#STRask - What Tools of Reasoning Help You Know What’s True, Right, and Good?

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Question about what tools of reasoning help us determine whether something is true or false, right or wrong, good or bad before bringing Scripture into it.   How do you determine whether something is true or false, whether an action is right or wrong, or whether something is good or bad? Before you bring in Scripture, what tools of reasoning help you recognize these categories in daily life?

All right, welcome back. We are glad you're listening because otherwise we'd be doing this for nothing. Morning, Amy. Good morning, Greg. All right. Here's a question from Casey. A friend was asked to explain, how do you determine whether something is true or false? How do you determine whether an action is right or wrong? How do you determine whether something is good or bad?

Before you bring in scripture, what tools or reasoning help you recognize those categories in daily life? Well, there's a couple of different issues here. One is true or false. That's facts that are non-moral in consequence and facts that are moral in consequence. And what we're trying to do when we are asking whether a thing is true or not is we're asking whether the claim or the belief or the idea in question matches the way the world is itself. So this matching of the claim with the world is the relationship that is called a truth relationship. So if I say it's raining outside and it is raining outside, then my statement

is a true statement because my statement matches the way the world actually is that I'm making a claim about. If I say grass is green and there's the grass and it's green, then my statement is true. If I say that there's no elephant in the room and there isn't, then that's a true statement. And I mean, it's a very simple way of putting it. Aristotle put it this way. If you say that it is and it is, or you say that it isn't and it isn't, then that's true. And if you say that it is and it isn't, or that it isn't and it is, then that's false. So that's a garden variety definition of truth. You don't even need to hear from Aristotle. You could have said that yourself. everybody knows what they mean when they use the word true or false.

So the question is, how do we know if a thing is true or false in two categories, statements, beliefs, or whatever, and in morality? And the simplest way, it seems to me, to answer those questions is to, I mean, the question has to do with what tools of thinking do. we employ? Well, I guess one of those is observation. That's not a tool of thinking. It is something that we are physically doing, but it's a way we determine true things about the visible world or the world that we have access through in our senses. We have to attend. We have to pay attention. Is grass green? I don't know. Let me look. Is there an elephant in the room? I don't see one.

And so just in a very simple way, we can use our faculties, our empirical faculties, our five senses, to determine whether a whole host of things are true or false. Now, by the way, some of this applies to even spiritual things, because even though the spiritual thing is in question, it is sometimes our physical faculties that allow us to draw certain conclusions. I know that there's mailmen, for example, because I know there's a mail system, and there's a mailbox, and every day there's new stuff in it. When I take that out, there's new stuff that goes in it, and I know a little bit about the system. Therefore, I can infer the reality of a mailman delivering the mail, even though I never see a nail, a nail man. A mailman. I've never seen a nail man. I've seen a lot of them. I was a carpenter for a while. I was a nail man for a while. So my point is simply that the ability to use our physical faculties, our five senses,

allow us to draw all kinds of conclusions if we are paying attention to the circumstances, not just about immediate things that we see, but allow us to conclude from the physical evidence the reality of other things that we don't actually see. All right. So that's one way. And arguments for God's existence and the resurrection, one of the best arguments for the resurrection has nothing to do with any reference to the miraculous.

It's looking at circumstances that are not miraculous, a dead man on a cross, buried than an empty tomb three days later, then people who say they saw things and had their lives radically changed as a result of what they thought they saw. and then the question becomes, what's the best explanation for all the details, and the explanation turns out to be that Jesus rose from the dead. So there's a lot you can do with the basic empirical stuff. Now, when it comes to morality, though, you're not dealing with things that you can see. That is, the moral quality of actions is not something that's physical. The action might be physical so you can have a man forces itself upon a woman in some

fashion. That's just a physical thing. But to make the assessment that this is an immoral sexual assault, that's a different matter. Now, it sounded to me like the appeal, one of it was you can't use the Bible to make these assessments. Before you bring in scripture, what tools are reasoning help you recognize these categories? Well, the tool in this case, case, and actually the reasoning tool and the tool, in other words, the reasoning tool that allows you to draw accurate inferences, even from physical stuff, and this would be the mailman, for example, or an anthropology. My daughter is really interested in archaeology, and so she was just telling me about how they found something at a dig that had all the evidences of

of human interaction. It was an artifact then, but it had to do with details so you could infer things. All of that is using rational capacities, rational capabilities, that are not themselves physical. The fact that we can make inferences, well, if there's this and this, then this, it seems that what follows is this, that's an inferential pattern that requires. a rational faculty. You're not going to see that in the stuff.

