Okay, so I'm excited about what we're going to do today. We're excited about it. Tell me more. We've got a mutual friend of the podcast that we both know.
I'd like to bring this person on, but I have a question for you that we have to resolve before we move forward. Is it okay if I don't act surprised when we bring him on since he's just kind of over there looming in the other part of the room? It is okay. Okay, cool.
But I have to answer this question. Sure. Okay, so on the podcast, you years ago, you came up with a term that's very interesting. It's called the third chair.
Oh, yeah. Okay, explain the third chair just so the third chair knows about the third chair. Well, there are two different types of conversations. You have one on one with a friend.
One is the kind you know nobody else is going to participate in or hear. And therefore, there's no reason to be cognizant of that other person because it's not for them and they're not here. But then there's a kind of conversations you and I have where from a practical perspective, it's not exactly easy or feasible to invite everyone who is going to be sitting in on the conversation with us to a microphone. But still we're cognizant of them and we're having the conversation for us, but we're also having it because we care about whoever's sitting in the third chair.
We think about them when we talk about things. So the third chair seemed like a way to acknowledge that what we're doing here, it's friendship. It's conversational. And by sharing it, you know, the third chair in the relationship.
That's a good thing. So to be clear, the person listening to this podcast right now, they're in the third chair. They're in the third chair. Okay.
So I have a question. All right. You and I are in a room. Yep.
And there's an individual in the room with us. Yes. They're sitting in, I'm looking around the room. It's basically the third chair.
You see that? Dude, you're breaking the podcast. I know. I'm just, we just have to figure this out.
People are going to like this. But the question is, is that person right over there, are they in the third chair or are they in the fourth chair? About 2A. No.
So you can't, you can't just bring in a guest and have them immediately bump the people who are normally a part of the conversation down a chair, then they automatically resent the guest from the beginning. And we want the third chair to like our guests. So what, okay, so what if we do it this way? How do you feel when somebody comes over?
I don't like it. And you get bumped down to like the kid table, Thanksgiving or something. That's actually in the Bible. I strategize.
I sit at the kid table first and then have them invite me to the adult table. I learned that one. You seriously just bibled me? Yeah, I did.
You bibled me. I did bibled, yeah. So well, Pythagorean calculus, inflection point. Maybe something in there gets you back.
All right. So those are science terms I've heard people say. You're kind of leaning towards what we're going to talk about. But I propose the following solution.
I propose that the audience is listening to the podcast. They're the third chair. And then when we have a guest here, we don't say the number of the chairs that the guest is in. So your solution is willful ambiguity that everybody can see through?
Yes. Yeah. So if you're sitting over there at the kid table at Thanksgiving, and everybody's like, they're all just tables. Right.
You look around and everybody's ripping snot down their cheeks. Yeah, that's the dumb thing with toys and stuff. You're like, I don't know. My eyes tell a different story than this.
I like it. I think you might be patronizing me right now. What do you think? But they're just all the chairs.
Yeah. But the audience is in the third chair. And then we have. They're always in the third chair, no matter what.
That's my proposal. Okay. So maybe I bumped down to the fourth chair. No.
No. I'm at the kid table, aren't I? You are. Damn.
That was such a nice way of getting me there. I understand. And I accept. All right.
Here we go. I wanted to have some ectocooler with my Thanksgiving turkey anyway. So let's do it. Let's do it.
For everyone in the third chair, I would like to welcome our guest today. Dr. Steve Bateman. How's it going, Steve?
Good. So Matt, what are we going to talk about today? Well, I think we're first going to talk about Dr. Steve Bateman.
And then we're going to talk about what we're going to talk about. So Dr. Steve, I've known for almost 10 years. Did you know that?
We're going on a decade, pal. That's pretty good. That is. And is that right?
If I just vouch, the JPMs are going to go up for a second here. Is that okay? Yeah. They kind of have to based on your profession.
Yeah. How do we do this? All right. You know how when you see somebody who's real good at testing rockets or real good at making YouTube videos or public communication, you appreciate that in a little different way, Destin.
Then you appreciate somebody who's good at something you're not really into, like ice hockey or curling or whatever. You can tell it seems like they're pretty good at that. But there's no nuance. It's a puck went in the net again.
