Elbow's Argument Analysis

In the traditional method of critical thinking, the goal is to find the right answer by discovering and ferreting out the wrong answers. Thus, in a multiple choice quiz, a student could determine that the correct answer was C by knowing that A, B, and D were incorrect. This student knows that, as Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” To me, this quote sums up the premise of what Elbow refers to as the doubting game. Once all untrue assertions have been eliminated, what remains is presumed true. However, one weakness of the doubting game is that it does not reveal what is true; it only identifies what is not true. For a thoroughly balanced intellectual process, …show more content…
In other words, just because something is not wrong does not make it right. Merely using the doubting game to find errors in a given viewpoint does not reveal what is true. Rather, it often leaves the the doubter confused. Much like the six blind men who each touched a different part of an elephant, those who do not seriously consider other positions tend to have limited, if not distorted, understandings of reality. In other words, one must suspend the critical viewpoint and consider opposing views correct in order to find the position that is most fully correct. Elbow goes on to say that a healthy intellectual process will actually utilize both games alternatively to produce the best results. The believing game and the doubting game can work together like Yin and Yang to generate a broader and deeper …show more content…
It involved a perceived conflict between the theory of evolution and the biblical creation account. I come from a Conservative Christian background. I have spent most of my life in the Southern Baptist Church. I was educated through a homeschool curriculum written by religious fundamentalists. So at both church and school I was taught that Darwin’s theory of evolution was false, that it completely violated the basic premises of Christianity. They taught me to play the doubting game by seeking only to disprove evolution, never even considering the possibility that Christianity and evolution could coexist. Since none of my friends or teachers believed in evolution, I assumed my parents did not either. So it came as a great shock to me when my father told me one day that he believed in theistic evolution rather than a literal seven-day creation. Though this revelation initially struck me as blasphemous, it was actually an introduction to the believing game. As my father described his viewpoint, I began to consider previously disregarded evidence for natural selection and a universe billions of years old. I suspect that if my father had not helped me to see other ways of looking at this apparent contradiction, I would have entered college with an ill-informed suspicion of evolution and anyone who taught it. I may have unnecessarily resented my professors and unnecessarily resisted