Do You Smash Everyone Who Disagrees With You?

AI Generated Transcript (I only fixed the mis-spelling of my name and added ONE paragraph break - I left the rest of the mess just the way AI delivered it haha):

Have you successfully crushed all of your opponents in debate online, or maybe you're a real debater? Welcome to Jon's Voice Notes, where I, Jon, take an idea, and without any preparation, I go stream of consciousness.

To share what I'm thinking about today. What I want to say today. And there it is. Starting to get early summer warm here in northern Illinois. But yet another spectacular beautiful day. I'm kind of stunned by how many there are. Guess it's wise to be outside. But I'm sitting here along the Kishwaukee River. The mighty Kishwaukee. So what about debate? Why am I thinking about debate? I was talking to my brother. He's listening to some debates.

And I, someone told me once, it was literally like a prophetic word, that I was going to be great in the debates one day. I don't know what that means, but I've been known to put out a word or two in response to others that are disagreeing with me and go back and forth some. But there's some reasons why I never really have gotten into formal debate. And none of this, by the way, means that I think formal debate is wrong.

But it's partly because one of the goals of formal debate seems to me, like I literally haven't taken a college course in it or anything, so maybe I'm wrong, but it appears to me like the goal is to win. Now for me, if I manage to...

Portray my opponent as a moron or get the crowd into what I'm saying, but it isn't really logically true. Or, you know, create a straw man and cast it down of what my opponent is saying and I win. To me, I have not actually won anything there. I don't know, maybe my ego is built up and it's nice to have everyone say, wow, you're a good debater.

But when I'm having a discussion, one that's kind of like a debate, because I have lots of discussions, especially in writing online, that are like debates. But I usually have one of a couple ideas in mind. One, I'm kind of testing an idea. When I say testing it, I don't mean I don't already believe it. Basically, I mean, I'm pretty sure I believe this. Maybe I'm pretty sure I strongly believe it.

But I want to see what people say. I want to test it, both for the sake of getting my words right, because sometimes I've found I say an idea in such a way that the way people are disagreeing with it shows me that I didn't state it very well. So I'm like, okay, I need to state that better. Or I find out what are people going to say in disagreement, and will it change my mind? Will I become stronger in my conviction?

So that's one of my reasons is I'm literally kind of testing.

Another reason is because I've had usually a lot of people, I'm always like, why don't you chime in? But they walk up to me at some point or I meet them that I haven't seen them for years and they'll say, you know, I love following you online and the points that you make and the debates that you have. I'm like, really? I thought like nobody was listening except the other person. But for that reason, if the debate is kind of public,

I feel kind of an obligation to make sure to defend my point, especially if I'm trying to undo a common thing in the culture that I believe to be bad for everyone. So I'm not necessarily trying to persuade the opponent, if that's what you want to call them.

But what I really want, okay, I do that. I feel like I need to do that. I feel responsible to do that because people are listening to what I'm saying. And usually I'm saying it in response to or in debate with someone who is saying something that I believe is destructive to the advancement of the kingdom of God. But there's something else. I feel like I've talked about this in here before. Maybe I'm repeating myself. But what I really want to do

is pursue truth in conversation with the other person who sees it a different way. So one of the ways that would happen is you actually say to each other what your point is, and before you go and defeat them, you try and understand what they're saying. Because you might be misunderstanding, right?

You might be, they might be misunderstanding. You might agree more than you think.

First, make sure. I try and do it for the other person. I don't know if I always do well, but I also appreciate it towards me. Because sometimes I'll say something and someone goes on to thoroughly defeat what I did not say. We call that straw man. Making a straw man out of what I said. Creating a fake straw man that isn't what I said, but portraying it as if it is what I said. And then

Making all the points against it. And I'm like, that's not what I said. That's not even what I meant. Not even close. And they didn't make any effort. I was actually in a conversation with a good friend recently. And we were not debating. It wasn't even close to a debate. It was friends hanging out. And this is another thing people will often do. I'm trying to say something or make a point. And then without actually understanding where I was going at all...

