Category: Philosophy

Wilson vs. Hitchens: Is Christianity Good for the World?

A tran­script of the debate (.pdf) can be found here.… (Read more)

Peter Kreeft, Refuting an Argument: Second Fallacy

Last week I wrote about the fal­lacy of assum­ing that by refut­ing an argument’s con­clu­sion, there argu­ment is there­fore refuted. This week I want to write about the oppo­site fal­lacy, namely, that by refut­ing an argu­ment you’ve pre­sum­ably refuted the con­clu­sion1. Find­ing exam­ples for this fal­lacy is eas­ier than the last, so lets con­sider a few examples.

Exam­ple 1:

  1. God didn’t answer my prayer,
  2. There­fore, God doesn’t exist.

Exam­ple 2:

  1. Nature is beautiful,
  2. There­fore, God exists.

Exam­ple 3:

  1. You have a mustache,
  2. There­fore you must own a dog.

None of the con­clu­sions above fol­low from the premise that pre­cedes them. An unan­swered prayer doesn’t prove athe­ism, the beauty of nature doesn’t prove the­ism, and hav­ing a mus­tache doesn’t have any­thing to do with own­ing a pet; each con­clu­sion is effec­tively a non-sequitur. As bad as these argu­ments are, the con­clu­sions may still be true because the con­clu­sions aren’t depen­dent upon the argu­ment … (Read more)

Peter Kreeft, Refuting an Argument

school_athens

On my down-time I’ve been going through Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic (3rd edi­tion). The sec­tion I’ve just fin­ished read­ing1 dealt with ‘pro­ce­dural fal­lac­ies’, and two that I want to look at have to do specif­i­cally with refut­ing an argu­ment, or rather, think­ing we have when there is a good chance we haven’t.

The fal­lacy I’m going to exam­ine in this post is the mis­take of think­ing that just because you’ve refuted an argument’s con­clu­sion, you’ve refuted the argu­ment. Kreeft writes:

We do not refute an argu­ment sim­ply by refut­ing its con­clu­sion. What refutes an argu­ment is an analy­sis of the argu­ment that finds in it a term used ambigu­ously or a false premise or a log­i­cal fal­lacy, thus show­ing how the argu­ment went wrong and why it does not prove its con­clu­sion. What refutes an argument’s con­clu­sion (which is a sin­gle propo­si­tion) is another argu­ment prov­ing the con­tra­dic­tory … (Read more)

John Wilkinson: “Truth is Manufactured”

Truth is not grasped but man­u­fac­tured.
–John Wilkin­son, No Argu­ment for God, p. 38

Really? Truth is man­u­fac­tured? Wilkin­son proves his point with a rather odd argu­ment, which I’m going to dis­cuss below. Before that, though, I must won­der if Wilkin­son, when writ­ing the above, fully thought out the impli­ca­tions of what he was say­ing. I sug­gest that if it is ‘true’ that “truth is not grasped but man­u­fac­tured,” then there is no rea­son to take this state­ment seri­ously. Go fig­ure. (As a prefa­tory note, I hope I’ve mis­un­der­stood Wilkinson.)

Actu­ally, Wilkin­son moves from the propo­si­tion “rea­son is some­thing con­structed within our minds“1 to the con­clu­sion you read above. Quite a mas­sive leap in logic. To val­i­date his point he ref­er­ences William James, and to demon­strate his point he dis­cusses the sen­tence “Jan­u­ary is cold“2. Now a word before I con­tinue; because of the word­ing … (Read more)

Is God Necessary for Morality?

A ‘debate’ between Shelly Kagan and William Lane Craig.

(Read more)

Block-Logic vs. Step-Logic

For a while now there has been an e-mail going around, extolling the ‘virtue’ (I sup­pose) of Hebrew ‘block-logic’ over against the ‘step-logic’ of the Greeks. For quick ref­er­ence, the e-mail is as follows:

“For this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “Houses, fields and vine­yards will again be bought in this land” (Jer. 32:15).

In the scrip­tures we dis­cover a dif­fer­ence in the way the Hebrew mind viewed things com­pared to the way many West­ern­ers relate to God. Hebrews used some­thing called Block Logic. That is, con­cepts were expressed in self-contained units or blocks of thought. These blocks did not nec­es­sar­ily fit together in any obvi­ous ratio­nal or har­mo­nious pattern.

