A Step By Step Course in How Christians Argue Fallaciously
I had linked earlier to a site about Reasoning Fallacies. I think it's time to illustrate them with some real examples of how most Christians argue at DC in a series of short Blog posts. I'll illustrate several of the most blatant fallacies as I see them using that link's nomenclature. Don't get caught or I might write you up for it. ;-) This could be the beginnings of a book, we'll see!
17 comments:
in my estimation here are the top three
- Equivocation
- Special Pleading
- Straw Man
a little more thinking about it and these popped up
- Division
- Composition
- Analogy
|_The Hitler Fallacy
Here are some QuIRP blog posts I made discussing christian fallacies
Additionally they commit fallacies based on statistics,
and conflation,
for example on QuIRP I lump them all together as dualism, but christians confuse, soul, mind, spirit and consciousness, and use them interchangeably in however way they'll work in an argument, and ignoring whether it makes sense or not.
But generally they just use information that is over 1600 years old and needs updating.
God was and still is just a place holder for the unknown parts of how the universe works. In 1600 years, we've acquired quite a bit of knowledge to create a new baseline that the theists haven't kept up with.
Thinking more about it,
I spent quite a bit of time labeling peoples fallacies as they popped up, so you could get some ready made examples out of my old comments.
Probably most of them were comments about what Harvey was saying.
But I remember quite an exchange I had with Bill Gnade, not any specifics though.
Another good place to get quick references to fallacies categorized is in lists of cognitive biases.
Wikipedia has such a list, and it covers quite a bit of the fallacies but with more of a scientific edge since they've been studied through experimentation.
Thanks Harlan! Did you know I taught critical thinking classes on a college level?
yea, you mentioned it, along with the fact that you used to teach critical thinking to lawyers.
About three years ago, maybe more, you had a post about critical thinking in which I went on about how fallacies are a subcategory of "reasoning schemes".
Fallacies have the form of a "reasoning scheme" but don't have the warrant or data to back them up. For example a reasoning scheme is "an appeal to authority". This can be a fallacy if there is no support for it or it is misapplied, but this is one of those reasoning schemes, like appeal to emotion, or even a circular argument that can be misidentified by skeptics and theist alike as a fallacious simply because it has the form.
- appeal to authority is appropriate in the court room
- appeal to emotion is appropriate for raising money to stop witch hunting in Africa,
- and a circular argument can be valid if it takes the form of a feedback loop.
All these have a form that is usually considered fallacious, but those that consider them fallacious because of the their form demonstrate that they are not competent to recognize a valid argument when they see one.
Diagramming arguments helps out a lot in this respect. Diagramming forces one to closely examine the details.
Informal Logic is where the best and most cutting edge research is going on about fallacies. Some of the research going on in Informal Logic is used in computer science and applied to Artificial Intelligence.
Another branch of computer science that comes in handy is
information quality.
In order to start a decision algorithm, you need to make sure you have quality data to start with.
As I see it assessing Fallacious reasoning touches on
Game Theory,
because to model a living thinking organism requires 'self-interest' to be built in.
Decision theory
touches on this,
Complexity theory
to a small degree coupled with Decision theory.
Additionally,
High reliability organization,
and lets not leave out
bayesian epistemology.
And to round it out,
cognitive science and how the brain functions to perceive data, categorize it, store it, create relationships between it, and retrieve it for communication.
really they all use principles that can be applied equally across categories straight into real life, and used to slice and dice christian arguments like a knife cuts a cake.
The reason why is that the baseline for accumulated human knowledge has been dramatically updated over the past 1600 years but theists don't find any value in it so they stick with the last update to their baseline which occured ~350 CE for christians, and ~500 CE for muslims and for LDS ~150 years ago but still drawing from that old baseline when a better one was available.
even skeptics don't take advantage of the latest research instead choosing to draw on old arguments that haven't enjoyed much success in the past.
you pointed out yourself over at JL's blog that these debates are pointless as long as the presumption that a god exists is tolerated.
skeptics are pressing on the wrong issues in my opinion.
The problem of evil is a categorical fallacy because evil is not an object, it is subjective, so as long as the definition of evil can't be defined, the argument will have no resolution.
Most of the atheistic arguments that i have seen don't press the theist to define their parameters, instead they flail about in a quagmire of conflation and ambiguous terms. Sure its fun, but its just spinning wheels.
An analytical rather than a skeptical approach is what I use at QuIRP to "debunk" faith based thinking as a category rather than one religion specifically. I have someone that helps me with news articles that deatail in real time the harmful effects of faith based thinking which I call Faith Based Harm, while I work on using the data to formulate arguments.
Right now I'm doing a Information Quality Assessment of Pauls conversion, which I'm afraid is going to take a long time. But its essential for a book that I might write, of which I've discussed with you before.
oh yea,
another common reasoning scheme that I just thought of is
The excluded Middle AKA
the Black and White fallacy.
Harlan, then you can help me when you see something fallacious here to highlight. Email me with the text and link if you so choose.
Cheers.
Nice to hear that there is someone helping John. It is hard work deconverting people.
I not sure if I have used the Hitler fallacy because I am talking about how Christians are who think they are with God (Gott mit uns) can become extremely immoral. I spoke about Hitler being a Roman Catholic who has not been excommunicated and things like that. I will be glad if my mistakes as well will be in check.
I would just like to ask what fallacy it would be for the Christians to label anything I point out as Christianity gone awry as "antagonism".
Is there an equivalent course on how Debunkers reason fallaciously?
Did you not check?
Another good resources is fallacyfiles.org
fallacyfiles.org is one of my staples,
so is the thenonsequitur.com and the lsat podcast
aquinas,
debunkers can fall into the fallacy trap as well as anyone can if they are not disciplined.
It takes a lot of effort and practice.
Analytical and Critical thinking are disciplines and are not part of the usual cognitive toolkit people use day to day.
for practice, i recommend buying LSAT test prep books and using them like puzzle books.
Do one or two questions a day. That way you get the practice, and a way to measure you improvement since they give you a score at the end.
You can also find fallacies used in many arguments for the existence of God in the appendix of the book
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
Okay John, Let's see how commited to the project you are.
I wouldn't claim to know as much about fallacies as you but it seems to me that there are several here from your teachers aid:
one
Two
rob r,
its enough to just assert they are fallacies, you really to say why they are fallacies.
and as i pointed out over in the plantiga post,
just because john offers does not mean I'm compelled.
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