Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
If you’re listening in real time and you live in North America, it’s back to school season, which looks a little different for everyone, but it’s often a time when parents are looking at what their students are going to be learning this coming year, and if you’re a homeschooler, you may be looking at ways to help your students learn new skills & really important topics.
Well, I’m excited to share 2 things with you: 1. I’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make Crazy Thinkers a really great resource for you and the doors are going to be opening on August 28th. It’s going to consist of a brand new 10-week course, Brain Cell University, which will help your student master the top 40 Fallacies using video and learn the skills of good thinking that can be applied to everything else. It also includes my monthly pdf, Brain Gym, where I send out real-life memes, headlines, articles, etc. and give you the questions to be able to have conversations and really think well about these things to see the problems behind the thinking & the arguments being presented. This is how you & your student can develop good media discernment.
Ok, the other thing I’m excited to share with you is that I’m developing a curriculum for homeschool co-op classes. I’ve had a lot of requests for this resource, and I’m working on it right now. It’ll help you use this podcast as a co-op class to teach critical thinking, and I’m excited to get this to you. I’m hoping to have it ready to go also by August 28th, so if you’re not on my email list, go to filteritthroughabraincell.com/contact to get signed up on the email list and you’ll be the first to hear when it’s ready to go.
Ok, let’s jump in by reviewing a fallacy we covered earlier this season: The Snow Job Fallacy. Ok, I encourage you to hit ‘pause’ for a minute and see if you can remember what the Snow Job Fallacy is. The Snow Job Fallacy happens when someone just talks & talks or presents information about something that’s either totally irrelevant, or at best, is only marginally relevant to the conversation at hand. Like a blizzard that covers up & hides everything it snows on, someone committing the Snow Job fallacy tries to cover up, misrepresent, or divert attention from something by talking a lot about something else that has very little to do with the topic at hand.
Question to ask yourself: “What does that have to do with the topic we’re discussing?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 116.
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Alright, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy, the Divine Fallacy. The Divine Fallacy happens when someone assumes that a certain phenomenon must be the result of divine intervention or a supernatural force, either because they don’t know how to explain it otherwise, or because they can’t believe that this isn’t the case. This fallacy is a version of the Personal Incredulity Fallacy that we covered back in episode 39.
Ok, here’s what the Divine Fallacy sounds like: Gabby wakes up one morning to find a kitten in a box with a bow waiting for her in the living room. She is overjoyed but can’t imagine how the kitten got there. She exclaims, “God brought me a kitten!” Ok, so this one is a cute little story, but it shows the general gist of this fallacy. Something happened that Gabby couldn’t explain, and because she couldn’t explain it, she decided it must have been God, or divine intervention. But does that really mean God made the kitten appear in the living room or was it actually her parents who knew she’d been wanting a kitten for a long time, bought the kitten and put it there as a fun surprise for Gabby?
We can even find some real examples of this fallacy from history. At one point, people used to believe that thunder was caused by ‘the gods’, and that epileptic seizures were caused by demonic possession, because they didn’t know how to explain these phenomena otherwise. The Salem Witch Trials are infamous for accusing women of being witches because they used herbs to help heal people. They didn’t understand how the herbs could heal, so they assumed it must be witchcraft.
The problem behind the thinking in the Divine Fallacy is that just because we can’t explain or understand something, doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation. I find it interesting that we even have common language for this in our culture…when some natural weather disaster happens, it’s called an Act of God. And some property insurance claims will have clauses that specifically address what are called Acts of God. Interesting, huh?
Is it really God that causes tornadoes, floods & hurricanes or are there natural conditions that lead to those weather phenomena happening? Now, I want to say this, as a Christian, I do believe that there are things that can only be attributed to God. I believe He is living and active in our lives and in the world today, so for me it’s not a stretch to allow space for that. But I’m also careful to know that sometimes there are explanations to things that I just don’t know about. Just because someone expresses belief in things such as religion, God, or supernatural forces doesn’t necessarily mean they’re committing the Divine Fallacy. It’s a Divine Fallacy when people assume that this is the only possible explanation for a certain phenomenon, either because they don’t know how to explain it any other way, or don’t want to believe that there could be an explanation for it.
Interestingly, there are other versions of this fallacy. People who believe in God tend to assume that because something is amazing or unbelievable that it has to be God, but there are also people who will assume that because something is amazing or unbelievable that it has to be aliens, or that it has to be due to some paranormal force or activity. And it sounds crazy, but there are TV shows all about this very thing. In fact, I just watched one recently where a group of scientists were trying to find answers to some weird, unexplainable stuff that was happening on a particular property and because they couldn’t figure it out, they were attributing it to aliens.
Question to ask yourself: “Maybe it’s God, but could there be another explanation that I just don’t know yet?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
