bible and theology on Fallacies

The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

It’s funny how sometimes members of the church can associate anything new with “heresy.” We often make the mistake of confusing technological innovations or scientific discoveries for changes to the g...

In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...

While sexual sin, financial scandals, and toxic work environments hurt pastoral credibility, a more subtle, and probably more common danger is carelessness with the truth. Intellectual integrity matte...

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, a...

Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.

He who believes his doctrine to be perfectly right and true has only to lift his hands and touch his ears and discover they are the long furry ears of a donkey.

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

Many deceptions only appeal to us because there is something inside us that "wants" to believe them. They are seductive because of darkness and wrong motives in our own lives. We must search...

No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

Some books were no more than assumptions piled on assumptions…. Conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all…. The whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem a...

The Oxford scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis... once closed a lecture to a group of apologists like this:  I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologis...

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.

Foolishness is more than being stupid, that deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance.

I must say that most attempts to explain why God permits evil—theodicies, as we may call them—strike me as tepid, shallow and ultimately frivolous.

If [an unbeliever] is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.

Only a fool thinks he can fool God.

Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship with one another.

So, while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth. Would you condemn...

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest...

It goes against the grain to give an image of oneself that is anything less than perfect, and many Christians imagine that they will be rejected by others if they admit to any faults. But nothing coul...

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue h...

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodox. It was sanity: and to be sane i...

One of the areas often missed in a lot of Christian apologetics is the social setting in which a person encounters the gospel. For example, it is far easier to espouse "rational arguments" f...