Assume, Presume, and ‘Noble Mindedness’

Most of us, myself included, would likely have a difficult time offering a useful distinction between the meaning of assume and that of presume. A Grammarly.com blog post [May 17, 2019] describes these words in this way: “Assume is a verb that means to suppose, to take for granted, to undertake, whereas presume is a verb that means to suppose, to take for granted, or to dare. In the shared meaning of ‘to suppose’, presume is usually used when you suppose based on probability, while assume is used when you suppose without any evidence.“

If this distinction is valid, and even useful, it would then seem a wise person would want to operate, to the degree practical, more out of presumption than of mere assumption, the latter meaning ‘to suppose without any evidence’-likely very fertile soil for biases, prejudices, and chronic ignorance. Purging our thinking and speech of reliance on mere assumptions, will likely result in a more fact-focused life, strengthening our resistance to faulty judgment, pre-judgment [i.e. prejudices], and mind control via pressure from peers. But, becoming a more fact-based person requires effort-something, due to our mental slothfulness, and enslavement to biases, we may not be willing to do. After all, it is much easier to simply rely on the opinions of others, and ‘assume facts not in evidence’ [a common objection to the statement of a witness by a trial attorney] than to do the oftentimes hard work of digging through the popular cultural rubble and ignoring the noise to determine what really are the historical and/or present day facts.

Since the words presume [verb] or presumption [noun] appear to involve ‘probabilities’ i.e. something is more or less likely to be true, it therefore seems rather compelling [very high probability of being true] that as followers of Christ our values, principles and convictions should be be based on a correct understanding of facts- be they facts about ourselves, this earthly life, and especially those facts surrounding the person and message of Jesus, as declared in the New Testament and predicted in the Old.

When the apostle Paul visited the Jewish synagogue at Berea, in Macedonia for the purpose of declaring to them the gospel message about Christ, his companion and historian Luke describes the Bereans as being “more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word [message of Paul] with great eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. Therefore, many of them believed..” [Acts 17:11-12a]. Luke uses a Greek word that some translations render noble-minded or ‘open minded’. This seems to imply a mindset that is non-biased, or at least not profoundly so, a mind that is open to hear new or old truth claims, and assertions, but a mindset that withholds judgment and conclusion until the very necessary work of research and examination have been carefully done. The Bereans were not gullible; they didn’t take Paul’s message for granted [assuming it to be true] and they didn’t apparently believe based solely on probabilities, i.e. that Paul’s message might be true [presumption] but instead examined the scriptures daily to see if these things Paul was claiming were ‘so’ i.e. true. I suggest the Bereans were not mentally slothful-they carefully examined their already-believed- truth- source, the Old Testament scriptures, to evaluate the legitimacy of Paul’s message.

The practical realities of our daily lives however, hinder us from always making careful examination and fact checking every circumstance we face, e.g. we would not even be permitted to examine the airworthiness of a commercial aircraft before boarding, and the vast majority of us would not even be qualified to make the evaluation! We would thus be forced to either ‘assume’ it to be airworthy [without actual evidence that it is so], or ‘presume’ it to be so based on probabilities [i.e. most commercial planes in service are airworthy]. But the great, overwhelmingly important issues about death and life-its meaning and purpose, our destiny, the historicity of Jesus and His truth claims, and His scripture-asserted resurrection, ARE things we can examine to see what is ‘so’ or true, IF we also are ‘noble-minded’ to do so.

Have you drifted away from being more ‘noble-minded’ into a form of mental sloth, a state of intellectual rigor mortis, that has sabotaged your willingness and eagerness to learn in multiple or new areas of your life but especially in the area of what it really means to know Christ more deeply for who He is-who He actually claimed to be, thus hindering a greater abandonment to Him as His bondservant?[Phil 3:3-10]

CJS