That's good. I think you're supposed to get it in there. But somebody who does what you do. Yes.
You do the piece signed to your eyes to their eyes. I see you and I see what you're doing. Right. That's how I feel about Steve.
Right. He is, to me, a model of what it looks like to be a descendant without becoming arrogant in a job that is really hard to do for a very long time. And that job being pastor of a local church. Right.
Steve, I've known you for a long time. And my favorite thing about this is knowing that you're uncomfortable with us talking about. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. See the way I'm avoiding eye contact. Yeah. You're not looking at it.
I mean, it's not what to do. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Well, I'll ask you this, Steve.
So it is Dr. Steve Bateman. Yeah. You don't have to say doctor.
Well, I was going to say, I've never actually heard you reference your doctorate. I've never heard you with your mouth say that you have a doctorate. Yeah. And that's on purpose, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if you look at the history of the professions, for instance, lawyers have doctorates, but you don't call them doctor.
What do you mean? Larger doctor. Yours, Prudence. Oh, OK.
All right. And so it's in my now there's several doctoral degrees you can get in the ministry. And so I typically don't play that card. OK.
Well, so I won't talk to you about it. Yeah. So Matt, you were explaining what Steve's doctorate is. I don't understand.
It's a little different deal. I was explaining what the degree before he got the doctorate is. So this is something people don't know about well-trained pastors. To be good at this is to be a holder of knowledge.
I know there are tons of people in the third chair who are like, I just, I don't think there's a God. I don't believe this. I don't go to church. Awesome.
I would cross that bridge a gazillion times with each other. Who's in that place in their journey of belief and understanding the universe and themselves. Clearly, they're people who are very gracious and able to think outside themselves because they're here hanging out with us. And we are people of faith.
You know, I will think there's a God and God is knowable. And it's interesting because this whole conversation we're about to have really actually has very little to do with this subject matter. Right. We're going to talk about logic and so forth.
But hey, here we are. All of that to say, acknowledging fully that we are in a very diverse room of very diverse opinions. But we're all people who seem to be able to think outside ourselves and like each other anyway. I know that it would be easy for a person who has never been around church.
It'd be like, oh, it's, you know, that's kind of low brow. It's for people who believe a thing. And I look, just got to admit, there is that kind of church. There is a very, very simple version of all of this.
But Christianity is a historical religious intellectual tradition. There are complicated ideas there that distill down very neatly to the simplest truths that resonate with the human soul about life, death, aging, meaning, purpose, God, forgiveness, atonement, all the stuff. There's a reason it's scratched to the itch for a gillion people around the world forever. So it plays very simple questions, right?
It's a big questions. So it plays very simple. But also, I mean, below that tip of the iceberg is this mountain of knowledge from intellectual giants who have tried to tackle huge questions about the soul and life and Bible and all of that stuff. And there's just a lot to know in order to be able to do this well because unless you want to just go with solo and shoot from the hip, be like, I had an opinion, I thought of about God kind of and just say it with authority.
If you want to do it right, you first have to humble yourself and go learn what everybody else, even people you deeply disagree with have already thought through for thousands of years. And so you cannot do that in a quick associate's degree. It just doesn't work. You can't physically internalize that much knowledge.
You can't really fully immerse yourself in that without taking a lot of time. So over the years, there's a program that's developed called the Master of Divinity. You don't master divinity. It's just what they call it.
And so in this program, you learn at least two study languages. It's usually going to be Hebrew and Greek, not Greek like they speak now. It's a different version that was common in the first century AD. Then on top of that, you got to learn practical stuff.
On top of that, like just how to lead a church, how to organize your thoughts into a talk. On top of that, you have to study a 66 volume book. If you're Catholic, you even get a few more. So that's called the Apocrypha, right?
Or the Deuterocannon, depending on who you talk to and how flattering you want to be. It's a 90 plus hour program. What most people call a PhD is less in terms of total time investment than a simple master's degree that your local pastor down the street has, who isn't talking about their degree or telling you what they've done. Steve, is that a fair reflection of what an MDiv is, a master of divinity?
Yeah, MDiv master divinity is usually a three-year program. So my master's degree is a master of theology. That's a four-year program. And so it's just more Greek and Hebrew and more systematic and historical theology.
