CAT: How I Test Claims Without Protecting the Answer

CAT Method

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If you have read any of my other posts, you have probably noticed that I keep mentioning something called CAT. What in the world is that? CAT is the methodology I use when I am trying to figure out whether a claim actually survives investigation.

It started because I had a problem.

I knew Christianity was true. I also knew that simply saying, “Christianity is true,” was not particularly useful when staring at a difficult question that seemed capable of undermining it. Furthermore, Christianity should not be protected with bad arguments. And to complicate things further, I also did not want skepticism to receive a free pass merely because skepticism sounds cautious. And I really did not want to change the rules halfway through an investigation because I suddenly did not like where the evidence was going.

Sighs.

I needed a method.

Not a method designed to prove Christianity.

A method designed to force me to deal honestly with evidence.

That became CAT.

The Basic Problem

Human beings are not particularly good at being neutral about things they care about. When I desperately want something to be true, I can become remarkably creative in defending it. If I desperately want something to be false, I can become equally creative in attacking it.

This is a universal dilemma that belongs to Christians, skeptics, and scholars alike. That does not mean reasoning is useless, but reasoning does need discipline. One of the easiest ways to bias an investigation is to quietly apply different rules to competing explanations.

Suppose a Christian explanation requires one assumption that has not yet been supported. Someone may immediately object, “You cannot just assume that.”

Fair enough.

But then the skeptic offers an alternative explanation that requires three equally unsupported assumptions and everyone shrugs because at least it sounds naturalistic.

That is not neutral investigation.

The reverse is also true. A Christian should not be allowed to invent an invisible explanation every time the evidence becomes inconvenient and then declare victory because the explanation is technically possible. Furthermore, the Christian cannot default to “because God is and He said and so that’s reality.” That’s not actually helpful for sound reasoning.

CAT tries to stop that kind of thing.

If one side has to show its work, everybody has to show their work.

We Can Know Truly Without Knowing Exhaustively

This is one of the simplest CAT principles, and I have already used it elsewhere on this blog.

I do not need to know every atom contained within a cat before I can reasonably conclude that I am looking at a cat. The cat does not need to sit down and announce, “Hello. I am a cat.” I can observe fur, whiskers, paws, behavior, anatomy, movement, sound, and a variety of other characteristics. At some point, the cumulative evidence becomes sufficient to justify the conclusion.

Could there still be something I do not know about the cat?

Of course.

Maybe it has a heart condition. It might hate tuna. Perhaps it once attacked a veterinarian and is now permanently banned from polite society. None of those unresolved details prevent me from knowing that it is a cat.

That principle matters because people sometimes treat unanswered questions as though they automatically destroy a conclusion.

They do not.

But—and this is important—unanswered questions are not automatically irrelevant either. Suppose the “cat” suddenly removes its head and reveals that it is a sophisticated robot. Well. That detail kinda…possibly…really matters.

CAT does not ask whether every single question has been answered. It asks whether the unanswered question is important enough to change the conclusion. That’s a very different standard. We can know something truly without knowing everything about it. But we cannot simply ignore missing information when the missing information strikes directly at the conclusion we are trying to establish.

Evidence Is Cumulative

CAT rarely expects one piece of evidence to carry an entire case. Real investigations usually do not, and maybe should not, work that way. One fact may point weakly in a particular direction while another fact may point in the same direction.

Then another.

Annnnnd another.

Eventually the combined evidence can become much stronger than any individual piece standing alone.

This is why I am suspicious when someone asks for the one perfect piece of evidence that proves Christianity. Why should there be one? Historical questions are usually established cumulatively. The same is true of criminal cases, scientific explanations, and most everyday judgments.

When was the last time you put on a shirt because it opened its mouth and said, “I am the perfect addition to that specific pair of pants”? We look at the whole outfit and decide whether it works. The shirt does not need to become anthropomorphic and declare itself superior.

