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The Bible Verse People Use to End Every Argument

Data Over Dogma

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This episode it's Twisted Scripture: Proverbs 3:5–6 — "trust in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding" — and the way it gets wielded to shut a conversation down. We dig into the claim that you can only "really" understand the Bible if you read it with the Holy Spirit, why that's textbook special pleading, and how John Lennox's red Ferrari ends up parked in the same garage as Carl Sagan's invisible dragon. Along the way: intuition versus reflective cognition, why every tradition reports the same spiritual "confirmation," and the difference between private faith and public claims.

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Chapters:

0:00 Intro
1:15 Twisted Scripture Begins
1:50 Proverbs 3:5–6
3:05 "I Read With the Spirit"
4:18 Special Pleading
6:18 Slavery as the Test Case
7:23 What the Commentary Says
8:19 Hidden From the Wise
9:19 Whose Spirit Is Right?
10:03 Intuition vs. Reflection
11:46 The Unreliable Brain
14:24 The Problem of Qualia
16:22 Lennox's Red Ferrari
17:24 Sagan's Garage Dragon
19:41 Feelings vs. Evidence
20:28 Every Tradition Feels It
23:47 The Thought-Stopping Cliché
25:01 Private Faith, Public Claims
27:10 "The Spirit Told Me"
28:41 More Trump-Card Verses
29:51 Data Over Dogma

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#DataOverDogma #BibleScholarship #Apologetics #Proverbs #HolySpirit

20 Comments

@dataoverdogma Creator 2 months ago Pinned

Hey folks! For those interested in the specific merch shown in this episode, you can get it from our classic collection at our old merch store:
https://datadoverdogma.printful.me

Sorry for any confusion that may have caused! The link to our new store (and merch with a Hebrew design drawn by our own Dan McClellan), can be found in the store link in the video description.

@rimsky82 2 months ago

Prov. 3:5-6 sounds to me like the Christian equivalence of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

@kenharness1417 2 months ago

I was around 14 when I asked my pastor how God created light and day on the first day but didn't create the sun and stars until the fourth day. His response was "We're not supposed to know everything." My response (in my head. I would never dare talk back to the pastor back then) was "Why can't we know everything?"

@foxyshabazz 2 months ago

"My pastor would just whip this one out..." An all-too common occurrence, I'm led to believe.

@Geospasmic 1 month ago

I've always interpreted that command as basically a denial of an answer. You do not deserve an answer to this question, and you shouldn't even be asking.

@scienceexplains302 2 months ago (edited)

“Lean not on your own understanding”
Did your god tell you to use that for every Bible difficulty, or are you using your own understanding?

@amyturpen4726 2 months ago

Lean not on your own understanding is nothing more than code for Do as (whatever) authority tells you to do.

@pineapplepenumbra 2 months ago

The first verse: "Don't think for yourself, otherwise you will see what bullshit we're trying to feed you, and then you won't give us power and money."

@robertjdodge 2 months ago

Sort of reminds me of one of the old elephant jokes:-
Q: Why do elephants paint the toenails red?
A:- So they can hide in cherry trees.
Q: have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree?
A:- No.
See how good they are.
Q:- do you want to learn how to see the elephants
A:- just believe and read my book on how to spot elephants in Cherry trees.

@Stoferbia 2 months ago

This disucssion reminds me so much of how I, as a mormon kid at 11 years old, brooded so extremely much over exactly the problem of how I were to tell the difference between my own mind and the holy ghost. And I ended up with the same, then not so satisfying, conclusion that since my flawed mind was the only way to actually experience any kind of "holy spirit" (or anything else for that matter) the experience could never be the bulletproof evidence I wanted it to be. You simply cannot somehow magically circumvent your own mind for knowing or thinking or learning or experiencing, it's just impossible. This is really the experience that did set me up for later doubts and leaving mormonism as an adult.

@CaritasAngola 2 months ago

We need merch with "Striking the tuning fork in the loins of my dogmatism"

@josephowens4654 2 months ago

‘Dragon in my garage’ followed up with ‘no true Scotsman’ seems to be the sum of the argument for most people.

@loving_lyle_loving_you 2 months ago

When I was a Christian, I used this verse with my own doubts in addition to “helping” my fellow Christians.

@Herschel1738 2 months ago

"Peer Review" is presenting scientific findings to a large pool of experts who can vet both the testing & the results of scientific works to find both unintentional errors & intentional deception. Formally, it vets the papers that summarize the results of scientific research. Informally, it is all the scientists who take the results & try to apply them to their own research.
Science does NOT trust the opinion of one mind, no matter how knowledgeable.

@artistjoh 2 months ago

This reminds me of a story Dave Allen told about the Pope and an atheist in a pub arguing about god. The Pope was frustrated with naturalist explanations, and said to the atheist "I think you are like a man in a dark room without a light, looking for a black cat that isn't there." "Well," said the atheist, "I think we are quite similar, I think you too are like a man in a dark room, without a light, looking for a black cat that isn't there. The only difference between us is that you think that you found it."