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Why Smart People Hold Tenaciously To Terrible Ideas… And Then Justify The Errors By Labeling Them As Reason, Logic, Or Science
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It’s Never About Facts… It’s Always About Filters
Most people swear they want the truth. They say it out loud. They type it into comment boxes. They put it in their bios. But watch what happens the moment a belief they depend on gets questioned. The tone changes. The walls go up.
Suddenly it’s not a conversation… it’s a border skirmish. That’s the tell, right? Because when truth threatens your footing, safety starts to feel like wisdom.
And that’s where things get uncomfortable. Because the fiercest debate defenses aren’t built around ideas that are obviously false… they’re built around the ones that hold your world together. These tightly held beliefs decide what actually counts as evidence, what sounds “reasonable,” and which questions are even allowed to be asked. (Greg Bahnsen called this Revisionary Immunity.)
Now, to see why people dig in so hard right out of the blocks, never look at the arguments themselves. It’s best to start with the universal fear of being wrong in a world that already feels unstable. The truth is…
People don’t just hold beliefs.
They consciously as well as unconsciously fortify them.
Why Some Strongly Held Beliefs Get Guard Towers and Moats
Most people would rather march off the edge with their comfort, status, and approval than be the one odd soul who turns back and takes the steep path to truth.
The interesting thing is that we all dig trenches around our beliefs; we stack sandbags, pour concrete, and hang “KEEP OUT” signs over the gate. Then we act genuinely offended when someone suggests the walls might be crooked… or that the whole structure was built on swampy ground to begin with.
And here’s the strange part: modern philosophy has spent the last couple of centuries pretending this stubbornness is clean, neutral, and purely logical. As if people cling to their deepest convictions because the math forced them to.
In reality, those beliefs are welded to identity, loyalty, fear, hope, and authority. They’re not floating ideas. They’re load-bearing beams.
Once you see that, a lot of “rational debate” starts to look like trench warfare with footnotes.
Chasing Truth in a Crooked World
To begin with, honestly trying to figure out what’s true is harder than people like to admit.
Your senses can lie to you. Your memory can quietly edit the tape. Your neat generalizations can get wrecked by one stubborn counterexample.
Take an old example: you grab a perfectly straight stick. You push into a pond. You look at it again, and it looks bent. Now, which sense do you trust? Worse yet, come late and see only the bent stick in the water, you’ll argue it’s a bent stick until the cows come home.
That little wobble… that moment when you realize you could be wrong… is where good philosophical analysis really starts. And it’s also where people begin looking for a safe haven.
Because uncertainty feels like standing on ice that might crack.
The Hunger for Certainty (Without the Risk)
So philosophers went looking for a place to stand that would never shift.
They wanted truths that couldn’t be overturned by new evidence, bad weather, faulty eyesight, or embarrassing mistakes. Truths that were immune to surprise. Bulletproof. Revision-proof.
In other words, they wanted certainty without risk.
And once that becomes the goal, stubbornness starts to look respectable.
How Philosophers Tried to Dodge Uncertainty
To escape the messiness of real life, modern thinkers split truth into two piles.
On one side, you’ve got what are called synthetic truths… claims about the world that could’ve been otherwise and that need experience to check. These are risky. They might turn out wrong.
On the other side, you’ve got analytic truths… statements supposedly true just by virtue of the words themselves.
“All bachelors are unmarried men.” That’s an analytic truth.
You don’t need to interview bachelors to get to the truth here. The truth is baked into the language. Safe. Clean. No exposure to reality required.
So philosophers said: Bingo. Here it is. Here’s our ultimate fallout shelter. We’ll arrange our language so it can’t be challenged because denying them means you “don’t understand the language.”
Problem solved.
Except for one thing.
The Price of Playing It Safe
Those truths “immune” to revision don’t actually tell you anything new about the world.
They’re simply definitions… tautologies… word salad gets to wear an academic robe.
You gain seeming infallibility… but only by giving up investigation or new information. Nothing risky. Nothing costly. Nothing that bites.
It’s certainty by evacuation. If you disagree with me, you’re not being scientific, logical, or whatever. “Stop asking questions.”
And at that point, the whole search-for-truth project starts to look less like clear thinking and more like a deeply manipulative move: wanting to dominate rather than to engage, learn, know, and grow.
Why Their “Safe Zone” Collapses
The trouble starts the moment you ask the obvious question:
What exactly makes something analytic?