The same principle works in the opposite direction. One apparent difficulty does not necessarily destroy a theory that explains the larger body of evidence extraordinarily well.

The questions are holistic:

• What does the total body of evidence suggest?
• Which facts does this explanation account for well?
• Where does it struggle?
• Which pieces of evidence support it?
• Which pieces push against it?
• Is there another explanation that fits the same evidence better?
• How much work are unsupported assumptions being forced to do?

That last one matters. And it’s very sneaky. A lot of the time, humans do not even notice that there’s an assumption in the first place, much less whether or not that assumption is actually supported.

I’ll give an example. A lot of Christians will say something like: “Tomorrow is not promised. Accept Christ today while you still can.” The unspoken assumption is that the opportunity to accept Christ’s saving grace ends at death. The Christian may or may not consciously recognize they are assuming that. Further, they may not even realize why they are assuming the salvation opportunity ends exactly at the point of physical death.

But here’s the kicker: the Bible does not state that theory as clearly as Christians sometimes assume. The Bible clearly teaches that the opportunity for salvation does not remain open forever. What is less explicit is whether the exact moment of physical death is always the point at which that opportunity closes.

• Hebrews 9:27 teaches there is judgment sometime after death.
• Luke 16:26 presents the rich man’s condition as fixed after death. That is strong evidence for postmortem finality, but the passage does not explicitly tell us whether the condition became fixed at the instant of death or at some point before the scene Jesus describes.
• John 8:21–24 presents dying in unbelief as a grave and apparently terminal condition, but it does not separately define the precise mechanics or timing of final judgment after death.
• Matthew 25:31–46 places the separation into “eternal punishment” and “eternal life” at the final judgment associated with the Son of Man’s coming, not at the moment of each individual’s death.

There are more passages we could examine, but these are enough to establish the methodological point. We can use cumulative evidence to support or weaken a hypothesis, but we have to be careful not to confuse “strongly supported” with “explicitly proven.” It is easy to read several passages, form a conclusion that fits them well, and then forget that part of the conclusion came from inference rather than from something the text directly states.

“Possible” Is Not the Same as “Probable”

This is one of my favorite problems.

Someone presents evidence for a conclusion and another person responds: “Well, maybe this happened instead.”

Okay. Maybe. But can you show me that it actually happened, that it probably happened, or that it explains the evidence better than the conclusion it is trying to replace? Human imagination is almost unlimited. If mere possibility were enough to defeat a conclusion, we could never know anything.

Perhaps the cat is an alien. I might be hallucinating. For all I know, every historical document was fabricated yesterday by a secret organization with an unusually specific sense of humor.

Possible? Technically, I suppose. Evidentially useful? Not a single bit.

CAT does not allow a hypothesis to survive merely because somebody can imagine a way for it to survive. A rescue explanation needs evidence. If an objection creates a genuine problem for a theory, the theory is allowed to answer it. But the answer cannot consist entirely of, “Maybe there is some unknown reason this works.” There may, in fact, be an unknown reason. But possibility is not evidence.

This is particularly important when we compare religious and naturalistic explanations. I will not allow Christianity to hide behind unevidenced possibilities. But I can’t allow naturalism to do it either. If one explanation requires increasingly elaborate unsupported mechanisms to account for the evidence while another naturally predicts what we actually observe, that difference matters.

Everybody Plays by the Same Rules

This may be the most important part of CAT.

No worldview gets to be the default simply because people are accustomed to it. Christianity does not begin with bonus points. Neither do naturalism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism, agnosticism, or whatever conclusion happens to be fashionable in a particular academic department.

Each claim gets examined according to what it actually says and what evidence we would reasonably expect if it were true.

If Christianity makes a prediction and the evidence strongly contradicts it, Christianity takes the hit. That does not automatically mean Christianity is false. It means the contradiction has to be taken seriously and examined. The same goes for every competing explanation. Additional assumptions count no matter who needs them. An unresolved question does not automatically defeat one side while the other is permitted to say, “We do not know yet.” And if I demand independent evidence from Christianity, I cannot suddenly accept speculation from another worldview because I happen to prefer where it leads.

