In this episode Trent offers some ways to respond to critics who say sophisticated arguments for the Faith are nothing but “word salad.”
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Do you like talking to strangers on the internet about something that is important to you, but maybe controversial? Neither do I, but sometimes it’s important to talk about these things. Even with strangers we meet on the internet, but sometimes even when we talk with friends and family, they can be very dismissive towards well thought out views that we might have on a controversial issue, whether it’s the existence of God, the catholic faith, catholic moral teaching… So in today’s episode, I want to talk about what do you do when someone claims you’re peddling word salad. When someone claims that what you’re saying is just nonsense and they don’t even bother to point out why it’s nonsense. That’s what I want to talk about today here on the Counsel of Trent podcast. For those of you who aren’t familiar, my name is Trent Horn, Catholic Answers, apologist and speaker.
Trent Horn:
I think this problem arises in discourse, especially on important subjects. The existence of God, whether we have a soul, whether we have free will. I think this happens because in modern society, people want things to be very accessible, all right? You don’t want to read a long journal article. You go and watch a Ted talk, for example. You don’t want to read a book chapter, it’s way easier if you can read an infographic or a summary of something. People want things to be made very accessible and very simple for them. And if it isn’t made accessible or simple, they may blame the other person to say, “You don’t really know what you’re talking about, because if you did, it would be completely accessible and simple to me. But since it isn’t, I bet you’re just trying to con me. And so I’m not even going to bother listen”.
Trent Horn:
And here’s the thing. There is a kernel of truth in this criticism. Let’s say you try to share an argument for the existence of God, a well thought out argument. You may try to put it online, for example. People might say “That’s just a bunch of word salad”. Have you ever heard that before? That’s just word salad. I don’t have to respond to it. But in order for us to respond to that objection, I think we need to be fair because it could be easy to say, “Trent, just let them go. Jesus said, don’t throw pearls before swine. Some people are uncouth. They don’t believe in the intellectual life, so if you try to bring them an intellectual argument, you’re casting pearls before swine. Why would you even bother?” And the reason that I bother quote unquote, is because “God loves that person. God wants that person to have eternal life, to know him, to be freed from their sins”.
Trent Horn:
I want to share aspects of my Catholic faith with people. And the other problem, by the way, not just the people want things to be accessible and simple, but that what we talk about in our faith, the deepest elements of our faith, the existence of God, the nature of the self, what it means to survive bodily death, how are we to live, how do we live an ethical life. These are big questions that philosophers have thought about and pondered for centuries, and in doing so, some of the issues when objections are raised, they can get down to very sophisticated ways of articulating distinctions on these issues. They can be sophisticated in order to present the best case possible. So when people say, “It’s got to be introductory level to me, or I’m not going to listen to it”, that’s hard.
Trent Horn:
If the topic being discussed, let’s say, the nature of the Trinity, for example. How can God be one God and also exists as three persons? There are different ways of articulating that, and it does become complicated. But just because something’s complicated, doesn’t mean that it’s false. It always does irritate me when someone puts forward a good solid argument for a position and it might be complex, and the other person just hand waves that away and says, “That’s just word salad. I don’t have to listen to that”. So, what I want to talk about in today’s episode is how do we charitably respond to this kind of attitude? It’s not always word salad, but there’s this idea that if you can’t explain it simply, maybe it’s not really a good argument. Here is a clip from the atheist YouTuber Stephen Woodward, I believe this is Woodford. Stephen Woodford and his channel Rationality Rules. In this clip, Woodford is criticizing the catholic philosopher Edward Feser’s Argument from Motion for the Existence of God, because it has 50 premises, and Woodford thinks that makes it overly complicated, so it doesn’t actually work.
Stephen Woodford:
It’s, what I call in the book, a purely actual actualizer, or an unchanging changer, or an unmoving mover, or an uncaused cause, or a non-contingent contingency, etc. It’s pretty much all the same. Now, Feser’s rendition of this argument is composed of 49 premises. Yeah, I’m serious, 49. But Aquinas’s was much more in line with most arguments, being four. You know, Einstein put it best, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”, as did John Adams, when he said, “Mystery”, and in this case, a billion premises, “is a convenient excuse for absurdity”.