We're not to the doctorate part. Is that the fair assessment of what you've done? Okay. All right.
So Matt, what's the doctorate part? So this is the key thing. What that means is someone who has that training has been trained not in how to repeat the things that they already think. They have been trained in how to interact with the most complex, most important ideas.
And they've been trained to learn how to do it sympathetically, even in disagreement. Because theoretically, they are the next generation of people upon whose shoulders future generations will stand intellectually. So they are carrying the baton and they have to be competent to carry that baton, both as a professional academic, but also as a practical academic who can make that make sense of people who went to school for something else or just have other things to do during the week and can't throw all of their energy at that. So it's a massive training program with at least a couple thousand years of history, depending on how you count it.
It's a very big deal and something that is way underappreciated in society right now, both in and outside of the church. It's way underappreciated. You could not pry that out of him. I know.
But what I'm telling you is the truth. So what is the doctorate thing? The doctorate, Steve, what do you have is called out with what? It's a doctorate ministry.
So you can go two routes in the ministry. Usually if you get the PhD, that's usually the academic degree. If you want to teach in a seminary, a graduate level in terms of theology or a store theology church history, if you go that route, that's the PhD. So the doctorate ministry is the practical degree for working pastors like me who are just responsible for local church.
I'm responsible along with a team of pastors for about 1500 people in their spiritual care. Okay. So that practical degree, it's for the everyday ministry, the real people in real, career and marketplace situations and trying to keep their marriage together and their families together and raise their kids and how scripture comes to bear on all that. In a lot of ways, a demon is meant to chase masters of theology, masters of divinity, to bring this academic who's just spent three or four years at very high level, doctoral level, historic degree stuff I was just telling you about.
It's meant to bring them back into the practical world of what the heck actually happens in people's lives. Because you go and you get lost in that world for years, things change and you can start, I mean, you've just been hanging around with other people speaking a language, pretty much nobody speaks in that form anymore and haven't for 1500 years. Like there's a bunch of practical stuff that you need other people to specialize in and specialize in training pastors in. And so the demon is the highest level of kind of that boots on the ground training for the person who also has the academic training.
One of the complaints, if you're around the academy for very long, if you're around academics for very long is that you kind of figure out there's not a good mechanism for taking ivory towers, scholars, there's a reason ivory towers are saying out of there and having them be able to function with normal people and accomplish normal things. This degree is meant to accomplish that. That's right. So we need the PhDs.
We need those guys and those men and those women in the seminaries in the graduate schools doing the research. That's a lot of, they're doing a lot of research. They're publishing articles in peer review journals and that sort of thing. They're writing the commentaries and most laypeople, especially the technical commentaries, that's not accessible to them.
What's commentary? So a commentary would be commentary on scripture. So like if you wanted to study the book of James, there's 2000 years of scholarship that has the interpretation of James, historical background of James, what James is dealing with in terms of the cultural background and all of that. So to bring a proper interpretation, there's only one good interpretation that passes.
What the local pastor has to do, he has to be able to interact with all that technical scholarly work that the PhDs are producing. And we become the brokers of truth for the people of God who are just in their everyday lives. So you make it accessible. We make it accessible.
When I make a YouTube video, me and everybody, George helps me. We spend a lot of time and it'll take us two, three months to work on an individual video that's played for 20 minutes. And then I look at what local pastors do and I think to myself, whoa, you did what I do in three months in a week. Well, there's a lot of parallel with what you do.
So you interact with a lot of the technical, scientific research and things that most people are not going to be able to do. And you bring it to a level where it's accessible to people who don't have that background, but they're curious and they want to learn. And they're smart. Yeah.
It's just didn't have time to go and learn the thing you went and learned. I don't have time, especially now there's so many ethical issues with advanced technology and all the things that are happening now. And especially in the area of medical technology that Christian scholars have to work through. I don't have time to do that.
I depend on the work of the PhDs who are working at that level. Then I can interact with that. I know what they're talking about and I can mediate that to people just trying to live their lives. Well, one of the reasons I was most interested in asking you to come on and Matt and I talked about it and we agreed this would be very, very interesting.
