Discernment

The strangely ill-advised notion of a federal Disinformation Governance Board came to a merciful end this week—thankfully, at least for now.

As Americans, we cherish our First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech and the press, and tend to oppose anything that even vaguely appears to threaten them. Furthermore, as has been expressed far and wide in response to this oddly-timed proposal, we rightly view it as our role as citizens to critique the government of this Republic—not vice versa.

One of the ways the Greek rhetors of old used to classify arguments was under the headings of ethos, pathos, and logos.¹ Ethos referred to character and credibility: arguments appealing to one’s reputation, standing, experience, expertise, and trustworthiness. ² Pathos referred to longings, drives, appetites—and what we today call emotions. Logos had to do mainly with facts and reasoning.

Read the series.

As we see in passages such as Hebrews 5:14, biblical discernment involves exercising the skill of seeing the differences between good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, true vs. false, and more important vs. less important.

But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (ESV, Heb 5:14)

Intellectual dishonesty takes many forms. One of the most common occurs when we look at the collection of arguments someone is making to support a claim, select the weakest among them, ignore the rest, and respond as though the weakest support is the only support.

Often, mockery follows. We heap scorn on the whole claim, emphasizing the absurdity of the one weak supporting idea.