Trent Horn:
I am really skeptical that Einstein even said this in the first place. I mean, with all sorts of famous people, Einstein, Mark Twain, the Saints, remember I wrote a book called What the Saints Never Said, people always attribute apocryphal quotations to them. I think this one’s been attributed to Einstein. It’s also been attributed to the physicist, Richard Feynman. I can’t imagine Einstein saying this because his work on the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity is very complicated and abstract. Now, you can explain it to a six-year-old, but you’re going to over simplify it almost to the point where it’s false. If you were to give that same answer on a physics exam, you’d get the questions wrong, because there’s actually another quote that has been attributed to Einstein and to Richard Feynman, that they asked him… probably to Feynman.
Trent Horn:
They said, “Can you explain in a sentence your discovery that led to being awarded the Nobel Prize?” And Einstein or Feynman said, “If I could explain it to you in a sentence, it would not be worth the Nobel Prize”. You can find other apocryphal quotes from Einstein that say, “Really big discoveries in science are actually going to be complicated”. The fact of the matter is, when we explain something, if we oversimplify enough, we’re going to get it wrong in our explanation. So sometimes to get it right, it’s going to be complicated. For example, how would you explain to someone what an atom is, what is an atom and what does it look like? I’m sure you probably thought of an illustration from your high school chemistry textbook, right? It looked like little balloons stuck together as the nucleus and little sticks going out, holding up the electron, and it looks like these little balloons or planets orbiting, a little, little sun.
Trent Horn:
That’s how you might explain what an atom is to someone who’d never heard that before. But here’s the thing, that’s not what atoms look like. Electrons do not look like little balls that orbit the nucleus’ sun. It’s not neat and tidy like that. Rather, what an atom looks like is, you have the nucleus, then you have kind of an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus, where the electrons exist in states of possibility. And then, when you deal with these subatomic particles, sometimes they are both a particle and a wave at the same time. They’re not one or the other. So these things are complex. And when you explain it to someone… Now, you can just oversimplify it, what atoms are, and you’ll get it wrong, but it works to oversimplify like if you’re explaining it to a child or a student trying to understand things.
Trent Horn:
But then when you want to get to the details, to try to prove to someone atoms are real, for example, then you might have to be more complex, or take a cell phone, for example. Could you explain to someone how a cell phone works without sounding like it’s magic? I mean, we say things all the time like, “Well it takes my voice and turns it into an electronic signal, sent over cables that then move on another signal”. And then people will say, “Well, what’s a signal, what’s a electronic signal, what is it, the data, how does it take my voice and turn it into a signal?” I can’t explain this. Maybe an engineer could explain that or a physicist might be able to reel, but notice that as he fully explains how a cell phone converts my face and my voice into a signal and sends it to the other side of the world, it’s going to be complex.
Trent Horn:
Now, some people will say, “Well, Trent, that’s not the same thing as arguments for God, because I can hold a cell phone, I can test it. It’s not like God”. No, of course not. Scientific explanations are going to be different than philosophical explanations, but scientific explanations are not the only explanations we have. Saying that, “Well, that’s the only thing we should rely on because we’re most successful when we build cell phones, not when we do philosophy”, that’s like saying, “The only way you can find something at a beach is to use a metal detector, because when you use a metal detector, you’re 95% likely to find a metal object, so only use a metal detector”. Well, if you lost a piece of paper at the beach, for example, or a piece of plastic, you’re going to have to use some other method. A metal detector is not going to help you there.
Trent Horn:
And it might be less effective, you might have to dig through the dirt or sift through or use sonar. But you can’t just say, “Well, I’m only going to use the most effective method”, if it has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. The same is true for God, or freewill, or the soul, or the mind, or consciousness, or moral truths, or multiverses, things that are not within the scientific domain. You’re going to have to use philosophy and logical reasoning. And we can do that and sometimes it’s going to be complex, just like scientific arguments are complex.
Trent Horn:
All right, what I want to do now is find common ground with people who say that Catholics just use a bunch of word salad. This happens a lot when you try to explain the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas to someone. Essence, existence… I’ve had this happen. People say, “That’s just word salad”. No, it’s jargon, and there’s a difference. And I can find common ground here that some people, when they give explanations, they’re addicted to jargon. So jargon are highly technical terms that are used among experts to describe various things. And they’re helpful when you’re talking to other experts. So, I know in my debate, for example, with Ben Watkins, he and I would throw out different terms, related to the existence of God, modal collapse, undercutting defeater, rebutting defeater. And we might throw out those terms without defining them, because we both understand what they mean. But if you’re talking to someone and they’ve never heard the terms before, you should use a different term they do know, or you should define the term and then use it if it’s such a crucial terms, you don’t have to keep repeating yourself.
