Hats and Hell

I believe it was Cornelius Van Til who said that choosing a worldview is quite different from choosing a hat. By this he meant much more than what I will touch on here, but I am nevertheless reminded of this illustration as I write this blog.

Within philosophy are laws of logic. We cannot just toss these laws aside without becoming irrational in our thought. Logical fallacies describe various manifestations of violations of the laws of logic. Here is one such fallacy:

Argumentum ad Consequentiam

"Argument to the consequences"

(Belief in) p leads to bad consequences.
(Where the bad consequences are irrelevant to the falsity of p.)
Therefore, p is false.

After a public debate against an atheist friend of mine, I was approached by a fellow student who is probably ten times more intelligent than I am. He raised issues related to the whole Creation/Evolution/Intelligent Design controversy that I unfortunately misunderstood at the time.

Whether it was the Holy Spirit manifesting Himself in a very loud way I do not know, but my fellow student without any further words from me became very honest as to why he could not believe in my God. I was very appreciative of his honesty, especially since I never had to dig at all to get to what his real objection to Christianity is. I do regret that I misunderstood his questions regarding science, but perhaps one day the Lord will permit me to answer them for him or He will send another laborer to do so.

Either way, the problem in the heart of this particular soul was with those who have never heard of Christ having to die and spend an eternity in hell. The thing to do when answering this objection would be to remain sensitive to the non-Christian and parry both the intellectual and emotional strikes, but I found myself pointing out the fallacy in this kind of reasoning before I said anything else. A longer period of time would have permitted me to explain that we are all sinners, and thus all deserve the wrath of God. It is the grace of God that is not deserved, and it is an act of grace that God extends the Gospel offer to us and even more grace which brings us to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Time did not permit this to be stated though.

My answer was to illustrate the Argumentum ad Consequentiam Fallacy as follows:

Let us suppose that my Mother has terminal cancer (and thank God that she does not).

Believing that my Mother has terminal cancer leads me to conclude that she will suffer and die from this disease.

Therefore, my Mother does not have terminal cancer.

Is the conclusion here true? Of course not, for we supposed at the beginning of the example that the opposite was true. The negative consequences of my Mother having terminal cancer (that she will suffer and die from the disease), have nothing to do with whether or not it is true or false that my Mother has the disease.

This same fallacy is found in the reasoning of the person in this true story. One of the consequences of believing Christianity to be true is having to believe that there are people who have never heard the Gospel and will spend an eternity in Hell. Does this mean that Christianity is not true? Well of course not! So here we have no reason for not believing in Christianity, we simply have what may be an emotional issue to be addressed from Scripture.

Christianity is true regardless of whether or not one wants to accept a proposition like that of hell and what the doctrine entails. I fear that many of my non-Christian friends have placed an emotional disturbance above rationality and are guilty of committing this fallacy. Even if they do not blatantly commit the fallacy, it often resides at the center of the other supposed intellectual problems they actually seek out to display as warranting their rejection of Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. The doctrine of hell and other potentially offensive doctrine like it are often seen as enough reason to hate Christianity from the start rather than digging deeper to see whether or not the worldview actually is true and whether or not these more shocking teachings might not contain truth and comfort when they are properly understood within the Christian worldview. As I have explained here, mere discomfort over the consequences of a proposition is not enough reason to hate those things which would require our belief of such a proposition or even to hate the proposition itself. Or, if I am wrong there, hatred is not enough reason to reject something as false. Reason has nothing to do with it.