Logical fallacies

You are sitting in a cafe, sipping your tea (yum) when you hear a discussion going on behind you; they are talking about the food industry. 

"Those big corporations, they are all trying to take over the world; my professor said so!"

                "Everyone is saying it; they are keeping animals in inhumane conditions!" 

"No TRUE Christian could condone or buy what these people are doing!". 

What is on my mind? Logical fallacies, those twists of the mind that allow a train of thought to derail into make-believe. Why does it matter? What are they? How can we avoid them? To know these, you must start from the root of truth.

Suddenly, you feel convinced that the food industry is just fine... well maybe not, but the arguments you are hearing are twisted and wrong. They are not true, they are fallacies, and in real life they pose a large problem. Why is it important to keep one's thinking clear of fallacies? If you come from the perspective of, "everyone's truth is their own, there is no higher/objective truth", then it doesn't. With that worldview you can have all the fallacies you want and it will not matter in the long run. But, if your perspective is that there is one truth (God's), then suddenly it becomes important to have a true vision of everything. It becomes even more important when what you believe affects how you act. If you believe that everyone is good you will act one way, and if you believe that they are all evil then you will act another way. If I think that God is unkind, unloving, and cold, then I will reflect that to others. What you believe starts to matter a lot; it becomes imperative that you know the truth, and fallacies are a major stumbling block.

Fallacies come in all shapes and sizes. You can find many people who will list and explain them; I found this list interesting: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/  Many of those are fallacies that you mostly say to others (loaded questions, ad hominem attacks), but some are fallacies that are even more annoying; fallacies we keep in our own heads. Appealing to nature, ambiguity, and many of the other fallacies on that list are ones that we can keep in our brains, derailing us constantly. These seem to me to be the most dangerous kind of fallacies. You can use fallacies to argue, and you probably still won't convince the other person of what you are saying. When you use fallacies in your own head, you are not only convinced, you are blinded (in a way) to other truths because of your one deviation.

So how do we avoid these dangers? Well, the first step is to know they are there. If you know the different types of fallacies you will have a far better chance of catching them. For example, if you are playing a game with friends and you have had unlucky rolls of the dice, you may be tempted to think that because statistically the dice has to roll other numbers, that you are about to get some great luck. Then you remember the gambler's fallacy: independent events (like dice rolling) have no effect on each other, so thinking that a bunch of bad rolls will end up giving you a good roll is a fallacy. That is a silly example, but you can see what I mean. Unfortunately, this method is mostly helpful in avoiding new fallacies, not getting rid of old ones. How can we attempt to purge our minds of these logical tangles? The best way that I have found is to talk about what you believe. Write it out, talk to other people. Think about what you are saying. Does it make sense? Does it have fallacies in it, or is it clean? Others may have a better way, but (apart from God's intervention-which is definitely  a valid way to get truth) this is the only way that I know of avoiding treacherous fallacies.

There are many glitches, stumbling blocks, and pitfalls that we can have in our minds. It seems impossible (it probably is) to be free of all of them. However, I am confident that through listening to God, thinking as rightly as we can, and using the tools God gives us, we can find truth to a greater extent than we have now.
   

P.S. Did I maybe have a ton of fun looking for and using Public Domain images? Yes, yes I did.