Universal Core of Ethics

Standalone Essays · Triad of Stewardship

Critical Thinking: Guarding Truth with Reason

1. What Is the Real Story?

Before accepting any claim, examine whether it presents a full map or just a highlighted route.

2. Who Gains? Who Loses?

Motives often reveal more than words. Trace the incentives behind the message:

3. What Is Missing?

No account is complete without acknowledging what it leaves out.

4. Why Now?

Timing is rarely accidental. Ask why this issue demands your attention at this exact moment.

5. What Can We Actually Do?

Move beyond feeling righteous toward identifying effective, evidence-based responses.

6. Why Do I Want to Believe This?

The most powerful bias lives inside us. This is the hardest—and most important—step.

Two Terms Worth Knowing: Parsimony and Symmetry

When you test a hypothesis, two terms are worth having in hand. To ask whether a hypothesis is parsimonious is to apply Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation that accounts for all the available evidence is usually the most likely to be correct. To check a hypothesis for symmetry is to ask whether it is equally applicable in all the situations where it is relevant. An asymmetrical hypothesis only applies in certain circumstances, or requires additional qualifications and conditions bolted on to stay true. A good explanation is both simple and consistent—it does not need special pleading to survive.

The 2,000-Year Mistake

History shows what a lack of critical thinking can cost. Around the 6th century BCE, Anaximander taught that Earth was only one world among many, and somewhere between 310 and 230 BCE, Aristarchus brought forward the hypothesis that the solar system rotated around the Sun. But the great Aristotle held that Earth was the center of the universe, and that because circles are obviously the most perfect geometric shape, the divine force that built the universe—the unmoved mover—would allow no other form of orbit. Aquinas built on this idea, teaching that the unmoved mover was no less than God. It was a beautiful idea, and the arguments were structurally sound. The problem was that it didn’t fit what people were observing in the sky. Ptolemy developed epic geometry in an attempt to solve the problem, but when you base your work on a faulty assumption—garbage in, garbage out. Century after century, we drew tens of thousands of circles, mucked about with the velocities, and tried to see whether intersecting lines would make it work. Nothing. Copernicus moved the Sun from revolving around the Earth to the Earth orbiting the Sun, and left everything else in place. That’s it. And he got a lot of hate for it. No less than Martin Luther once wrote, “This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy, but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still and not the Earth.” He was referring to Joshua 10:12-13, but he could as easily have quoted Habakkuk 3:11.

That was the whole argument. First: circles are perfect, so they must be how planets orbit. Second: the Bible said Joshua stopped the Sun, not the Earth. On the strength of those two false premises, we fumbled everything about space for some two thousand years—from the mid-300s BCE until Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came along. We knew the Earth was a globe, knew its size, even approximated its weight to an amazingly close figure, and still we dropped the ball for twenty centuries. Where would we have been if we had simply asked ourselves, “But what if God likes ellipses?” Or, even better, “But what if the Bible got it wrong?”

My Own Blind Spot

I’ll admit my own failure here, because sometimes people write most about what troubles them most. As I said in the Compass’ Forward, this is not a list of my ethical achievements but a rough map showing where work is needed; there is no prophet, no messiah, no Mahdi that should be fully trusted with your mind—all humans are fallible, including me.

I was raised in a Fundamentalist Christian home. My parents were missionaries, zealous enough that they deliberately chose the most difficult fields, so that sect’s thought patterns were forcibly inculcated into me from birth. Even as a child, from as far back as I can remember, I had intellectual problems with it. I couldn’t understand why they thought the Earth was a little over 6,000 years old when all the evidence showed the contrary. I was boggled by Joshua causing the Sun to stand still, or by God drowning humanity like unwanted puppies—“Where the heck did all that water go?” I remember asking myself. Worse than the science was the ethics: a Bible in which God ordered genocide and offered a legal method to rape female prisoners of war. I would bring such things up and get soundly put down for my lack of faith, or even spanked for my audacity—often by people who were not even my parents. Yet I not only stayed in the faith, I became a pastor who taught it.

For years afterward I couldn’t figure out why I did that. I knew better. I was constantly struggling, always questioning, almost continuously in trouble. Recently I came to realize that it was my autistic tendencies that did me in. Like most autistic people, I like order; I embrace rules, because they offer peace of mind that in a chaotic world you are doing the right thing—and very few groups have more rules than Fundamentalist Baptists. And autistic people are constantly seeking social scripts to get along with others. I discovered that if I adopted the rules and beliefs of the Baptists around me, I got along better with them; if I not only adopted them but taught them eloquently, I was admired. I became one of the cool kids. Oh, the doubts were still there—but I was used to neurotypicals not making sense, so I just assumed that here too, in the area of theology, I was the one who was wrong. So, just like the generations upon generations of scientists who wasted their lives trying to prop up Aristotle’s misbegotten ideas, I too wasted most of my life, and a fair portion of my fortune, upon a faith I never stopped questioning. Why? Because I failed to listen to my own conscience, which kept nagging me, “But—what if I’m right to question this stuff?” It is okay to question, and sometimes the most difficult path leads to the most personal growth.

Seeing Through Another’s Eyes

To weigh what is “good” in a hard situation, you have to engage the perspectives that differ from your own. I believe it is in Aristotle’s Ethics that he says something like this: each person judges well what they know and is thus a good critic of those things; to be a critic of some specific thing, one must be educated in it, but to be a critic in general, one must be educated about everything. The willingness to engage a different perspective in an educated manner puts you in contact with a wide range of people.

To see things from their perspective is a wondrous and often dizzying thing. To look upon the Sahara and see it as a Bedouin does; to watch the rise and fall of the stock market and have your heart race as a trader’s does; to see the world and all its hazy, ill-defined threats as a traumatized person does—each of these is a small piece in the mosaic of humanity. It is the essence of humility and compassion to be willing to peer through another person’s eyes, even if only briefly. It requires us to set aside our own biases and assumptions and to approach others with an open mind, and in a world that so often seems divided and polarized, this kind of perspective-taking is more important than ever.

Defending Truth in Practice

Critical thinking is not blanket cynicism or endless doubt. It is a deliberate loyalty to evidence and reason over comfort, tribe, or certainty. It is a refusal to be rushed by urgency or flattered by alignment.

The world doesn’t need more self-proclaimed “critical thinkers.” It needs more people who actually pause and question—especially when it’s uncomfortable, and especially when it challenges their own side.

Start small: The next time your emotion rises and your thumb hovers over “share,” pick just one of these questions and pursue it honestly. One honest pause can interrupt the cycle of manipulation. Because the highest cost isn’t being wrong in the moment—it’s carrying a falsehood forward and paying for it later.

See also: Essays · A Sojourner’s Compass · Sojournism: Full Documentation

Part of the Triad of Stewardship’s Standalone Essays. Companion pieces: Forgiveness and Its Limits (forthcoming) · The Mandates of Conflict · Criminal Justice.