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In an article on the Reformation21 website titled, “When ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’ Is All the Logic Left,” Justin Poythress, Pastor of All Saints Presbyterian Church in Boise, ID, offers some wise caution about the typical way in which people try to persuade each other. His words are particularly relevant to much of what goes by the name of persuasion about environmental issues, including among Christians. Here I will quote him at length and then apply what he says to a recent document that purports to speak for evangelicals about climate change.

Poythress begins:

Spoiler alert: If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk, a straw, a broom, crayons, and eventually another cookie. The lesson of the story is simply that actions have consequences, which then lead to new circumstances demanding new actions. Every effect becomes itself a cause. This is a helpful way to teach your four-year-old to think before prying up mystery gunk off the sidewalk. It’s also a useful primer on logic for the rest of us.

The trouble is that, for many, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is the furthest extent of our logical study. We don’t want complex syllogisms, but compelling stories. The degree to which gripping narratives embody logical syllogism is the degree to which we are willing to think logically. Our field of reasoning goes only so far as the stories take us, and no further. 

This means that the validity of any argument must, indeed, can only be demonstrated through a personal narrative. Do I believe that the healthcare profession is completely corrupt, full of greedy, lying malpractitioners? I need only share my personal story of falling afoul of poor medical care, and my case is all but proved. We sense instinctively that we cannot challenge the truth of someone’s personal experience. It is, after all, their experience. But that also moves their argument beyond the pale of dispute. To argue against their point means that you don’t care about their plight. The only way I can hope to find footing in an argument is to offer counter-stories to illustrate the other side. The one who shares his story first seems right—at least, until another comes along with a better one (cf. Prov. 18:17). 

There are two practical takeaways for us to bear in mind when engaging our world of narrative syllogisms.

[First,] We need to learn to argue using narratives. …

[Second,] When engaging someone’s narratival reasoning, look for where personal examples have turned into premises.

So, that’s the start of Poythress’s article. I’ll dig into those two takeaways later. For the moment I just want to focus on Poythress’s identification of argument by personal narrative as a substitute for logical reasoning.

When I read that, my mind went instantly to Loving the Least of These, a document released in August by the National Association of Evangelicals and the Evangelical Environmental Network. Why? Because that document sought to move evangelicals to embrace the belief that humanity’s use of fossil fuels as energy sources is causing climate change, that is, global warming, that will have catastrophic consequences and that therefore we must turn from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and other “renewable” or “Green” energy sources to slow, stop, or reverse the warming.

How did it seek to move evangelicals to that conclusion? Not, primarily, by scientific evidence (though it does attempt some of that in “Section 2: A Changing Environment,” which Cornwall Alliance Director of Research and Education Dr. David Legates and I have addressed in several episodes of Created to Reign, Cornwall Alliance’s podcast, but by stories, narratives, reports of personal experiences.

We see this in the foreword to Loving the Least of These, by Walter Kim, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, who writes, “for too many in this world, the beach isn’t about sunscreen and bodysurfing but is a daily reminder of rising tides and failed fishing. Instead of a gulp of fresh air from a lush forest, too many children take a deep breath only to gasp with the toxic air that has irritated their lungs.”

Dorothy Boorse, a biology professor at Gordon College and the primary author of the Loving the Least of These, writes, “Each section includes reflection from an expert, and examples from people working with the issues are sprinkled throughout.” She continues:

In the summer of 2021, a heat wave in western North America shattered the record books. In the small town of Lytton, British Columbia, the highest temperature ever measured in Canada was recorded at 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.4 degrees Celsius) — something most would expect only to see in places like Death Valley, California.17 The heat wave also marked the deadliest weather-related event in the history of Washington state, officially claiming the lives of 112 Washingtonians. Over the heat wave’s two-week span, a total of 1,400 heat-related deaths were reported across western Canada and the northwestern United States.