You're brilliant. Your mind is impressive and I know that makes you uncomfortable to hear that. I've had the opportunity to sit across the table from you many times and have a meal. And when you're not in the pulpit, so to speak, and you're just shooting from the hip, it's some of the most thought-provoking conversations I've ever had.
I mean, deep, deep, deep water stuff. And I love watching you squirm right now because you're also probably humble. I feel like I'm a dump truck trying to keep up with a couple of Lamborghinis. I think Lamborghinis is being a sexy vehicle and I'm looking at you and I looked in the mirror this morning.
You ain't no Lamborghini, brother. That might be a mess, Bob. So one of the things that is most attractive about your mind to me, obviously you're a man of faith, it's not even that. Your ability to think critically.
Your critical thinking skills are off the chart. And I'm interested in your mind from a secular point of view. Like your ability to take a thing, an argument, and dissect it and be, I don't know, even the person on the other side of the argument from you, I've noticed that you're very charitable and how you articulate their position. I wanted to talk to you about how you do that.
And one thing I know you love, because I've heard you talk about it, our logical fallacies. And I want to learn more about that. And we have the saying here on the podcast, JPMs, Jesus is per minute. People here, hey, there's this pastor coming on, it's probably going to, JPMs are going to ramp up.
We did rail it for the first five or seven minutes here. We did. But I'm interested in your thoughts on these fallacies, logical fallacies. I've heard a lot about it.
I have not been trained in this area, Matt. I know you have, Steve. I know you have. So I'm kind of the dumb guy in the room here.
I know a couple of them. I've heard of something called the red herring fallacy. I've heard of the false dichotomy. Is that it?
Is that it? False dichotomy or false dilemma? False dilemma. Okay.
I've heard about these things, but I don't know what they are. I have an idea of what a red herring is and ad hominem I've heard of that. But I'm quickly depleting my gas tank on this information. And I know this is important stuff, because I know this is how you spot truth.
And am I on this? Is this right? What do I need to know, Matt? Well, this seems like a good place to start.
Steve, what is a fallacy? A fallacy is a misleading statement or deceptive statement. Sometimes it's intentional, often probably most often it's not intentional. It's a sloppy way of thinking.
For an argument to be saying it has to be a valid argument, but also the premises have to be true. I'm sorry. Okay. So valid.
Is that a technical term or does valid mean, okay, is that a casual term or is there a technical way to know if an argument is quote valid? Yes. I mean, this is the history of the laws of logic. It's valid.
It's acceptable. It's a validated argument that we can accept as a people. So it has to be valid. The structure of the argument has to be valid.
One of the most common syllogisms is if a then b, a, therefore b. Wait, I'm sorry. Slow that down. Yeah.
Say it again, please. If a then b, if a is true, then b is true. Okay. That's the first premise.
So the second premise is a is true. So the conclusion therefore, b is true. Oh, it's the transitive property of like angles. It's basically taking math and putting it towards.
Okay. So this is cool. So I can feel it happening already. So we're taking what I love, math, science, things like that.
And these tools are a bridge to what you do, Matt. You remember a long time ago, I was telling you that I don't think we are on a spectrum where you represent the far end of hard sciences and the tangibly provable. And I represent the far end of historical speculation and opinion sharing. Yes.
But that rather, I think we are on a horseshoe where we're using nearly identical tools. That the only difference is the way we can probe the subject matter we like, but the rules of logic, we then subject the subject matter we like to. It's the same rules of reason. So it feels way different, but it's actually very similar.
I can feel what's about to happen here. So I've been limited by my vocabulary my entire life is what this feels like. And you're about to give me some tools, haven't we all? Yeah.
And the common denominator is truth. Right. You're both after the truth. Two plus two is four.
That's true. And but the same thing applies in the humanities and history. That kind of seeking after objective absolute truth is this. That's what you're both after.
Okay. I've heard the term logical fallacies. Why do people point them out or you don't use a logical fallacy? You just look out for them.
Is that how it works? Logical fallacies are the stuff of political propaganda and advertising. What you're trying to do is you're trying to bypass the intellectual thought and get right to the feelings. The propaganda is designed whether it's whether you're trying to sell something or what you're trying to get somebody's money or get somebody's vote.
