What is cause and effect in logical reasoning

dms1972 said:

I want to understand this better

Hal Lindsay has written : "When Hegel introduced the philosophical basis for relative thinking and rejected absolutes, he literally altered the future course of the world. Absolutes are unchangeable truths from which you can reason from cause to effect. In relative thinking you are dealing with subjective thought in which cause and effect have no part."

What does he mean: "Absolutes are unchangable truths from which you can reason from cause to effect." Is he talking about syllogisms?

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No. A syllogism is drawing a conclusion from two true statements. The conclusion may or may not be correct. For example, "All men have brains. All humans have brains. Therefore, all humans are men."

Satan hates absolutes. He promoted the idea that if you believe it, it is true - to you. This predates the current insanity that if a truth does not conform to the prevailing PC lunacy, then it is not true. So utter confusion reins. We are told we must believe the science when it comes to evolution and climate change. When it comes to gender, biology goes out the window. God's word says that He created male and female. The world says, no, it's whatever the person decides that they prefer to be.This is obviously absurd, so much so that it is illegal to try and talk kids out of gender change in some countries.

God is the God of absolutes. There is, for example, the principle of sowing and reaping. Satan started the rot in Eden. He cast doubt on God's word. God told Adam that there are consequences to eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Satan cast doubt on God's word and therefore God's integrity. Satan undermines morality by saying that sleeping around is a pleasure and there are no consequences. Countless lives have been destroyed by this fallacy.

Jesus said that He is the only way to God. That is an absolute. We can draw the conclusion that we must accept Christ in order to come to God. Relative thinking rejects this. How many times have you heard that it does not matter what you believe as long as you are sincere? That has got countless people killed.

dms1972 said:

The premises in your example should be:

All humans have brains
All men are human
Therefore all men have brains.

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Duh. Any two statements used to produce a conclusion is a syllogism. The conclusion may not be correct. It's a technique sometimes used to mock and show the foolishness of a statement.

dms1972 said:

I want to understand this better

Hal Lindsay has written : "When Hegel introduced the philosophical basis for relative thinking and rejected absolutes, he literally altered the future course of the world. Absolutes are unchangeable truths from which you can reason from cause to effect. In relative thinking you are dealing with subjective thought in which cause and effect have no part."

What does he mean: "Absolutes are unchangable truths from which you can reason from cause to effect." Is he talking about syllogisms?

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I first had to find the source of this quote for Lindsey because even though I've read the "Late Great Planet Earth" long ago, the quote you've cited seems to have come from another book -- Hal Lindsey with C.C. Carlson, Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, p. 86.

Anyway, knowing that Hal Lindsey has been known as an older style Dispensationalist, my guess is that he's also a Foundationalist where epistemology is concerned, and in valuing the importance of how he conceives "cause and effect," he likely has taken umbrage with Hegel's dialetical method of bringing "new facts" from a synthesis of theses and their anti-theses. This makes the affirming and stating of truth more of a kind of emergent property of thought rather one that comes from building from axioms and other apriori intuitions which may be thought of as absolute. Dispensationalists aren't the only Christians who criticize Hegel in this way; those in the Reformed tradition often do too. [Of course, I think you already know this, but I'm stating all this here in the hope that it offers a little more clarity...]

If Lindsey thinks that 'truth' is a product of Foundationalistic building in thought, then it's clear to see why he has criticized philosophers like Hegel. I don't necessarily fully agree with Lindsey in this evaluation, but Lindsey thinks what he thinks.

As for Hegel's dialectical method and what this means for his view on "cause and effect," we can see he thought---and not so clearly for us, and maybe even a bit weirdly---that:



G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, Trans., A.V.Miller, Humanities Press, New York, 1976

dms1972 said:

Thankyou for your reply 2Philovoid.

I apologise for not providing a reference in my OP, yes that is the book it was from.

I think what Lindsey says is a lot like something Francis Schaeffer said about Truth and Antithesis.

Schaeffer wrote that : "Truth in the sense of antithesis, is related to the idea of cause and effect . Cause and effect produces a chain reaction which goes straight on a horizontal line. With the coming of Hegel this changed." (from The God Who Is There Ch.2)

I did read a bit of Hegel years ago. I think my own worldview was influenced by what I read of him.

I just am not sure I understand Schaeffer or Lindsay at this point in what they are saying. Because of where I am at at the moment I am trying to avoid a "chain reaction" in my thinking!

I am not sure how typical Schaeffer is of reformed thinkers. There has been critiques of Schaeffer at this point also - for instance from Greg Bahnsen. I know Bahnsen is more of a Van Tillian. What I don't know is how truly reflective of the Bible or Reformed Theology any of these thinkers are.

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Some aspects of this present conversation are referring back to some the same ones that you and I touched upon over 4 years ago in a previous thread you posted:

Francis Schaeffer on Heg

The thing is in all of this, where epistemology is concerned, especially if and when we refer to and read and adapt from modern philosophers, we're not really dealing with the epistemology that Jesus and His Apostles, Paul, or any other early first century disciples were working with. And this recognition is the case for us now, I think, whether we're speaking of and engaging with Schaeffer, Hegel, Bahnsen, Van Til, Hal Lindsay ..... or whoever.

This isn't to say that we can't engage each of these thinkers as they've tried to wrestle with the problem of grounding and/or integrating their epistemic notions with their Christian faith as best they can today, but I think we we need to realize that in being 2,000 years removed from what we might call "the original epistemic state of Christian faith," where we are at now isn't going to allow us to "enter into" the same, identical epistemic mindset of New Testament believers.

All of the above partially provides some of the reason why I say that I'm an existentialist (ala Pascalian or Kierkegaardian type reflection, with a dash of Sartre and Sagan) rather than an Idealist (such as Hegel). However, this isn't to say that some aspects of Hegel's thought aren't serviceable for me. Some of them are, and I think where the current position(s) of Philosophical Hermeneutics is concerned, the idea of the "Fusion of Horizons" idea is adapted from Hegel, being filtered, so to speak, through Heideggar or Gadamar or Ricoeur, or other more recent PH type scholars).