The Apologist’s Tools
You can’t get people’s attention if you don’t know how. So now we’ll consider the apologist’s indispensable “tools of the trade.” They’ll help you remove obstacles so that people you encounter can move toward the truth. One Bible verse that’s always helped remind me that it’s God’s grace, not human ingenuity, that makes an effective apologist is Proverbs 3:6: “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
Logic and Arguments
Let’s start with the following definitions of the key tools of apologetics drawn from two respected logic textbooks,7 followed by examples drawn from real-world apologetics discussions. The first tools we’ll examine are logic and arguments.
Logic: Over the past nearly thirty years that I have been working in the field of apologetics, I have had to study logic assiduously as part of my work. Even though I have a B.Phil. in philosophy, I’m still learning from those who, like Peter Kreeft (our generation’s preeminent philosopher/apologist), have dedicated their lives to teaching people how to think clearly and to use logic in defense of the Faith. So, rather than simply repeat their teaching in my own words, I’ll let them explain what every apologist needs to know about the art of constructing cogent, persuasive arguments. Logic is the “science that evaluates arguments…. The aim of logic is to develop a system of methods and principles that we may use as criteria for evaluating the arguments of others and as guides in constructing arguments of our own.” Mastering the art of logic will “increase confidence that we are making sense when we criticize the arguments of others and when we advance arguments of our own.”8
Logic enables you to construct valid arguments in defense of a truth-claim (e.g., “God exists, Jesus Christ is God”), and it helps you “troubleshoot” truth-claims (your own and those of others) by checking them for errors, also known as logical fallacies. It detects and corrects errors when they are found.
Kreeft explains how logic “powers” arguments, and how mastering the art of logic and constructing good arguments will benefit you and others:
Logic builds the mental habit of thinking in an orderly way…. It has power: the power of proof and thus persuasion. Any power can be either rightly used or abused. This power of logic is rightly used to win the truth and defeat error; it is wrongly used to win the argument and defeat your opponent…. Logic can aid faith in at least three ways…. First, logic can clarify what is believed and define it. Second, logic can deduce the necessary consequences of the belief and apply it to difficult situations…. Third, even if logical arguments cannot prove all that faith believes, they can give firmer reasons for faith than [can] feeling, desire, mood, fashion, family or social pressure, conformity or inertia.9
Your apologetics efforts will be effective to the extent that they are based on good, solid arguments. By “good and solid,” I mean arguments that are clear in their terms, true in their premises, and valid in their logical conclusions. If any of these three ingredients is missing, an argument is defective and will fail. You might get lucky and actually persuade an unsuspecting person with an argument that is unclear, false, or illogical, but that’s being right for the wrong reasons or, something far more likely, being wrong for the wrong reasons. Kreeft explains:
If an argument has nothing but clear terms, true premises, and valid logic, its conclusion must be true. If any one or more of these three things is lacking, we do not know whether the conclusion is true or false. It is uncertain.10
Let’s break down this concept into its component parts. Arguments can often be reduced to syllogisms, which have three parts:
Major premise: All squares are shapes that have four sides of equal lengths.
Minor premise: This shape has five sides of unequal lengths.
Conclusion: Therefore this shape is not a square.
Terms: Kreeft explains that a term “has no structural parts. It is a basic unit of meaning, like the number one in math or like an atom in the old atomic theory (when they believed atoms were unsplittable and had no parts).”11
A term is “clear” when its meaning is clear and you use it consistently according to that meaning in an argument. However, when a term is ambiguous or used in two different ways (i.e., equivocally), it introduces a fallacy, either because of ambiguity in meaning or because of grammatical ambiguity.
An example of ambiguity in meaning is the word “cut,” which has a variety of meanings: a share in the profits, a wound made by a sharp object, being dropped from the team, a slice of meat, a cost reduction, a style of clothing fashion, a command to stop (i.e., “Cut it out!”), and so on. The phrase, “He made the cut,” could refer to an athlete who is selected for a team, or a surgeon who makes an incision, or an office manager who eliminates an expense.
Or consider this recent Wall Street Journal headline that provides another example of ambiguity:
“GOP Lawmakers Grill IRS Chief over Lost Emails.”12
As someone pointed out, “This type of sentence has great possibilities because of its two different interpretations: (1) Republicans harshly question the chief about the emails; and (2) Republicans cook the chief using email as the fuel.”13
Grammatical or syntactical ambiguity occurs when the structure of a sentence renders its meaning unclear, often because of word order or because of incorrect or missing punctuation, such as: “The typical American eats more than three Greeks”; or “The police caught the man with a net.” Or compare: “Please don’t stop” with “Please don’t! Stop!”
It’s crucial to use clear, unambiguous terms when engaging in apologetics. Here’s an example: the term “world” is used here, clearly and consistently:
Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16, emphasis added)
In the context of this passage “whoever” is universal and literal, it means everyone. Thus, you and every other human being are part of the world to which Jesus is referring. Therefore, because God so loves you, he gave his only Son so that you should believe in him and therefore not perish but have eternal life.
To contrast, “world” in the phrase “Athanasius against the world” (Athanasius contra mundum)14 is neither universal nor literal. The great fourth-century Church Father was not literally opposed by everyone in the world in his defense of the divinity of Christ, though he was by many.
Arguments: “A group of statements, one or more of which (the premises) are claimed to provide support for, or reasons to believe, one of the others (the conclusions). All arguments may be placed in one of two basic groups: those in which the premises really do support the conclusion and those in which they do not, even though they are claimed to. The former are said to be good arguments (at least to that extent), and the latter bad arguments.”15
Example of a good argument: When Jesus declared, “Before Abraham was, I am,” the Jews “took up stones to throw at him” (John 8:59). And when Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” the “Jews took up stones again to stone him,” and said, “We stone you for no good work but for blasphemy; because you, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:30–31). Therefore, the Jews clearly understood that Jesus claimed to be God.
(The first two premises are demonstrably factual, as evidenced by the Lord’s countless miracles,