The Blog

By exposing inadequate justifications for beliefs, a seeker of truth can better find adequate justifications.

This is what an apologist does.

An apologist is someone who shows how good reason and evidence support or contradict a particular belief.

The Socratic approach helps students realize at least three things:

1. Any teaching – religious or otherwise – is worth trusting only if it points to the truth. Believing error can have deadly consequences, both temporally and (if any one of a number of religious teachings are true) eternally as well. To understand what is truth, read previous post.
2. Many beliefs that people hold today are not supported by evidence. They are held by subjective preferences. People almost always arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of truth but on the basis of what they find attractive. But truth is not a subjective matter of taste – it’s an objective matter of fact.
3. Finally, in order to find truth, one must be ready to give up those subjective preferences in favor of objective facts. And facts are best discovered through logic, evidence, and sciences. If you are unsure whether truth can be known, read previous post.

In the next post, we will discuss different types of logic – Western and Eastern.