That would be like taking an untested super suit to Antarctica in the winter and hoping to survive.
No comments:
Post a Comment