Propaganda in its negative sense is designed to make you hurry up and feel something versus slow down and think something. Okay. So what logic is supposed to do is get you slow down and think. That takes more intellectual sweat.
What propaganda is designed to do is to get you to hurry up and feel. You feel fear. So you got to move. You got to take action.
You feel happy or you could have this feeling of being satisfied if you bought this product. You're trying to bypass the logic in most of that kind of messaging. Stupid hideous oversized trucks should be banned nationwide. So there's an argument in there.
Yeah. But I employed a fallacy too. The fallacy was I told you what to feel and that is self-concluding. I told you the argument should lead you to consider the conclusion that maybe trucks are getting too big and that maybe we should do something about that.
I don't think they're nearly big enough. I think we can get those things like I don't see why with using aluminum and lighter weight metals we couldn't get a Ford F-150 to be 16 feet tall. You drive a truck. He's right.
I do. What do you do? It's a two-wheel drive GMC. What does that matter if it's dual drive?
Well, you're carrying less weight around so the mileage is better. Most people have four-wheel drive don't need them. Okay. And it's nice to have it when you need it.
So when we have an occasional ice storm here in Alabama, all my friends with four-wheel drive that I've been ridiculing. We'll call me and say do you need to ride somewhere? I think I'll have to. Yeah.
So it's their turn tomorrow. So what was the fallacy you're going to make fun of me for my bear spray until the next time I use it? Right. Right.
I always said four-wheel drive gives you the ability to get stuck farther away from home. He's not wrong. That's pretty good. You said there was a fallacy in the statement but I didn't catch it?
No. It's not so much. You used some feeling words like stupid. You told us already that this is a stupid thing.
I led with the emotional conclusion and then followed with a fake argument. I don't think there was a fallacy though. They just sounded like an opinion. I think it's fallacy.
I don't remember which one you call it but that's why we brought Steve. To me that fallacy is the ultimate example of leading with emotions. It's like the only thing. I can't remember what you said.
Did you use the word because in there? I can't remember. No, there was no cause. So you're not making an argument.
You're sharing an opinion at that point. But I'm presenting it as though the foregone conclusion is my opinion. That's right. You're trying to persuade us.
That's really what this is all about. How are you going to persuade people? Are you going to persuade them with emotion? Are you going to persuade them with reason?
And I'm kind of on a crusade, especially among professing Christians, to make America reasonable again. I said what you're doing there. I like that. To be reasonable.
Oh, I laughed. I wasn't supposed to laugh at that, was I? No, no. I mean, you can.
No, I'm sorry. I really am. That word is used in Scripture. In fact, there's so many times it's okay.
We're talking about Scripture. Is that right? Yeah, whatever you're going to let me do that. It's kind of what I do.
Yeah. So over and over again, there are admonitions in Scripture to people who profess to be Christians. That are imperatives in the Greek. That means it's a command.
This isn't a suggestion. Okay. And they go like this. Do not be deceived.
Several times. Do not be deceived. Let no one deceive you. So that should not be understood as you don't have to be deceived.
That's right. And it's one thing to be gullible, but it's another thing to be willfully gullible. And I would like for Christians, who, you know, people who claim to be Christians to think about the fact that it is even a sin to be willfully gullible. And what I mean is you don't take reasonable steps to be able to discern the truth, whether it's in the media or anywhere else.
Oh, so you're saying that you have to adhere to logic and reason. We have a moral obligation to be reasonable people. What does it mean to be reasonable? Like reasonable sounds like a word that I get to choose.
Oh, it's completely unreasonable for you to ask me to do this. It means it's reasonable. It means that you arrive at your decisions through reason. Logic's going to be part of that, but discovering the truth is a part of that too.
So you got to be able to discern the truth in the media, whatever. In a logical formula, you have to have true premises. That requires back finding. What's a premise?
A premise would be the statement like in that syllogism, premise A, it would be if A then B. The second premise, premise two would be A. And then the conclusion is therefore B. But to begin with all this, you've got to be able to use critical thinking skills and another number of other ways to discover the truth.
You got to have facts. In 1770, at the Boston Massacre, several British soldiers were brought to trial. And most people heard the phrase, facts are stubborn things, but they don't know where it came from. So it was in the 1770 trial where John Adams was appointed to be the attorney for the British soldiers.