Trent Horn:
I agree that some people, when they’re sharing this complex arguments, they use so much jargon, and they just want to impress people, that they lose sight of communicating. My friend and colleague, Jimmy Akin, has a great story about this. We did a show on apologetics a few months ago. And Jimmy said he was… I believe he was with his wife when they were dating. And he was talking about an argument he was learning and he used all of this high level jargon. And he thought that he was impressing his then wife, it was probably his girlfriend at the time. He thought he was impressing her because he knows all this jargon. And she said to him, “Do you think I’m an idiot? You’re purposely using all these words I don’t understand”. And he was mortified. He didn’t mean to do that. He wanted to show that he understood the material by using jargon.
Trent Horn:
And actually that’s not a great idea to use, that if you can explain it without the jargon, that’s good, or explain the jargon first before you use it, so you’re on the same page with that other person. So that’s important to remember that, number one, some people they’re just bad at communicating things. So this can happen when we try to share Thomas Aquinas, so we should work really hard that something is not word salad, and it’s totally our fault because we’re just so bad communicators. In fact, Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, at the beginning of it, he talks about how you should write simply so that people can understand.
Trent Horn:
This is what he writes, “Because the doctor of catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners, we purpose in this book”, the Summa Theologiae, “to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners. We have considered that students in this doctrine have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments. Partly also because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter, but according as the plan of the book might require”. And so he goes on, but it’s so funny to see Thomas’ saying. Man, a lot of theology manuals nowadays, they’re so full of jargon and repetition, and they just follow an organizational pattern the author liked, not what was most helpful for the student, so Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologiae so that a beginner could read it.
Trent Horn:
And then people like me try to read it nowadays, and I’m like, “This is for beginners?”, and I start feeling not very smart when I’m reading that. So you can say, “Look, the word solid objection. I understand that we should work on being better communicators, but sometimes we have to talk about complex things and we just need time to be able to do that, so maybe you need to use a bunch of illustrations for each complex subject”, for example. Another thing we should know, we should know that some combination of words really are word salad. Some combination of words simply don’t make sense, and those should be called out, and we could tell atheist and others who object to our arguments, “I agree with you, word salad is bad”. There are some combination of words that literally don’t make sense. One of the most famous examples of that was called the Sokal hoax.
Trent Horn:
Alan Sokal was a physicist and he published an article in a postmodern journal called Social Text. It was published in 1996, and he was peeved at postmodern scholars who just trafficked in word salad. They would take scientific explanations and make them so un-understandable. Un-understandable, that’s not a word. They would make them so opaque, or they would add things to scientific explanations to create a contradictory description. Something that made no sense at all. It was word salad. So he decided to submit an article to one of these postmodern journals to show how easy it would be to submit nonsense to these postmodern scholars. And the article he wrote was called Transgressing the Boundaries Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. And it’s full of just paragraph after paragraph of comparisons and arguments that make no sense.
Trent Horn:
Here’s one example of that. He writes, “Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women, and pro-choice, so liberal, and even some socialist mathematicians, are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework, which reflecting its 19th century liberal origins already incorporates the axiom of equality, supplemented only by the axiom of choice”. This means nothing. This means nothing that it’s equivocating on equality and choice, trying to say, “Well, liberals want pro-choice or abortion, and they want equality. And there’s also mathematicians who move beyond this framework because they also want equality and choice. The axiom of equality and axiom of choice”. That makes no sense at all. The axiom of equality is a basic principle of mathematics. This is by Zermelo-Fraenkel framework deals with things in set theory, and in mathematics. Axiom of equality says that any quantity is equal to itself. Basically, one equals one. The axiom of choice is a specific mathematical axiom about you can take an element from every set and a collection of infinite sets and make a new infinite set.
Trent Horn:
It’s just about choosing objects in different mathematical sets. It has nothing to do with legal abortion or pro-choice, it just has the word choice in it. So there’s lots of these things in the so-called hoax. So this would be word salad, but notice I can explain why it’s word salad, because I can talk about the meaning of all the constituent parts and show what they mean put together and how it doesn’t make sense. So, we can take from this as kind of a way forward that if someone says, “What you’re saying is just a bunch of word salad”, you can ask them, “Well, what is the specific contradiction I am saying, what do my words literally say, and why is that word salad?” I find that many people will look at an argument and they won’t do what I just did with the so-called excerpt and say, “Here’s why it doesn’t make sense”.
