The Fallacious Mind

I was told a few days ago that a certain act is immoral--because, according to those I argued with, if it was wasn't immoral, more people would do it in the presence of others!  As a result of this laughably unsound argument, I began to contemplate the nature of a fallacious mind.  When I mentioned that agreement does not affect moral truths, my two ideological opponents told me that the point was not debatable.  I protested--because they were objectively in logical error.  I did this not only because reason proves my objections correct; I did this because were the issue at hand abortion or some other important topic to today's moral debates, these people would very likely have immediately affirmed that consensus does not determine moral truths.  Fallacies are errors in reasoning; a fallacious mind is one that uses or believes fallacies; therefore the people I conversed with had fallacious minds.

Just as others have asked what makes otherwise moral people lapse into evil behaviors, I now ask what makes otherwise sound people collapse into fallacies?  What produces this cognitive dissonance that can go undetected by the very people experiencing it?  The fallacious mind is disconnected from reality; it is intellectually diseased at the most fundamental, basic level.  It has exchanged truth for error, actually believing its own demonstrably false delusions.  To do so it must try to extinguish or flee from the light offered by consistency and reason.  Of course, consistency [1] and reason still have authority even where unacknowledged--nothing can stymie them.  Reason is self-evident despite denial [2].  The erroneous assumptions, claims, contradictions, and stupidity of individuals who do not grasp this do not affect or alleviate this truth.  Refusing to confront actual reality, the fallacious mind has succumbed to identifiable errors.  Reason, which I am using synonymously with the word logic in this case, is the great light, the source of knowledge that illuminates the pockets of truth we can discover with other things like sensory perceptions [3], divine revelation [4], and general experience.

The fact that people can align themselves with reason or refrain from doing so means that people can indeed, within certain boundaries, actively resist reason.  Some people take this to signify that reason itself is unreliable, but this represents a self-refuting misrepresentation of what actually takes place when people reject reason--after all, if reason is unreliable then we could never have any basis for claiming it is unreliable!  Logic still exists and is reliable by pure necessity.  From the standpoint of Christian theology, just because the Fall darkened the human intellect by enabling humans to come to false conclusions and succumb to fallacies does not mean that reason itself lost its innate reliability, a thing impossible to come about.

But the fallacious mind, at best, suppresses this knowledge or tries to evade it; at worst, it loses its desire or ability to recognize truth as real and falsities as the lies they are.  It has an inner condition that I neither can relate to nor understand beyond mental awareness of its nature and its results.  Such a mind serves as an example of the contradictions that one lapses into when one deviates from the illumination of reason.  Compartmentalized surrender to fallacies can be very damaging as well despite its more limited range of errors, for a person who remains sound in some areas yet resorts to fallacies in others may have great difficulty realizing this disparity.

There is only one hope for the fallacious mind--that it recognize its intellectual blindness, whether this be by its own internal reflection or with the assistance of divine intervention (not that one excludes the other).  What causes otherwise sound people to become selectively fallacious?  Nothing more than their own fantasies and delusions.  The fallacious mind can seem a lost cause; a wholly fallacious mind is a thing incorrigible, useless, and deeply frustrating to those who seek truth.


[1].  Consistency alone does not mean something is true.  I could invent my own false religion tomorrow and make it internally consistent, but that would not change its lack of veracity; it would still be false regardless of its consistency with its own tenets.  However, if a belief is true it MUST be consistent internally and with external truths.

[2].  See here:
A.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-self-evidence-of-logic.html
B.  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-error-of-presuppositions.html

[3].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-reliability-of-senses.html

[4].  No matter what people say, reason is what ultimately enables us to understand a religious text like the Bible to begin with.  Some information needs to be revealed by God in order for humans to access it (example: truths about his character), but reason is what allows us to correctly interpret and comprehend the Bible.