Glorify God By Thinking Well
“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts a stake in the ground from the very first question.
But how do we glorify God and enjoy him? By being holy.
And, how do we become holy? By presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice.
How do we do that? By not being conformed to this world.
And how do we avoid conformity to the world? By being transformed by the renewal of our minds, that by testing we may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:2)
There is a chain of logic that comes between our chief end and learning how to think well.
Unfortunately, we are living in a world that will do anything it can to keep us from thinking at all, much less thinking well. That is one of the reasons I keep reading books (and passing them to my kids) about thinking clearly.
Samuel Johnson once noted, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” I think he’s right. Therefore, the most important things are worth rehashing multiple times.
Edward Burger and Michael Starbird’s 2012 book, The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, is short, practical work that provides handholds for learning to think better. While perhaps not earth shatteringly innovative, the presentation is engaging, sufficiently brief, and helpful.
Elementary, My Dear Watson
The authors, both mathematicians, use the ancient scheme of the four terrestrial elements plus the fifth celestial element to create a framework for their methodology.
It begins with earth, which is to understand deeply. Rather than simply get through the basic concepts in an introductory text as fast as possible, they commend readers to actually learn the building blocks of the discipline.
This is often overlooked, especially as college level intro classes often have too many students, but the reason why many students struggle with algebra is they are not good at arithmetic. The reason why many students struggle with calculus is they never mastered algebra. Master the basics and more advanced applications become much easier.
Next, they advise jumping into the fire by embracing failure. By learning from mistakes, the authors argue, advanced learning can take place. Refusing to fix gaps perpetuates the failure, but knowing what doesn’t work may help explain why. It’s even better when an expert provides feedback.
Questioning is the next element, in the form of air. When you raise questions for yourself to answer you provide opportunities for exploration, testing certainties, and pursuing the edge of knowledge. Their exemplar for this chapter is Socrates, but the main theme is not the Socratic method. It’s learning to ask the right questions and not resting until you really have it.
Great thinkers follow the flow of ideas from basic to more complex. This is like the element of water. Creativity is enhanced by looking at what people have done and asking what else can be done with those ideas. It’s a generative process.
The final element is the quintessential element: it is the proposal that you use the four preceding steps to continually change and improve as a person. The associated chapter is a challenge to pursue excellence incrementally.
So Basic It Might Work
If our chief end is to glorify God and we’re looking for a way to get there, we might find help in transforming our minds through the wisdom of this book.
It’s a little, gift-sized self-book. But it really is basic enough that it might just work.
Starbird and Burger don’t get bogged down in psychobabble and self-confidence. Yet they really believe that average people can make impressive progress through persistent effort. They acknowledge talent, but affirm the value of hard work. And they offer a process for making changes that can lead to results.
If the goal of home education is to help kids to think (not just what to think), then this sort of book in the hands of a teen may be just the right thing.
If we learned how to ask better questions of Scripture in our Bible studies, we might get beyond “What does this passage mean to you?” to ask why Peter quotes so much from the Old Testament. Persistence in pursuing clear lines of question, researching, and moving to the next step might get us from milk to meat and make the author of Hebrews happy.
This is a good book. It deserves to be read, as the authors suggest, multiple times to really absorb the methodology. At the end of the day, I think their clear presentation of effective thinking may be so basic that it just might work.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.