Further south, the 2021 fire season in the western United States was longer and more dangerous than in most other years, in part due to extreme heat, low precipitation and low snowpack exacerbated by ongoing drought. California alone experienced almost 9,000 fires that burned almost 2.6 million acres of land.18 Few people died, but thousands of buildings were burned and hospitalizations increased more than 10 percent due to poor air quality as toxic smoke engulfed the western United States and spread east. In July 2021, plumes of haze from California fires were visible on satellite images as smoke was pulled all the way to the Atlantic Ocean by high air currents.19

North America was not alone in experiencing an outbreak of dangerous extreme weather. Fires in 2019, 2020 and 2021 flared around the rest of the world as well.20 Massive fires blazed in Russian peatlands, Indonesian forest, Greece, the Amazon basin, and countries in North Africa. The Australian wildfires of 2019–2020 burned so strongly that enormous pyrocumulonimbus clouds formed as intense heat from land created hot updrafts of wind. These masses of hot air carried plumes of smoke higher than have ever been recorded. Smoke from the fires affected 80 percent of Australians, or about 20 million people, and even destroyed some of the ozone layer.21 As many as 3 billion animals, including an estimated 61,000 koalas, were killed or displaced by the fires.

While this at first sounds like a scientific argument, it is really an argument by story, by narrative. High temperatures occurred here and there, wildfires occurred here and there, buildings were burned, people were displaced, animals killed. Each of the events described is tragic and sad and should move us to compassionate action. But should any of them, or all of them together, move us to believe our use of fossil fuels causes global warming so catastrophic that we must mitigate it by replacing the most abundant, affordable, reliable sources of the energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty with other energy sources that are diffuse, expensive, and unreliable?

Sprinkled through the Loving the Least of These, then, are more narratives:

• A Black pastor tells of how African Americans suffer more from heat waves and floods than their White counterparts—because their average income is lower.

Boorse offers five narratives even in the section that supposedly focuses on scientific evidence.

• First, La Paz, capital city of Bolivia, faces water shortages as mountain glaciers, its primary water source, shrink.
• Second, Shishmaresh, a sparsely populated community on remote Sarichef Island, Alaska, is threatened by rising sea level and by declining food supply as sea ice shrinks, making seals, their main food source, more scarce.
• Third, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific “are losing their traditional way of life” because “Warmer waters, coral bleaching, erosion, extreme cyclones and other changing weather patterns, and tidal flooding contribute to … crisis.” I won’t address here the truth or falsehood of the claims; I offer it just as another example of argument by narrative.
• Fourth, as temperatures rise in temperate regions, forest pests “live longer, grow faster and eat more,” leading to job losses for those who depend on the forests.
• Fifth, alleged harm to ocean fisheries threatens jobs and food supplies for people around the world.

There were more examples of argument by narrative in that section of Loving the Least of These that purportedly gave scientific evidence, but we’ll let those suffice.

The next section, “How Climate Affects People in Poverty,” consists almost entirely of sad stories of people in Bangladesh, China, Haiti, Ethiopia, Malawi, Vietnam, Benin, the Solomon Islands, and other places suffering from heat waves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events. Every story tugs at our hearts, and rightly so.

But even while we grieve for the suffering, and even while we seek opportunities to help them in very concrete, specific ways, we must not allow such narratives to substitute for evidence and logic that supports a conclusion. So here I return to Poythress’s article, because he explains things so clearly.

First, he addresses

Arguing Via Narrative

We need to learn to argue using narratives. This skill hardly needs to be taught; it comes instinctively. Narratival reasoning is not some unmitigated evil, but is part and parcel of the human experience. Our most strongly shaped beliefs and opinions are not the result of carefully reasoned philosophy, but rather due to profound personal experiences. The power of narrative is a timeless axiom among persuasion professionals. Any lawyer, salesman, or advertiser will tell you: “the best story wins.”

We need to always be on the lookout for (and stocking away) stories. We need flesh and blood examples which either bear out or challenge umbrellas of belief. Even as we handle issues involving abstraction or hypothesis, we should be willing to imaginatively construct stories which, although not real, could illustrate outcomes within these abstract or hypothetical parameters.