They basically say, I don't want to talk about that because basically the facts are this, this, this, and this. In other words, I don't want you to talk about it. I wish to say in a one-way conversation.

style what I believe and by not wanting to talk about it I mean there it stands it's the absolute truth you don't get to say anything now so that's kind of yuck it's kind of yuck but that conversation that wasn't the purpose of that getting together it was just old friends getting together so I just let it go and not even really offended I'm just using it as an illustration point people do that they don't actually listen or try and figure out where you're going or what your point is

When I'm listening to someone, if they're the one doing the saying, sometimes I like to just ask questions. Like, what did you mean by this? Why did you say that? Why do you believe that? To try and first understand. Now, let's say you're both doing a good job of that, of talking to each other about something. And you find out you really do disagree. You just see it in an opposing way. You do not have the same agreement whatsoever.

Well, this is not the end of the world. I want to submit to you this idea that the best thing to do in that conversation is to get as close to your presuppositions that you actually disagree on as you can. Now, I say that's the best thing to do, but most people can't go there because they don't believe they have presuppositions. They believe they're using reason and logic only.

But how is that even possible without a presupposition that reason or logic matters or has any value or usefulness at all? So when you say, so a presupposition is just like your underlying idea, the corest of the core belief, the closer you get to the core of your beliefs, at some point,

you reach a level where this is a presupposition. It's not even necessarily provable. Everyone's doing that. There is no other way. I remember in geometry class when we had to write proofs, eventually you would get to your most basic assumption. Sometimes we called them assumptions when we wrote our geometric proofs. Because you get to a point where it's like, we all look at this and intuitively believe it and agree on it, so we're going to work from there.

So we kind of have a consensus that reason and logic and science are a basis for discussing things. But most people won't even go to, well, why do you believe in reason and logic and science? Why are those reliable? Why do they matter? Well, they're testable. They're provable. Well, why does that matter? And how do you know they're testable and provable? You're assuming them in order to prove them.

But ultimately, every single thinking system, every single reasoning ultimately goes back to some form of presupposition or a core assumption. I call them faith presuppositions.

But that irritates some people. They don't like to hear it called faith because they think faith only means a superstitious belief in the supernatural with no proof or something like that. They define it in such a way as to kind of put it down. But I would say if you have decided...

that you trust your senses, that they mean something. You trust your mind and the rules of logic to analyze the things that you see, to read and understand the things that what other people are seeing and draw ultimately conclusions. That's what science is. You observe nature. You know, scientific method is like a very systematic observation of nature to prove or disprove a hypothesis, right?

And you decide, you believe that all that is valuable and you trust in it. Ultimately, that is faith. That is faith. You're having faith that that observation ability and that ability to think and reason means something. That they're valuable, that they're useful, that they're true in some way. This is a faith assumption. You just believe it. You don't try and prove that.

How could you prove that? Because you'd have to use those things, reason and logic and observation, in order to prove it. So there's a core there. Now, I go deeper in the core to say, my faith, my core faith presupposition is...

God is real. And not just any real, but the God described and revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Covenant Hebrew Scriptures as well. Old Covenant and New Covenant. This is...

where my faith presupposition lies. It's a core belief. Now, those who mistakenly believe they do not have any presuppositions, say, see, you are basing yours on a core superstition or blind faith.

I am basing mine on reason, logic, and science. And I am saying, I believe in reason, logic, and science. I am just acknowledging that those things are founded upon God is real. His revelation in the world through his word, through his historical actions that are recorded by prophets and apostles. Because this is all real,

I have put my faith in this. I can say God created me in his image. And he designed me to think his thoughts after him. He put in me a brain and a mind and a heart and a soul. And the capability of understanding words. He gave us language. And using logic, logos related to language.

the rules of meaning, you know, the rules of logic. He gave us these things. We can intuitively understand them and even come to some consensus and agreement about them. But that's all it is, is it's a faith consensus and agreement that based on whatever, even the idea that this works, like science works, how are you defining what works? Makes my life more pleasant? Makes my life less pleasant? Makes something I think appear to be true?

Either way, a core belief in God, in the presupposition of God, isn't faith in a way that is different from someone who just skips that step and goes straight to a presupposition of a belief in logic and reason. You would be amazed how hard it is for people, even Christians, to see this. But I would argue that it is actually quite obvious.