You can imagine what the crowd in Boston thought about these British soldiers. He looked at the jury and said, facts are stubborn things. And he brought out the facts and he saved their lives. They were not convicted of murder.
I didn't know that. John Adams, the second president of the United States. Right. He defended the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre.
Would he have considered them an enemy? He would not be friendly to them because they did not like a standing army quartered in their city and sometimes in their own homes. So even though he had an enemy, he kind of knelt the facts and let the facts determine the truth. That's right.
And so he fought for the truth. The truth, the question is, is this true? This is why it's really important to understand we got three safety nets in this culture, largely due to the influence of Christianity on our founding. One of them in the First Amendment is a free press.
And what the free press gives you is competition and competition is good. And what that means is there's not one source for your news. You can have a Fox anisean in. You can have all these other news sources coming at you from different perspectives.
So they, you know, we think about the check and balance system in our government. We think of, oh, there's three branches of government and therefore they check and balance each other. But you got other checks and balances and the First Amendment is one of the best ones. So you got the press checking the power of the state because they're constantly looking for scandals and corruption.
Now, is there a motive always good? Probably not. There's a profit motive here. I don't care what the motive is.
By the way, that's another fallacy is the appeal of a motive fallacy. It doesn't matter what the motive is of the press to find dirt or to uncover corruption in the government. I don't care if they're in it for the money. What matters is what's true.
I want to know about that corruption. I want to know about those lies, right? So you got competition in the press. You don't have to depend on one news source because then those media outlets keep each other in check.
They can report on each other. Ah. And so what just drives me crazy sometimes is professing Christians who only listen to one source. When we are not taking advantage of or exploiting the reality that we have multiple sources that we can use to do fact checking.
Competition in the press is the first is the first safety net. The second safety net is the court. What keeps a check on the press is we got a legal process and we can sue for libel and defamation. So it's one thing to make a claim on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, or X, or whatever it is.
It's another thing to prove it in court because in court, what court does is it takes the emotion out, it slows down the process and it uncovers facts. That takes a while. You have to be dispassionate to do that. Dispassionate.
So you have to slow everything down, bring the facts out and that's why courts own for it. The court takes the emotion and the passion. It doesn't always eliminate it. It's not perfect, but it's the best hope we have to slow down the process to find the truth.
So the first check and balance on society to get to truth is that what we were doing here. The first one was the media. Yeah. We got a bunch of journalists out there sniffing around looking for information to give to us.
The second one was the court system. The court system holds the press and check. You can't just print anything you want. And so if it's not true, if it's defamatory, if it's damaging to people, you can take people to court.
So civil court, you're thinking, yeah, not. They don't go to jail for saying things that aren't true. They might have to pay damages, which is a very key distinction because you don't want the government prosecuting saying something wrong. But you want citizens to protect themselves from other citizens.
That's a way underrated safety net. It's huge. I'll give an example. And this covers some of the policies is a few years ago, Rachel Maddow, who would be on the left in terms of journalism and media, was sued by a conservative organization for defamation.
And this went to court. There's enough evidence there that she said things that were defamatory against this conservative organization. And her defense in court, her lawyer's defense was no reasonable person could think that she was giving in her show, which is on MSNBC. No reasonable person could think that she was actually espousing facts.
That was the defense? Because the defense was it's because it's the entertainment defense. In other words, she's an entertainer and she's sharing her opinion. And you can do that.
Our thing is a complete joke. So therefore, I don't think you can really hold her to account. Right. But she's not the only one who made use that as defense.
So Tucker Carlson did the same thing on the right. All right. So when Tucker Carlson gets sued for one of the women who said, I don't know how much you want to put it. Just say it.
Okay. Let me just say this. There are two kinds of voters. There are voters who believe what their favorite media source says about the indictment.
And then there are voters who actually go and read the indictment. Okay. All right. So Tucker Carlson was sued over one of the women who claimed that she had an illicit affair with Donald Trump.
And because Carlson said some things about her that were defamatory. She took Carlson to court. And the Fox News lawyers use the same defense. No reasonable person could think that Tucker is actually reporting facts.
