The Concerning Lack of Critical Thinking

I’ve often said to folks looking for a church, that our Congregation doesn’t ask you to “leave your brain at the door.”  Oh for sure we have important beliefs and doctrines.  We hold the Bible to be the word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and the source and norm for faith and life.  We celebrate the orthodox faith articulated in the truly ecumenical Nicene Creed as well as our Baptismal Apostles Creed.  We also celebrate the Augsburg Confession as the true articulation of Biblical faith. We embrace the Great tradition of the orthodox faith passed down to us over the centuries.  Yet, we also encourage people to wrestle with our doctrines and beliefs and think critically about them. You get to ask questions here and not be punished for thinking.  However, at the same time, we acknowledge the limits of our reason and celebrate our dependency on the Word, the person and work of Jesus, coming to us externally.  In other words, we need a preacher. We need revelation and the Holy Spirit coming to us through Word and Sacrament and can’t think or reason our way into a right relationship with God or into eternal life.

With all of that said, let me share a worry I have by citing the way cults work.  Cults teach their people to discount automatically any voice or thought that does not come from their inner circle.  In other words, in doesn’t matter the logic or reason of an argument. It doesn’t matter if a position makes sense, no, it is jettisoned immediately if it comes from outside the tight nit circle of the cult.  One is taught to spontaneously dismiss any voice that doesn’t confirm the belief of the cult.  In essence, it sounds something like, “When a person says this, that’s because …. so don’t listen to them.”  I’ve talked with my share of folks enmeshed in a cult, and it’s like their mind is sealed off. Often we talk about this as a kind of brainwashing.  In truth, all of us are already susceptible to self-confirmatory thinking – only noticing what confirms our beliefs and NOT what doesn’t but a cult doubles down on this by insulating their members from critical thinking. 

Here is my worry: Unfortunately, I’m seeing the practice of cults infecting our culture.  Please be on the lookout for how we are doing this today.  We dismiss someone’s point, not on whether it is based in facts or reason, but because of what group they are in or because they are not in our group. We purport to know their motivation for thinking the way they do, so we don’t consider their position. C.S. Lewis said it this way, “You must show that a person is wrong before you start explaining why they are wrong.”

I would hope we will make every effort to ponder the merits of a position by its basis in data, logic, and for a Christian, by its fidelity to scripture and then (from my Lutheran perspective) to the great tradition of the church catholic. Could this be one contributing factor to the much-touted divisions in our country today? 

When it comes to matters of faith.  I am thankful that my Logos Bible software has lots of writings and commentaries from other traditions than my own.  I often disagree with their perspective but I think it is very good and helpful for me to understand and hear other views.  For example, lets take Baptism.  As a Lutheran Christian, we are in the group that celebrates Baptism as a Sacrament but it is really helpful for me to read the positions and views of those who don’t.  I need to evaluate their arguments on the basis of their fidelity to scripture and not discount them simply because the writer went to a Baptist seminary.

Well, I hope this is enough to get you thinking about this dynamic of critical thinking. If you want to explore what I’m talking about in more depth, I’ve included an excerpt from C.S. Lewis below.  He describes it as “Bulverism.” He invented the term and I worry about how prevalent Bulverism is today.

From God in the Dock pp. 299-302

IT IS A DISASTROUS DISCOVERY, AS EMERSON SAYS SOMEWHERE, that we exist. I mean, it is disastrous when instead of merely attending to a rose we are forced to think of ourselves looking at the rose, with a certain type of mind and a certain type of eyes. It is disastrous because, if you are not very careful, the colour of the rose gets attributed to our optic nerves and its scent to our noses, and in the end there is no rose left. The professional philosophers have been bothered about this universal black-out for over two hundred years, and the world has not much listened to them. But the same disaster is now occurring on a level we can all understand.

We have recently ‘discovered that we exist’ in two new senses. The Freudians have discovered that we exist as bundles of complexes. The Marxians have discovered that we exist as members of some economic class. In the old days it was supposed that if a thing seemed obviously true to a hundred men, then it was probably true in fact. Nowadays the Freudian will tell you to go and analyze the hundred: you will find that they all think Elizabeth [I] a great queen because they all have a mother-complex. Their thoughts are psychologically tainted at the source. And the Marxist will tell you to go and examine the economic interests of the hundred; you will find that they all think freedom a good thing because they are all members of the bourgeoisie whose prosperity is increased by a policy of laissez-faire. Their thoughts are ‘ideologically tainted’ at the source.

Now this is obviously great fun; but it has not always been noticed that there is a bill to pay for it. There are two questions that people who say this kind of things ought to be asked. The first is, Are all thoughts thus tainted at the source, or only some? The second is, Does the taint invalidate the tainted thought—in the sense of making it untrue—or not?

If they say that all thoughts are thus tainted, then, of course, we must remind them that Freudianism and Marxism are as much systems of thought as Christian theology or philosophical idealism. The Freudian and the Marxian are in the same boat with all the rest of us, and cannot criticize us from outside. They have sawn off the branch they were sitting on. If, on the other hand, they say that the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither need it invalidate ours. In which case they have saved their own branch, but also saved ours along with it.

The only line they can really take is to say that some thoughts are tainted and others are not—which has the advantage (if Freudians and Marxians regard it as an advantage) of being what every sane man has always believed. But if that is so, we must then ask how you find out which are tainted and which are not. It is no earthly use saying that those are tainted which agree with the secret wishes of the thinker. Some of the things I should like to believe must in fact be true; it is impossible to arrange a universe which contradicts everyone’s wishes, in every respect, at every moment. Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking’. You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third—‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment’, E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

I find the fruits of his discovery almost everywhere. Thus I see my religion dismissed on the grounds that ‘the comfortable parson had every reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in another world’. Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is an error, I can see early enough that some people would still have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the other way round, by saying that ‘the modern man has every reason for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is rejecting’. For Bulverism is a truly democratic game in the sense that all can play it all day long, and that it gives no unfair privilege to the small and offensive minority who reason. But of course it gets us not one inch nearer to deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or false. That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds—a matter of philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided, the improper motives of some people, both for believing it and for disbelieving it, would remain just as they are.

Lewis, C. S. (1994). God in the Dock. (W. Hooper, Ed.) (pp. 299–302). HarperOne.