Critical thinking

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, […] who correctly handles the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)

When what someone says can be interpreted in multiple ways, we are in danger of coming to an understanding which is different to their intended message.

From television stories to personal experiences, we live in a world where honesty seems to be an increasingly rare commodity and suspicion and scepticism become protective shields.

In scientific research, sampling is the primary method used when research cannot be conducted on a one-to-one scale. The facts discovered at the level of the sample are presumed to apply in general.

In our everyday lives we ​​often resort to simply repeating what has been said or done before. But not everything that is old is authentic or correct. When we refer to tradition with full confidence that the way it was understood and acted on in the past is self-evident, we are committing the logical error of appealing to tradition, or false induction.

From an early age I learned, from the advice of adults or from my own experiences—and sometimes the hard way—the relationship between cause and effect. It's simple: if you touch the hot oven door, you’ll get burned! Subsequently, I discovered that there are a multitude of pressing uncertainties all around us in daily life. To figure out what actually causes the things that...

Western societies pride themselves on their access to information. Compared to our predecessors, we seem to be the most informed generation to have ever lived on Earth. However, paradoxically, the more data we have access to, the harder it is to determine what is true and what is false.

The biased sample is a kind of unrepresentative sample, either for quantitative reasons (as is the case with the too-small sample), or for qualitative ones, when its structure does not represent the structure of the real population that is the object of the research.

Almost a century ago, writer Virginia Woolf noticed people’s tendency to approach books “with clouded and divided minds, asking fiction to be true, poetry to be false, biographies to be flattering and history to chime with prejudices.”

A few years ago, the American Statistical Association carried out research on the history of statistics, tracing their use throughout the course of human society’s development. The results of the study are displayed in the form of a chart called the Timeline of statistics, available on the association's website.

Conspiracy theories and fake news are not the same thing, although the two categories have much in common.

"Intelligent, scientifically trained people no longer believe (or can no longer believe) in God."

In practice, people often accuse each other of making logical errors, but sometimes the accusation is false. Such an accusation is made by someone who does not understand what logical fallacies are and how they work, or by a manipulative person who takes advantage of the ignorance of those in the first category.

By their very complexity, situational moral decisions demonstrate that there is an absolute good that we seek. Moral principles work together for the absolute good.

What we think about ourselves, over time, becomes our reality. This is a good enough reason to identify thinking errors left running in the background and to seek out strategies for healthier thinking.