But it's a pride of mind to think, I, on my own, have learned logic and reason and how to study science and have joined my fellow human beings in my own pursuit of knowledge. This is all humanism, man-centered knowledge.

I'm saying, no, every logical thought you thought, every neuron that fired, every bit of oxygen and whatever energy feeds your brain, traveling around your brain, is fed by something God created. Your ability to do this is you acting like an image of God that you are and reasoning things out. He has given us the ability to observe the world.

He has given us the ability to test the world, the natural world, through science. He has given us the ability to think and recognize patterns of thought. And this idea follows this idea follows this idea. And there's some common rules. We can learn all those, both from the Bible and from just our own observation. It's all based on faith.

Either you skip the true faith of the core of who God is, or you're just blindly believing in it without the correct presupposition. So that was a long way of going off. If you and I disagree, I would like to get, and we really do, after a healthy discussion where we're not just trying to shoot each other down, but we're trying to understand one another, I wish I could get people to do this, but it's almost impossible. I would like to get to the point where we're facing...

This is a core belief I have that's not necessarily based on anything other than faith. And this is a core that you have that's not based on anything other than faith. And that's why we disagree. There's actually a core philosophical preference at the core. There used to be this atheist evangelist roaming around Northern Illinois University. I don't know if he's still there. He was one of the professors. I call him an atheist evangelist. And I had a number of friendly conversations with him when I was sitting out there at a...

booth with scriptures and tracts and all that. And we were talking about what drives evolution and there was the need for survival. What drives ethics? Where do ethics come from?

And I got him to admit, I don't know if you'd admit it now, he might say I'm misrepresenting him. I'm not meaning to. That conversation was very many, many years ago. But as far as I can remember, I got him to basically admit that survival is the core value behind ethics.

And I also got him to admit, I don't know if I got him to admit, maybe he just freely offered it, that at the core of his naturalistic beliefs that nature and science and logic and reason was a philosophical preference. He actually did use the words philosophical preference. So I don't know if I could meet him again now that I've developed my thinking more, if we could come to an agreement about what it actually is that we disagree on.

And I think there would be an understanding that it's our core faith is where we actually disagree. And I think we could nod and shake hands and go away from each other at peace. And if one of us needed to be persuaded by the other, the ideas are sown. And if the Holy Spirit is working, he will do what he needs to do. Between Christians, the faith presuppositions might not be as core. They might be a little bit less core, if you will.

If you believe the Bible needs to be read, for example, in every way, you need to first consider what you consider to be the most obvious meaning, the most literal meaning. And you should only ever even think about looking to see if it's symbolic or spiritual if there's some sort of thing in the text that says that, or something. This is a philosophy of reading the Bible.

If you believe that, and what I believe is that I believe the Bible means what it means. I don't believe it's open to interpretation. We have to work to interpret it, to apply it, but it's not. It means what it means whether you and I get the interpretation or not. Whether we get it right or not. But, lost my train of thought. So you got the Christian guy who...

So you have the Christian guy who believes you need to take everything in this certain kind of literal fashion. And then you got me. I believe you're free to look at the form of the literature, the context. And in some cases, it's pretty clear that it's not literal. Or what does literal even mean, by the way? I've heard R.C. Sproul say that literal is related to the word literary.

So you actually have to take it literally, you have to take it according to its literary form. So there are things in the Bible that are clearly poetry. The fear, I think, on the other side of that argument is that sometimes people use this kind of idea to make stuff up and insert it into the Bible. I believe that's the fear. But let me tell you, if you try and interpret the Bible by...

The obvious meaning, what you're really going to do there is not clear out your bias. Because if you just read it to the first initial obvious meaning, you are letting your bias in. Because your first reading, it's going to obviously mean whatever your bias to think it means. When you do the work to study it, you might remove your bias.

You might realize, oh, I came into this with some assumptions that aren't really true. Oh, wow, the historical context changes this. Oh, wow, this same phraseology is used in different places and clearly means something else. Maybe I need to reconsider. So if you really want to study, if you just take what you consider the obvious plain meaning in your English translation, you're probably going to read your bias into the Bible.