The evidence has to be weighed by the same standards, with the same burdens and the same tolerance for uncertainty.

That sounds obvious.

It is surprisingly difficult to maintain.

The Standard of Proof Matters

Not every investigation is trying to establish the same thing.

Sometimes I am asking whether something is merely possible. Sometimes I want to know whether it is more likely than not, which explanation best fits the evidence, or whether a conclusion has been established beyond reasonable doubt. Those standards are not interchangeable.

An unresolved problem that barely matters when testing possibility may become very important if someone is claiming the conclusion has been established beyond reasonable doubt. So CAT tries to identify the burden before declaring victory.

Otherwise the goalposts move. Someone begins with, “This definitely happened.” Then the evidence gets uncomfortable, and suddenly the claim becomes, “Well, you cannot prove it did not happen.” Those are not the same claim.

CAT notices the difference.

CAT Has to Be Able to Hurt Christianity

This is the part that matters most to me.

A methodology that can only confirm what I already believe is useless. If CAT cannot hurt Christianity, then CAT is not an investigation. It is decoration.

Bad Christian arguments should fail. Weak interpretations should fail. If a supposed contradiction is real, I want to know it. If another worldview explains a particular piece of evidence better, it should receive credit for doing so. And if an objection remains unresolved, I should be able to write the word unresolved without panicking.

Again, Christianity does not become false because one Christian argument fails. It also does not become true because I manage to rescue every argument Christians have ever made. That distinction has been extraordinarily freeing. If an argument fails, let it fail. Truth does not need me to keep dead arguments alive. God does not need my protection.

But skepticism does not win merely by imagining another possibility either. An objection must do actual evidentiary work.

CAT is adversarial in both directions. Christianity has to survive its strongest objections, but those objections do not get a free pass either. Any Christian response has to earn its place, and any competing explanation has to survive the same level of scrutiny. Eventually, some explanations begin to fit the evidence better than others.

That is what I care about.

Uncertainty Is Not Failure

One of the stranger expectations people bring to religious questions is that every investigation must end in absolute certainty. Sometimes the evidence simply does not justify that.

CAT allows conclusions such as:

• probable
• strongly supported
• mixed
• unresolved
• insufficient evidence
• established beyond reasonable doubt

There is nothing embarrassing about that. Pretending certainty where it does not exist only weakens the argument.

CAT does not require us to eliminate every alternative the human imagination can produce. The question is whether the alternatives that remain are strong enough to defeat the conclusion under the standard of proof being used.

That is much more useful.

Why I Use CAT Here

The questions explored in The Great Tapestry are not emotionally neutral.

Why does God allow suffering? Why does He seem hidden? Can the Bible be trusted? Did Jesus actually claim to be divine? Did He rise from the dead? What happens to people who never hear the Gospel? Do other religions explain reality better?

These questions involve history, philosophy, theology, morality, and deeply personal experiences. I do not want my emotional investment deciding the answer before the evidence gets a chance.

So CAT keeps forcing me back to a few basic questions:

• What do I actually know?
• What am I inferring?
• Where have I made an assumption?
• Is this merely possible, or is there evidence for it?
• What supports the conclusion, and what pushes against it?
• Would I accept this argument if someone used it against Christianity?
• What would change my conclusion?
• Has the evidence actually met the standard I am using?

CAT is not perfect because I am not perfect. No methodology can magically remove human bias. But it can make bias harder to hide. It can expose the moment I change standards, protect an assumption, or grant one explanation a privilege I would refuse another.

That is why I use it.

I am not interested in cocooning Christianity from difficult evidence. I want to know what survives when the cocoon is gone. If Christianity is true, it should survive honest examination. If one of my arguments fails along the way, let it fail.

The conclusion has to earn its place.