Every attempt to answer it collapses into a circle.
People tried saying:
“Analytic truths are the ones whose denial is self-contradictory.” But what counts as a contradiction depends on which prepacked truths you already think are necessary.
“They’re true by meanings, not facts.” Fine… but now you have to explain what “meaning” is without smuggling an analytic motif back in.
“They can be reduced to logical truths by definition.” Which just kicks the problem over to logic itself… and leaves you explaining why logical laws can’t ever be revised.
Round and round it goes.
Meaning depends on synonymy. Synonymy depends on necessity. Necessity gets explained by analyticity.
That’s not grounded in truth. That’s philosophical musical chairs.
Underneath all the polish, the real rule becomes: “Trust us—we’re the experts, and we can just tell.”
That’s not method. That’s instinct with a doctorate. (Think “safe and effective”)
Stubbornness With a Lab Coat
And this is where the “why are people so stubborn?” question finally snaps into focus.
The analytic/synthetic distinction was never neutral. It was a clever way to declare certain beliefs untouchable by labeling them “what any rational person must accept.” Yep, that’s how they get ya.
Once something gets stamped analytic, disagreement stops being a live option. If you deny it, you’re not wrong… they say you’re confused. Uneducated. Unscientific. Linguistically defective.
That’s not open inquiry.
That’s psychological social pressure wearing a white lab coat.
When This Trick Gets Turned on Scripture
And things get ugly fast when this framework is aimed at the Bible.
Here’s the move:
If biblical claims really say something about the world, then they must be open to empirical checking… which means they can never be more than probable.
But if you insist Scripture is absolutely certain, then it must be “analytic”—true by definition—which means it doesn’t actually tell you anything about reality.
So the Christian is handed a fake choice:
Meaningful but uncertain or Certain but meaningless
Again, that’s not logic. That’s a rigged game built on faulty filters with broken distinctions.
What’s Actually Going On in Our Heads
Step back from the jargon and the picture becomes simpler… and far more honest.
People don’t carry beliefs around like loose index cards.
They carry worldviews.
A whole web of convictions… some near the edges, some forming the steel frame at the center. When a new experience clashes with that system, you’ve got options.
You can blame your senses. You can tweak a side belief. You can adjust your logic. You can reinterpret the situation.
In principle, any belief can be protected if you’re willing to pay the price of changing enough around it.
There’s no magical class of untouchable truths built into language itself.
There are just beliefs that are more deeply entrenched than others.
Why Folks Dig In Their Heels
So why are people in general so stubborn?
Because core beliefs aren’t abstract definitions. They’re the rules of reality as they understand them.
All standards of “evidence,” “reason,” and “logic” are shaped by those commitments.
When you challenge someone’s core values or reality filters, you rarely change their opinion on the periphery; you’re threatening their entire map of the world.
That’s why people double down when challenged. You’re not poking an idea. You’re leaning on a load-bearing beam.
And no, this isn’t just “those people.” All of us do this to some extent.
Scientists do it. Philosophers do it. Christians do it. Muslims do it.
The problem isn’t that we all have filters (worldview glasses) that govern claims and evidence.
The problem is pretending our filters are neutral while everyone else’s are “biased.”
Where Certainty Actually Belongs
If no sentence is magically insulated from revision just because of grammar, then true certainty has to live somewhere else.
Scripture doesn’t claim certainty because it uses clever language. It claims certainty because it’s the Word of a living, infallible God.
That means God’s Word can be both certain and deeply informative at the same time.
It doesn’t become trivial because it’s revision-proof. It becomes authoritative.
And once that’s clear, discussions, debates, and apologetics can’t simply be about swapping around isolated facts in some imaginary neutral space. Worldviews are colliding. Foundations are clashing.
The real work is exposing which filters can actually support knowledge, logic, and meaning… and which ones quietly borrow those things while denying their source.
Living Honestly With Our Commitments
In the end, the attempt to carve out a safe category of analytic truths fails. The distinction collapses. The neutrality dissolves.
What remains is the uncomfortable truth that everyone lives by deep, non-negotiable commitments.
So the real question isn’t:
“Who has purely neutral starting points?”
It’s rather…
Whose epistemological starting points are authoritative and deserve unwavering loyalty?
People are stubborn because their deepest commitments anchor their entire outlook.
The Christian claim is that only one anchor is worthy of that kind of stubbornness… the self-attesting God whose Word does not change.
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