Trent Horn:
They just can’t grasp it. And not only they can’t grasp it, but they are opposed to the argument’s conclusion. So you might have someone explaining the theory of relativity, and things like the relativity of simultaneity, dealing with Einstein’s theory of relativity. And someone might say, they won’t call it word salad, they just say, “That’s too smart for me”. And they’ll just say that, but they trust that it’s true because it’s not controversial, and they think scientists usually get these kinds of things right. But if it’s an equally complex argument for God, instead of saying, “That’s too smart for me, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t”, they believe that no, no argument shows God exists. So even this really, really smart one, “Well, it can’t get the job done either, so I’m going to call it word salad”.
Trent Horn:
And Christians could be guilty of this too. There are complex arguments. You read Jordan Howard Sobel’s book Logic and Theism. There are complex arguments based on symbolic logic that attempt to show God does not exist. And it would also be equally intellectually lazy for a Christian to read Sobel, or Mackie, or Oppy, and say, “This is just word salad”. Now they could say, “This is kind of hard to read”. I think Oppy in some of his works like arguing against God’s can be a little wordy, it makes it hard to read. I think Sobel sometimes uses a bit too much symbolic logic. So you don’t always have to use symbolic logic when you’re describing things, but I wouldn’t call it word salad. And if a Christian said that, that would be a lazy reputation. Likewise, a atheist who says the same thing about a complex argument, a complex modal ontological argument, or fine-tuning argument, whatever it may be.
Trent Horn:
Just say, “I don’t really understand what this argument is saying. I’d have to look at the premises, I do need it. Explain more to me before I can tell you if it’s right or wrong”, and that’s humbling because you or I might have to do that for an argument we don’t understand. So maybe we need to lead by example to say, if we don’t understand something and we disagree with the conclusion, “I don’t quite follow that argument. Maybe you could restate it or give me some more resources so I can look at it a little more”. So if we want other people to be humble with our complex arguments, we need to be humble with their complex arguments as well. And then when we present these kinds of arguments, we should just do our best to try to simplify them as much as possible.
Trent Horn:
I really enjoy the work of Edward Feser, for example. The catholic philosopher Edward Feser, and Josh Rasmussen, he’s a protestant philosopher. Both of them, Rasmussen and Feser are good at taking complex subjects and explaining them clearly for a lay audience. And we need to be prepared to do the same. If you can’t explain it clearly, maybe take an inventory and realize, maybe I don’t understand this exactly. And go back to the books, go back to the foundations, reread, relearn, and then get wait so you’ve got it under your fingernails and then explain it to them. And then finally, I would just say, keep the offer open in the dialogue. As someone says, “That just a bunch of word salad”, do not be dismissive to say, “Well, I really think this is important, I’d like to share it with you. I’m happy to try to find another presentation of the material that might be more…” You don’t want to be condescending here.
Trent Horn:
“That might be more pleasant to read for you”. And you can say, “Yeah, this stuff’s going to be a little wordy. Maybe I can show you something else”. It’s hard. I mean, when I’m on the internet, I want to just be snippy with atheists that are just condescending, but you know what? God calls us to love every person. They are made in the image and likeness of God. That person would not exist if God did not have a plan for him or her. And so we need to be cognizant of that and then be humble and always work on being better communicators so that when people accuse us of peddling word salad, our consciousness are not put to blame. It’s like first Peter 3:15 through 16, “Always be ready to give a reason for the hope within, but do so with gentleness and reverence, keeping your consciousness clear so that when people malign you, if you’re a good conduct in Christ, they’re the only ones who were put to shame”. My dynamic translation of first Peter 3:15 through 16. Maybe that includes 17, but that’s the thing.
Trent Horn:
When someone criticizes us, it’s not a personal fault of ours, whether a personal virtue fault or a personal communicatory, communication fault. Rather, we want that person, maybe they just need more time to grapple with the truth we’re sharing with them. And we should always try to accommodate the person where they’re at. Hey, thank you guys so much. I’m so glad you were here. Definitely visit us at trenthornpodcast.com, where you can get access to our Catechism and New Testament study series. Don’t forget about all that. Trenthornpodcast.com. I hope you have a very pleasant day.
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