Even David Hume would, was a skeptic about certain aspects of causation because just because you see a billiard ball roll forward, contact another billiard ball, and that billiard ball move, the second one moves, you can't say that one cause the other because you can't see cause, you just see moving objects. Now, to me, that's extreme, because I think we have the ability to infer causal relationships by things that we see. But the point I'm making is, even inference, that's a rational quality or capability that we have. We have to draw on an unseen, immaterial faculty of the soul, not the brain. This isn't a faculty of the brain. It's something the soul does. And when it comes

to morality, we are drawing from a different faculty, our ability to see the difference between right and wrong. Even without scripture, we can see that. Francis Schaefer made the point that all human beings go through moral motions. Now, this is a little bit abstract. He's saying we have a formal capability to talk as if some things are right, some things are wrong. We all do this. That's what he called moral motions. But not only is there this kind of formal moral motions, we also have the material content of morality that we all seem to be aware of.

And C.S. Lewis has a chronicle in one of his books, The Abolition of Man, I think, in an appendix of all of these things that all human beings have acknowledged to be either vices or virtues. Courage is considered by everybody to be of virtue. Every culture. No culture thinks that cowardice is good, for example, and he's got a whole list of those. So we don't need to read a Bible to know that. What the Bible does is explains why we know what we know. It says the law is written on our hearts, that we have a conscience.

Now, that conscience is not inviolable, and that is it doesn't always give us perfectly accurate information, but because we're fallen and because we have other motivations to deny what we deep down inside know to be right. And so, but those are factors. And so the whole process, sometimes the process of moral assessment is easy. And people do it all the time. Here's what they say, that ain't right. Very simple. They're not philosophers or not theologians or not biblical scholars.

They just look and say, that ain't right. That's unfair. That's unjust. You shouldn't be doing that kind of thing. Shouldn't treat people that way. It's not fair. You know, a whole bunch of different words come out of their mouths that are moral assessment type words that, in many cases, accurately identify the moral qualities there because we have

a faculty that allows us to see that. And I'm using the word see here in terms of a perception, but not a physical sight. It is a perception, though. In fact, we use the language. Can't you just see that that's wrong? We'll say things like that. You listen to people's language, and you'll see that there are lots of different things that are quite obvious to the rank and file about morality. They get it right away.

Now, other times it's more complex because it seems like you have competing elements. Should human beings have freedom? Yeah, I think freedom is moral good. Well, should a woman have the freedom than to end her pregnancy? That's freedom. Well, what do you mean, enter pregnancy? Well, I mean, you know, terminate the pregnancy. Well, what does that mean?

Well, it means an abortion. Yeah, but what does that mean? Well, that means killing the thing that's growing in there. Well, what is that that's growing in there? Well, it's something. Yeah, it is something growing. It's a human being. There's a line of thinking that gets you to that conclusion.

So now you're asking, not does a woman have a right, have the, should she have the freedom to end her pregnancy, but should she have the freedom to kill another innocent human being? Oh, well, now when they put it in very clear terms, now the moral element maybe is going to shift for people. Just the freedom to act, remove a piece of tissue, if that's all it is, what's wrong with that? But if that tissue is not just tissue, it is a human being that the mother is producing, oh, that changes things.

I want to bring this up to say that sometimes the moral questions are not as obvious because the language isn't clear. And sometimes people, I think, purposely work to make the language unclear because they want what they want. And so they don't want others to see what's actually happening. The abortion issues are a clear example, but there's more like that. And so euphemistic words are used to characterize otherwise immoral behavior. The Third Reich did this all the time, all the time. And the left does it all the time here. In the left world, why does it all the time?

You know, the communist countries, they do all of these things, and it's all to promote the good, or so they say, and on the surface it looks good to the common person. but when they get all the facts and they see the whole thing, then they realize that, well, that wasn't good. That was actually bad. So all to say that moral decision-making, moral assessment is sometimes more complicated. And just like with physical assessments, we have to look very closely. We have to assess things, and we have to look at all of the circumstances to find out what is true about that.

But in both cases, we are drawing on faculties that are faculties of the soul. The philosophers call them intuitions. And intuition in this sense is something that you have, that you don't know how you have. You know, but you don't know how you know it. It's built in. And those intuitions can be sharpened, be made more effective if we use them more. But if we don't use them, I'm not very observant. So my wife says, did you see this thing there?

I said, no, I didn't see anything, man. But it was there, but I didn't observe it. She's very much more observant than I am. So those are how some of these things work together, I think. And the more that we sharpen, the more that we are attending to either process, the more, the moral or the non-moral, you know, whether the facts about the world, the more we're attend to those things carefully, the better we're going to. get at, as one of my philosopher mentors said, increasing our store of true facts and decreasing our true beliefs, rather, and decreasing our store of false beliefs. Now, notice that in both cases, whether we're talking about true and false or good and bad,

we're starting with facts and then we're reasoning from those facts. So when it comes to things in the world or philosophical things, you're starting with things you know to be true, like you're observing something in reality or you're thinking about cause and effect or you're thinking about something we observe. And then you're reasoning from that to come to all sorts of conclusions. And the same thing is true for right and wrong. As you said, we have a faculty. We're able to perceive certain moral facts. And then we reason from those. We put those facts together in ways that are wise. And then we come to a conclusion. But I think it's worth noting here that you have to start with certain moral

