While most people give it little thought, we encounter many cause and effect relationships every day. In a perfect world, all of these would be based on completely accurate assumptions and lead to good actions. Unfortunately, cause and effect logic is often used when the presenter doesn’t know the assumption, doesn’t want you to know the assumption, or is in some other way mixing truth and falsehood (sometimes intentionally and other times unconciously). For this reason, if we are to use this same logic GOD has given us to aid our understanding of the world around us, or even scripture, we should know how to determine if a proposed cause and effect statement is valid. For this purpose, we use the catagories of legitamite reservation:
-Clarity (is the statement correctly communicated)
-Entity Existance (Can/Do the cause and effect both exist)
-Causality (does the cause really lead to the effect)
-Insufficient Cause (Does one or more additional causes need to be true to create the effect)
-Additional Cause (Can a different cause create the effect)
-Predicted Effect (This is a little more complex, so I'll explain it later)
For this post, I take a closer look at the Clarity and Entity Existance catagories
Clarity
The clarity reservation is simply a check of whether our understand of the presented suffiencient cause relationship matches the presenters intent. This should always be the first reservation applied. It makes no sense to waste any of our short lives arguing or debating something we don’t truly disagree about.
A scriptural example of a clarity reservation can be found in 1 Corinthains 3:5-7. Here Paul corrects those in Corinth that believe they have been saved by the men spreading GOD’s word.
1Co 3:5-7 “Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom you believed, even as the Lord gave to each? I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither is he who plants anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.”
The clarity reservation is simply a check of whether our understand of the presented suffiencient cause relationship matches the presenters intent. This should always be the first reservation applied. It makes no sense to waste any of our short lives arguing or debating something we don’t truly disagree about.
A scriptural example of a clarity reservation can be found in 1 Corinthains 3:5-7. Here Paul corrects those in Corinth that believe they have been saved by the men spreading GOD’s word.
1Co 3:5-7 “Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom you believed, even as the Lord gave to each? I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither is he who plants anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.”
Entity Existence
The entity existance reservation is simply questioning if the cause and effect in a relationship either currently exist or can exist as claimed.
GOD shows us the entity existance reservation in Gen 13:16: "And I will make your seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can count the dust of the earth, then shall your seed also be counted."
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