Skip to content

Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 2 – Redirection (Dale)


The smell of this will get you off the trail…

Last time we briefly distinguished four ways Christians respond to apparent contradictions in theology. Here, we look at what I call Redirection. When confronted with an apparently contradictory doctrine X, the Redirector changes the subject. She says something to direct your attention away from X, or at least away from the apparent inconsistency of X. The Redirector is either not arguing in defense of X at all, or she’s committing a red herring fallacy.

An example:

Doubting Don: What’s this Incarnation business? Jesus was God and a human? But isn’t that saying that he is and isn’t God?

Redirecting Rebecca: Isn’t it amazing that God loved us so much, that while we were yet sinners, he sent his only Son to redeem us?

(Don doesn’t bite on her first attempt at Redirection.)Doubting Don: Well, sure, that is amazing. But what does that have to do with my question? All contradictions are false, right? But the Incarnation doctrine looks like one. It seems we shouldn’t believe it, then, as we aim to believe what is true.

Redirecting Rebecca: Look, if the divine didn’t become human, then no human can become divine.

First Rebecca just changes the subject. When pressed, she gives (the start of) an argument for the Incarnation doctrine. But this is also a red herring – a distraction. Don has raised a worry that the Incarnation is inconsistent. It’s no good offering an argument for something which we’re pretty sure is a contradiction. Discovering that some claim is contradictory forecloses the project of looking for evidence or argument for that claim. Again, maybe what she says at the end is true, but unimportant, because no human can become divine (because that is logically impossible).

She’s thinking: some people are saved, and being saved is becoming divine, and so given the principle she states, the divine must have become human (i.e. the Incarnation doctrine must be true). This is all fine and dandy – perhaps true – but she just hasn’t faced the issue of whether that doctrine is consistent (so possibly true) or inconsistent (so necessarily false).

This is irresponsible. God gave us minds so that (concerning important things) we can maximize our true beliefs and minimize our false beliefs. Moreover, many people have faced the issue of consistency, whatever the doctrine is – Trinity, incarnation, free will and foreknowledge, evil and God’s goodness. Rebecca really ought to look into it more.

Redirection
, as a settled stance (rather than a momentary response) towards apparently contradictory claims, just isn’t a serious option for someone who wants to love God with all her mind.

(Note: If you’re thinking that Rebecca’s argument for the Incarnation will be so strong that it will be cogent even if the doctrine is still (after she’s thought about it quite a bit) apparently contradictory, then you’re thinking of her not as a Redirector, but as a Resister. On Resistance, stay tuned…)

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

6 thoughts on “Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 2 – Redirection (Dale)”

  1. Pingback: trinities - Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 20 - Resolution by Revision (Dale)

  2. Pingback: trinities - Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 7 - Resolution by Rational Reinterpretation (Dale)

  3. Pingback: trinities - Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 3 - Restraint (Dale)

  4. Brandon – I think you’re talking about what I call Resolution or Resistance… stay tuned and see if you agree. Putting it differently, the delaying you’re talking about isn’t mere delaying, but rather asking for the patience to hear a positive reply.

  5. I’m not sure that the only two options are that the Redirector either is not arguing in defense of X or is committing the red herring fallacy. For instance, it could be that the Redirector regards the objection as ill-founded, and thinks that the other person will come to see that if other points are laid down first. There’s a great example of this in Socrates — who actually redirects quite a bit, especially when directly dealing with Sophists — in the Gorgias; Socrates never directly answers Callicles’s arguments — as pro-Callicles thinkers like Nietzsche have occasionally pointed out — because his whole position is that the entire viewpoint within which Callicles is making his objection is defective. If you have the worldview of Socrates, Callicles’s arguments look straightforwardly absurd; thus the best response to Callicles is to try to get Callicles to set his argument aside for a moment and appreciate those things that make Socrates’s whole point of view preferable. So Redirection sometimes is a defense of X. So there does seem to be a genuine Redirection that’s not, as you would suggest, either ignoratio elenchi or red herring.

    (I also think it’s pretty clear in real-life cases of Redirection that this is what people are at least usually trying to do, even if they aren’t doing it very well. But that’s a different issue.)

  6. Pingback: trinities - Dealing with Apparent Contradictions: Part 1 - the four R’s (Dale)

Comments are closed.