He's an entertainer. He has an entertainment hour and he's sharing his opinion. And so both on the left, quote, the left and the right, we have. So if I understand correctly, you're telling me that the court system is to slow down everything and to pull out the facts and be very deliberate about how we're finding truth.
That's right. And on both the quote left and the quote right, we have on record, both of them saying, you can't believe us. On the left and the right is propaganda. Okay.
And and the judges ruled in favor of both Matt Allen and Tucker Carlson. Really? Oh, they said they escaped because of that. It was an effective argument.
They have freedom of speech. Which again, logical argument. Yeah, the argument that they made in court to defend them was a logical argument because it's defending free speech. Okay.
I don't know what to think of that. This is why I mean, all of this too is why we portray Lady Justice as wearing what? She's got a robe blindfold on. It's a blindfold.
Right. It's meant to communicate them. You get the scales of balance and you got the blindfold. And sometimes she's also portrayed with a sword on her hip.
So there's a lot going on with that particular personification of what justice ought to look like. The sword isn't loaded and ready. It's not ideal. We don't want to need.
I mean, we're not quick to use this, but it's there. And these decisions, this weighing in the balance, blind weighing in the balance, just weighing in the balance, it does have teeth because somebody in society will need to be the decider and the arbiter of disputes. And the blindfold is depicting the principle of impartiality. Yes.
And that is a fundamentally Judeo-Christian ethic. That is what the book of James is about, for example. You should not show partiality to the rich because they're rich, but you also have a scripture that says don't show partiality to the poor because they're poor. What matters is the fact.
What are the facts of the case? Wow. Okay. In all of this stuff, these are lofty ideals.
We want to make judgments. We're having arbitration of disputes. Everyone's always negotiating with everybody. I didn't like it when you made that argument with me years ago, Destin, but it kind of come around.
Like everyone negotiates. And some of that negotiation is not as friendly fun and just part of the normal give and take of life banter, even you could call it. Some of it's pretty intense and pretty high stakes. If there are two people negotiation will occur.
There are more than two people negotiation is constantly occurring. So as a result, the question becomes what are the ground rules for that negotiation, especially if some sort of third party steps in to mediate the dispute. There have to be ground rules. Now, it's very tempting and alluring to reduce the ground rules to the equivalent of a logical street fight, which is just to say, whoever can stir the passions of the 12 people on this jury best or whoever can stir the passions of their audience best, they shall to be declared the winner.
Is it good? Who cares? Is it just? I guess so it happened.
But then the other perspective and the slower and boring perspective would be, even though this is an abstract task that we're carrying out here, trying to get to truth, there have to be ground rules and there have to be ground rules that everybody agrees on. And they're not even legal ground rules. They're just ones and zeros math ground rules applied to thought. And if I'm understanding you correctly, it seems like that's where you're suggesting that the logical fallacy thing comes in is that these are the places where people are most likely to cheat their way into emotion, to cut a logical corner and get to a quick result.
And they're slippery and they're sneaky and they work even on smart people. And that's why they're pernicious. And that's why I'm assuming you learned them. So you could catch them when they're happening.
And I'm assuming you get to when they're happening in your own mind and when you want to pull the trigger on those yourself. That's right. This episode of Nodum Questions is supported by patrons of the program, affectionately known as the winged hasars. And we reached out to several people and we asked them if they would be willing to tell us why they support Nodum Questions.
And we got a really cool response from two local guys here. And we thought it'd be fun to just play this for you and let you hear why Charlie and Clark support Nodum Questions on Patreon. I'm Charlie and I'm Clay. We live in Huntsville, Alabama, but we are born in Nebraska.
We're patrons of Nodum Questions because we really enjoy listening and learning from how Destin and Matt think through things. And we support Nodum Questions so I can keep going. And because we love hearing from Bernakley's and Testicley's. Since they're huge and they're great.
That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much, Charlie and Clark. We were grateful and maybe we'll see each other out and about at a restaurant or like when I'm pumping gas or something.
So yeah, I'm grateful to Charlie and Clark for supporting on patreon.com slash Nodum Questions. And if you feel the same way at all or you just you just want to pitch in on this thing, we appreciate it. That's it. Let's get back to the discussion.