Then, having granted the usefulness of arguing by narrative, Poythress turns to

Challenging Faulty Personal Premises

When engaging someone’s narratival reasoning, look for where personal examples have turned into premises. Narrative, emotional-based arguments are really just forms of hyper-inductive reasoning. You get one very specific example, birthed from a specific time and place, involving specific people. From that one example, a conclusion is formed which is then used to gather together broad categories of people and circumstances.

Take a personalized example: Chris realized team competition was hurtful when, as a kid, he was chosen last in a kickball tournament. Now, as a boss, he has learned to avoid segmenting or dividing employees into competitive teams. Notice what’s happened here. A personal experience, incontrovertible because it is personal, has slipped through the back door and turned into a premise. Being chosen last was a bad experience. The inductive leap concluded that that experience was bad because team competition is bad.

The danger of narratival reasoning is that it obscures its extreme inductive nature.

Let me pause a moment here to clarify. Deductive reasoning draws specific conclusions from general premises premises: If all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. Inductive reasoning draws general conclusions from specific premises: This swan is white, that swan is white, the swan over there is white, so all swans must be white. Clearly inductive reasoning is less conclusive—how can we be sure we’ve examined all swans? What if tomorrow we see a black one? Nonetheless, we need inductive reasoning—but we need to do it properly.

Now back to Poythress:

Traditional inductive reasoning seeks to gather a whole collection of instances or stories and reach a general conclusion from these specifics. Narratival reasoning takes one experience and makes it the guiding premise for future decisions, and then obscures its dark deed in the winding pathway of a personal and emotional story.

Let’s pause for a moment. What is the “dark deed” to which Poythress refers? It is the deed of illegitimately drawing a general conclusion from insufficient examples. Note the distinction Poythress makes between “a whole collection of instances or stories” and “one experience”—or a handful.

Poythress concludes:

Chris’ conclusion evokes sympathetic understanding, but what are his conclusions and the premises those conclusions then form? Are all teams bad? Is all competition bad? Is it that specific combination, the competitive-team, that is bad? Or is it the choosing of teams that is bad?

A narrative in itself is hard to debate because it is simultaneously specific and vague. The whole thread of reasoning from one premise to the next gets buried, and is in fact irrelevant, because that’s not the point of a story. The point of a story is to evoke a feeling, which will then motivate a direction of behavior.

We don’t need to avoid or fear narratives. By personality, some of us will be more geared to think in deductive logic, while most in our day will move along more instinctively, through compelling narratives. We need to recognize how a narrative operates in the field of discourse and debate. A narrative contains a principle and a perspective. If we rely on feeling our way towards principles on the basis of narratives, then we need at least to allow those principles to be challenged through a different perspective, a different story.

But this is still begging the question. Unless we want to be continually bounced around according to the pathos of the storyteller, we need God’s unshakable Master Story (i.e. the Bible), rounded out with coherent premises by which we can judge all other narratives.

I agree with Poythress. Narratives, personal stories, are entirely appropriate “to evoke a feeling, which will then motivate a direction of behavior.”

But narratives, personal stories, must never substitute for proper reasoning, whether deductive (inferring specifics from generalizations) or inductive (involving not just a handful of examples, called anecdotes, but a large, statistically significant number of examples, sufficient to make it statistically highly unlikely that a correlation we’re pointing out occurs by chance rather than by cause and effect).

In the absence of such statistically significant evidence, we must guard against being moved by personal stories to actions that might be unwarranted by the actual evidence, actions predicated on an assumed but not proven cause-and-effect relationship.

Narratives, personal stories, are great motivators, but they’re not great provers. The danger is that they will motivate us to act to solve a problem that might not be real or that, though real, has a different cause, and hence a different solution, from what the narratives assume. Doing so, we may do more harm than good.

I’m convinced that Loving the Least of These fails that test. As a corrective, I recommend that you read Cornwall Alliance’s 55-page document A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against Harmful Climate Change Policies Gets Stronger. And if you want something more comprehensive, you’ll find a number of excellent books on the subject in our online store.

Photo by Ricky Kharawala on Unsplash.