What is today known as “critical thinking” is a product of the mindset that adheres to the Darwinian model. Adherents to that model all but have a patent on the phrase. Misunderstanding this, modifying the term to fit their own ends, even those taking their cues from the Bible will speak of how they, too, employ “critical thinking,” as though they are not to be outdone by skeptics using the phrase. But it is in vain. Critical thinking, by definition, totally denies miracles. The Bible records many of them. They are to be appreciated through what Paul calls “the eyes of faith.”
“Critical thinking” is not a mere modern manifestation of the “reasonableness” or “soundness of mind” that the Bible recommends for all Christians. It is the skeptic’s means of discarding faith. It is the skeptic’s way of saying those eyes of faith have cataracts in need of removal. I never use the term, though I understand how some Christians might. It becomes like the conniving doctor from The Fugitive advising detectives that they will never catch Richard Kimble because “he’s too smart.” Whereupon, one of those detectives says, “Well—we’re smart, too,” and a cacophony breaks out with his fellows declaring how smart they are. So it is with the skeptics. You don’t want to accede to them a monopoly on smarts. We’re smart, too, even if we don’t accept all of their premises.”
(From: A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen)
Elsewhere in the book, there is a section discussing the difficulties in recording history, which is not objective but very subjective. The book adds that, “Historian Allan Guelzo is dubious about the saving value of critical thinking, due to its effect of “cloaking human foible beneath a veneer of science.”
But I may bang away at this too much, to the point where some all but blow a gasket. It’s just that vast swaths of the world has replaced “All You Need is Love” with “all you need is critical thinking,” and notion that CT is the secret potion that will solve all is so absurd that I just can’t restrain myself. To clarify, I’m not against it if kept in its place. It’s fine insofar as it goes. But it is not capable of going the distance. It is the repairman who shows up for the job with a toolbox stuffed with wrenches when a screwdriver is needed. Worse yet, he is unsure that screwdrivers really exist. Yes, he has heard anecdotally of such things, but how can he be sure they really are valid?
I should have inserted “in effect” to make it, critical thinking effectively denies miracles, not that it outright does. As Luke Timothy Johnson put it in a lecture regarding the historical-critical method of examining scripture:
“the historian cannot take up anything having to do with the transcendent or the supernatural. Therefore, the historian cannot talk about the miraculous birth of Jesus, his miracles, his walking on the water, his transfiguration, his resurrection from the dead and so forth. Well, fair enough, the historian can’t talk about those things, but that methodological restraint . . . very quickly becomes implicitly an epistemological denial, that is the historian can’t talk about these things, therefore they are not real.”
So the method embracing critical thinking is okay so long as someone does not suppose their critical thinking is the be-all and the end-all, that it’s fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t go everywhere. But if they DO think critical thinking is the be-all and end-all, then the statement of the book is true as-is: ‘critical thinking denies miracles.’
…It only becomes a problem when people begin to suppose anything other than critical thinking is not thinking at all. Alas, during these days of exalting science, many people DO suppose that. Elsewhere in that lecture, Johnson likens that historical critical method to a Trojan horse. It is eagerly accepted by schools of theology, for who wants to disdain history? and who wants to be thought uncritical? But once wheeled inside, it releases the troops of faith’s destruction.
…..I think there are many ways of evaluating information. Who can say the process through which one triumphs over the other in a given situation. There is a character in a certain John LeCarre novel who “believed that facts were the only kind of information and he despised whoever was not ruled by them.” I never want to be that character and I think to restrict oneself to any one way of analyzing information assures that one will be. To that character, “human nature was one vast unsavory quagmire.” At the very least, that statement verifies what I have found in life, that critical thinking is not the optimal tool for comprehending human nature.
****** The bookstore
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