But if you do the work, you may find that a lot of times the most obvious plain meaning is the translation is good. And it's really clear what it means. But if you keep studying, you may find it's less clear than you thought. Or you might find there's nuance. Or you might find this is probably more likely to be symbolic or spiritual. Whereas this over here, like for example, the historical narratives of the story of Jesus, if someone's trying to take that as symbolic...

I believe they are gloriously messing up there. They're misunderstanding what they're reading. A clear writing style of historical narrative that is meant to tell historical events. It's not symbolic. It actually happened. However, when Jesus is telling a parable...

It clearly is, I don't know if symbolic is the right word, it's a parable. He's clearly not so much about an exact rich guy went off and left everyone with talents. He's making a point. He's teaching through a story.

So at least some of those parables are clearly not like an actual historical narrative, although the fact that Jesus told them is. So I hope you can see what I'm saying. You can't use the idea that you need to look deeper to make up whatever you want it to mean and find a way to read it in.

That's also a mistake. Okay, I went off on quite a tangent there, but if I am talking to a brother in Christ, or a sister in Christ, who we disagree, and we get to the point where we realize, I am committed to this way of reading the Bible, and I'm like, well, I'm committed to a little bit different way. Here's my reasons, here's my reasons. You can either go on to debate those reasons, whatever your hermeneutic is,

Or you can just be at peace and say, okay, we see why we disagree. Obviously, if you look at it that way, if you read it with that style in mind, you're going to come to this conclusion.

If you read it with this approach, you're going to come to this conclusion. It makes sense that we're coming to different conclusions. Or, you know, you're convinced that, I'm convinced that Revelation was written before 70 AD, maybe quite a bit before, and that in general is about the end of the Old Covenant and the beginning of the New Covenant, the revelation of Jesus. Jesus has been revealed to the world.

The book of Revelation, the revelation of Jesus, is about that. It's not about the end of the world. Okay, I believe that, and part of the reason is I'm convinced it was written before 70 AD when Jerusalem was destroyed. Someone else is not convinced of that, and they're convinced that it is an in-order, in linear fashion explanation of what's going to happen at the end of the world.

That's very common. A lot of better people than me believe it that way. But you can already see, this is where we're actually disagreeing. So we could split hairs about all these passages and verses, but at the very core of how we're interpreting it is different. We're looking at it from just a core different way, that that's where the actual debate is, because as long as we're looking at those in totally different ways, of course we're going to disagree about what it means and what it says.

So I don't know if that, what I'm actually talking about here is debate, not really meaning to talk about revelation or whatever. But do you see what I mean about getting down to the core? We could look at a passage and it means this. No, it doesn't. It means this. Well, what about this verse? It clearly says this. Well, no, this verse, no, this one says clearly this. And yet we're following kind of some different hermeneutics, some different rules of interpretation, some different beliefs about the core meaning of the book, etc.,

So I would rather have that discussion and get down to that than just keep splitting hairs and trying to defeat one another.

So if it's with a Christian brother, it'll probably be like that. If it's with an atheist, I have yet to meet an atheist that could be persuaded that they have presuppositions. No, I have no a priori assumptions. I am just starting with logic and reason and science. It's like, well, those are a priori assumptions. But if you can persuade them, you can try, if you can get them to see...

Hey, let's face it. We have different core assumptions and we're never going to come to the same conclusions unless one of us changes our assumptions. Well, there you go. There's my take on what I wish debate was really like. It was rather than trying to defeat people. And I don't mean that. I'm not moralizing like you evil people out there trying to defeat one another in the debate. We do need to cast down arguments. That's biblical.

I'm just talking about my preferences. I would much rather have this kind of reasoned, logical debate where we're just trying to get to the... either to discover that we don't disagree as much as we thought or to discover that here's where our core differences really are. That's what I would want to do. So thank you for listening to a longer...

Jon's voice notes. I appreciate you, all one of you, or however many there are now listening. I hope you're blessed and encouraged and helped. Sorts your mind out in some ways. 

But this is Jon Davis and Jon Davis voice notes signing off.