So let me ask you this. I've tried desperately to get smarter every day. I try to read. I try to listen to people that are smarter than myself.
But I can feel that I'm susceptible to certain things. What would you say is a logical fallacy that I probably that probably catches me off guard. Probably is effective on me often. And something that you know, what's a blind spot I might have in this area that I might not know about?
I don't know about you personally. I mean, I know you well, but I mean, you're a good thinker. So I can't think of anything that you would be particularly vulnerable to. Let me go over a few common ones.
Maybe they'll hit you. Probably most common one is the ad hominem, right? So ad hominem is Latin for to the man. And so an ad hominem argument is when you take your focus off the argument itself and off the facts of the matter and you make personal attacks on the person who's making the case.
Okay. The reason I don't think that's a logical fallacy is because you're a jerk. He's a pastor. He's a pastor.
So like he's going to this from a Christian angle. Sure. Yeah. I don't know that we can trust him.
Oh, I wear my glasses with one of the little things sticking out, right? I know. That's why I don't think so. You did.
So you committed several fallacies there. And one of them is the red herring fallacy. You said, look at me. I got a red herring.
My red herring. So yeah. What is the red herring? Red herring is if you're in a marketplace, red herring is supposedly, I don't know about herrings, but supposedly they're rare.
So you hold it up and say, look at this red herring. And so it doesn't have anything to do with the conversation you're in or with the argument you're making, but you use it as a distraction, especially if you see the show. Oh, yeah. You're starting to lose the argument.
You use it as a distraction. And I could say, yeah, but what about you? I just is one of the only ones I've read about. And I heard it a different way.
I heard that when hunters are like they have dogs that are, this sounds so stupid saying that loud. So I'm second guessing my thing I heard. I heard that when hunters have dogs and are tracking something to throw them off the trail, if you were to put a red herring out in the woods somewhere, the dogs would go to that instead of the thing you're tracking. I've never heard that before, but it would and still illustrates the you're distracting, right?
I kind of doubt that. Okay. Because what's the point of bread? Oh, it's can't smell red.
Okay. There you go. That was logic. Yeah, he just I just felt like I got body slammed to the mat.
Come on. Maybe a little ad hominem is the first one we're bringing up to the man. Maybe a recent example I can think of that would be 2016 Republican debates. I tend towards civil liberty.
There was a candidate in that who intrigued me at the time, the son of Ron Paul Rand Paul. He's a senator from Kentucky in our country. He was like the one guy on the stage being like, Hey, we should have the Fourth Amendment again, where you can't just spy on Americans. You have to get a warrant.
So I love that. That's my heart language. It works on me. Camilla whispers things like that to me.
And I'm like, let's just make out right now. It really works on me. And so he's saying that stuff. And I'm feeling like I really like this Rand Paul guy.
Talk about private things. He makes this. He makes some argument about illegal courts, secret courts and spying on people and warrantless searches and all of this stuff. And then Donald Trump, who don't want to spoil it, but he went on to win the entire election to become president of the United States of America.
He turns to the crowd after Rand Paul says that. He's like, look at this guy's hair. Look at his stupid hair. It looks stupid and he looks dumb.
That was it. That's what he said to Rand Paul's complicated argument about the Fourth Amendment and the importance of preserving the legal reality of warrants for searches. Like that's at home at him. That's right.
One of the most effective people at it, of course, would be Donald Trump. So he dispatched Marco Rubio with Little Marco. He dispatched Jeb Bush with Sleepy Jeb or he didn't have an opinion. We had a point if you kind of look at his case.
So I remember hearing Crooked Hillary. Crooked Hillary is not only he's really effective at attaching names to people that are demeaning. But he's not the only one. I'm not here to pick on Donald Trump, although he has kind of legitimized that in public discourse.
Ah. I mean, I'm old enough to remember a few things and you didn't hear that in political discourse before. So and Adam and Mark. He was more sophisticated before.
It was. He had to be smarter to do it and you had to be clever to do it, which I kind of admire. The British, if you've ever watched a parliament, you know, they're just really good at it. But the thing about an ad homo argument is that it's intellectually lazy.
It's a way to bypass having to debate actual policy that your opponent holds. You don't have to master foreign or domestic policy. You can just call the name. But we all tend to do it.