facts. You cannot reason to murder is wrong. I don't think that's possible no matter what you say because you can't say, well, our society does better. Well, why is that better? Why is it not better for me to do better and have what I want? So there's actually the moral things that we perceive are not things that we can reason to. We either see them or we don't. We can't reason just from mere physical facts, is what you're saying. You can't go from an is to an ought. You have to start with moral categories

and you have to have the right ends. Because you can reason, let's say your end is, I want to be the richest person in the world. Well, your moral reasoning, leading up to that, if that's your goal, if that's what you think is the highest moral good, then you're going to come to different conclusions then if your highest moral good is something, say, the Bible says is the highest moral good. So whatever your ends are, your reasoning towards getting there will bring you to different

conclusions. And I think this is partly where the Bible does come in because there are things that the Bible explains about what the end is and what we're shooting for that we need to know if we're going to reason the right moral way. Now, a lot of times you can, there are things that are good that we don't see our good until someone shows it to us. Yeah. So the more basic moral good, like murder, the easier it is to see. And this is what you were explaining with abortion.

Murder wouldn't be the moral good. No, murder is wrong. It's easier to see that. But as you reason, just like as you reason from in math problems, 2 plus 2 is pretty easy to see. whereas calculus is less easy and you have to think more carefully about it. The same thing is true for certain moral things, that it took people a long time to figure out. But once you see it, then it seems obvious, even though it took a while to put it all together. So without the Bible, we wouldn't know what end we were shooting for.

And there are some basic things we might not have known, although I think when they're revealed, we can see that they're good. They're just harder to see than other things, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, of course. There's a process that's involved. But both, all of this requires, I made reference to this earlier, but it requires a soul. And the reason is, is because all of the things we're talking about is a process, a rational process, a moral process that entails propositional thinking. and putting pieces together, so to speak. But notice that all of these pieces that we're putting together,

though they may be introduced to us by some physical element that we see, all of the work is being done mentally. And your brain doesn't do mental work. Your brain is just molecules. It's all gray matter. It does chemical work. It doesn't do thought work. It doesn't do propositional work.

It doesn't do values work. Now, it may work certain parts of your brain may work with your soul when you're contemplating these ideas. People can take a look at the brain and see certain parts of the brain light up, you know. But when you're contemplating moral issues. But it's interesting, they don't know.

Nobody who's doing the brain analysis, the brain scan, knows that you're thinking about a moral issue and that's why that's lighting up, unless you tell them. You have to tell them that's what you're thinking of, and that's how they map the brain out in terms of its areas of activity that correspond with certain mental activity

because you have people telling them what's going on while these parts of the brain are lighting up. It's not self-explanatory. Oh, let's just look at the brain. Oh, I know what they're taking about here. The thoughts aren't in the brain. Parts of the brain are being used by the soul to do this work. And I want to underscore this one other point that you brought up, and that is you can't just look at something and get a description of the behavior and then come to the conclusion that the behavior is wrong.

That's called the naturalistic fallacy. So what if I said abortion takes the life of an innocent human being, therefore abortion is wrong? Well, wait a minute. I'm missing something. First premise there is a description of what happens. but the conclusion is a conclusion about the morality of what happens. That particular way of putting it is not adequate. I've got to start with a moral statement.

It's wrong to take the life of an innocent human being. Then abortion takes the life of an innocent human being, therefore abortion is wrong. So I'm able to combine the moral claim of the first premise with the factual claim of the second to come up with the conclusion that also has a moral claim. If you don't have a moral claim in place to begin with, you can never come to a moral conclusion. And this is David Hume, a naturalistic fallacy, and he's right on this particular point. You can't just look at something and then from the thing conclude that it's wrong. Unless you already have in your mind the moral rule that applies in the circumstance that you see taking place. And where is that moral rule come from?

It doesn't come from the physical facts. It's got to come from somewhere else. And this, now you can see how this begins to form into an argument for a transcendent moral law giver. If it's just molecules in motion, if everything's merely descriptive, this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and that's the atheistic universe, you're never going to get a moral conclusion out of that. That's why the consistent atheist has got to be someone who rejects objective morality. But we know better. That's why everybody complains about the problem of evil. They know something's wrong with the world. Well, where'd they get that knowledge?

Well, it's not coming from the nature of the world. It's coming from somewhere else that one is using, is comparing the nature of the world to that sense of how things ought to be to come to the conclusion. Things are not the way they ought to be. Well, thanks, Casey. You obviously asked a question that took up our entire time. I always love it. There are so many aspects to that. And if you've been thinking about a question yourself, please send it to it.

us on X with the hashtag SDR ask. And you can always go to our website, STR.org. And all you have to do is just look for our hashtag STRask podcast page. And you'll find a link there to send us your question. And we really do depend on your questions. So we'd love to hear from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason. Thank you.