Only a few days ago I was charged with "splitting hairs" during a theological discussion. My fellow dialoguer did not seem to apprehend or comprehend the difference between doing so and merely exercising appropriate intellectual care. Actually, I would probably have been further accused of splitting hairs had I thoroughly defined the difference between that and using careful definitions and asking what someone means by their phrases.
People can be very careless with what they mean when they say various things. Below I have some examples of issues that I have debated people about where the truth about reality greatly changes depending on which understanding is correct--caution in deciphering which conclusions logically follow from preceding premises is thus called for.
For instance, does God have foreknowledge of future events or does he directly cause them?
Foreknowledge or causation? The answer makes no minor difference. The former enables God to know the future, but the latter makes God the direct cause of everything--and that includes every act of evil. The latter makes God entirely responsible for every act of human sin and for every human heart that rejects God. This makes God the ultimate obstacle to human salvation and sanctification, not human pride, unwillingness, or ignorance.
When we say God is good, do we mean that a standard of goodness exists external to God and he happens to be good by aligning with this standard or that he IS good and that good is part of his immutable nature?
If God just happens to be good because of some happenstance alignment with an outside standard of morality, then he is not inherently good and thus could hypothetically be evil. If he is good by his very nature, however, then it is futile and irrational to reject or morally criticize any moral ideas legitimately originating from God because there is no such thing as another standard of morality to appeal to.
Related to this, does the Bible define morality or does it reveal it?
The former means that if the Bible is true and it had happened to say that rape is good but any use of alcohol is sinful (the exact inverse of what it teaches about these two things), then we must accept this. According to the latter, though, the Bible does not arbitrarily "make" something true but serves as a method by which God simply reveals how things already are. This means that the Bible, and by extension God, does not randomly present morals that we arbitrarily are told to follow but informs us of moral facts that exist objectively and independent of our preferences and awareness.
Are all sins equal or are all sins evil but some are objectively more depraved?
Again, this is no small matter. The former, if true, means that we have no basis for condemning things like rape, serial murder, and the slave trade with greater vehemence and urgency than we condemn a moment of jealousy or the theft of a penny. The latter means that we have a moral obligation to punish some sins more severely than others as Mosaic Law does and that trying to ontologically equate sexual abuse to a remark said in an arrogant tone is a heinous abomination. According to the former, it is unjust and logically and morally wrong to distinguish between any evil as "worse" than any other sin.
Is all killing murder or are some killings morally obligatory?
If valid, the former means that every time God legislated for humans to impose the death penalty for something like kidnapping or murder he was in moral contradiction, commanding us to not kill while explicitly and repeatedly instructing us to do so--ultimately meaning God commanded people to sin. The latter means that it is just to execute people according to the guidelines in God's ethical revelation and unjust not to do so in certain circumstances.
Is it lust to look at a married person and find him or her attractive, or is lust something else?
The former means that the vast majority of people are unable to not sin simply due to the nature of their instinctual aesthetic judgments. The latter means that some churches have been oppressing innocent thoughts for decades and that something Christians are hesitant to acknowledge as non-sinful is not wrong. Some people may object that defining "lust" precisely is "splitting hairs", but it is not so. Do we discover what the Bible objectively means by use of the word or do we leave it to our subjective preferences and perceptions to arrive at conflicting definitions as we then condemn others for violating what subjectively seems wrong to us.
These issues I mentioned are extremely important to comprehend with clarity and specificity. As I demonstrated, the options available for each topic do not result in minor theological and moral differences. Depending on the correct answer, much of reality is different than it otherwise would have been. There may be people who gratuitously split hairs, but defining positions and words carefully is crucial, not optional--as is knowing the exact differences between the content and veracity of one position on a matter versus that of another. When people say "The Bible tells us what is right and wrong", do they mean that any moral teaching God just happened to put in the Bible became good or that God revealed through the Bible how morality already is? When they say "God is good", do they mean that he happens to be good because he acts in synch with a higher standard or because he IS good? Their explanations will unveil much about their worldviews.
We need to remain alert when we realize that these answers do not "split hairs" but make all the difference.
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