Greek logic, which has influ­enced the West­ern world, was dif­fer­ent. The Greeks often used tightly con­tained step logic which rea­son a premise to a con­clu­sion, each step linked tightly to the next in coher­ent, ratio­nal, log­i­cal … (Read more)

Is Everyone an Atheist?

Some­where, on some inter­net forum, some­one has said some­thing along the lines of ‘every­one is an athe­ist’. I know it’s the case because some­one said this very thing to me, and then neglected reply to the thoughts I had pro­vided them.  I’m going to pro­vide some dif­fer­ent thoughts here as we con­sider the ques­tion, “is every­one an athe­ist?” As always, we begin with some definitions:

The­ism: The affir­ma­tion of the exis­tence of God.
Athe­ism: The denial of the exis­tence of God.

As might also be appar­ent, ‘athe­ism’ is the nega­tion of the­ism, hence, ‘a-theism’ (a-, meaning, not).

Typ­i­cally the argu­ment goes some­thing like this: “Even though you believe in YHWH, you don’t believe in Zeus, so you’re an athe­ist (to the adher­ent of Greek mythol­ogy),” or “Even though you believe in YHWH, you don’t believe in Allah, so you’re an athe­ist (to the Mus­lim)”. Does this claim make sense? I don’t … (Read more)

‘Ought’ and Naturalism

If nat­u­ral­ism is true, can there then be ‘ought’ state­ments which are morally objec­tively bind­ing? By ‘ought’ I mean a ’ moral oblig­a­tion’: mur­der is wrong, there­fore I ought not mur­der. Dis­obey­ing the law is immoral, there­fore I ought to obey the law. Slan­der is wrong, there­fore I ought not slan­der, etc. These sorts of moral oblig­a­tions I under­stand as objec­tive, or absolute. They hold author­ity over human exis­tence, and find their ori­gin out­side of the human mind. They are part of the fab­ric of the uni­verse, unchang­ing. If nat­u­ral­ism is true then it seems to me this can’t be the case, and not for lack of trying.

If nat­u­ral­ism is true, then it seems to fol­low that the uni­verse lacks mean­ing out­side of the mean­ing a mind (such as the human mind) may give it. The uni­verse has no inten­tions, it isn’t sen­tient, it doesn’t have a plan or … (Read more)

Is / Ought Problem

TU asked for my opin­ion on the ‘is’ / ‘ought’ prob­lem, so this is exactly what I’m going to do. I haven’t really cared to look into it much, so TU, feel free to cor­rect me where I’ve mud­dled things up.

From what I under­stand, the ‘is’ / ‘ought’ prob­lem states that we can­not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is,’ that is, a descrip­tive state­ment does not entail a pre­scrip­tive con­clu­sion. For exam­ple, ‘the earth exists’ does not entail the ‘ought,’ “there­fore, Jim ought to be respon­si­ble and not lit­ter”. But what of the is-statement ‘bind­ing moral guide­lines exist’, fol­lowed by the ought-statement, ‘there­fore we ought to live morally’? This seems to entail an ought from an is, if you hap­pen to believe in moral absolutes. So it would be that some ‘is’ / ‘ought’ state­ments are possible.

Oth­er­wise, lack­ing the exis­tence of a deity then I have to … (Read more)

Self-Interest and Selfishness

Very often the dic­tio­nary is a good repos­i­tory of def­i­n­i­tions, while at other times it causes need­less headaches. I say this because I am hav­ing a prob­lem with the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘self-interest,’ let me show you with three examples:

Oxford Dic­tio­nary:

Self-Interest — one’s per­sonal inter­est or advan­tage, espe­cially when pur­sued with­out regard for others.

Merriam-Webster:

Self-Interest 1. a con­cern for one’s own advan­tage and well-being or  2. one’s own inter­est or advantage.

Dictionary.com:

Self-Interest1. regard for one’s own inter­est or advan­tage, espe­cially with dis­re­gard for oth­ers or 2. per­sonal inter­est or advantage.

It seems that ‘self-interest’ can have two dif­fer­ent though very sim­i­lar mean­ings. The first mean­ing is sim­ply ‘con­cern or regard for one’s own inter­est or advan­tage’ while the sec­ond is essen­tially the same, with the addi­tion of ‘with­out regard for oth­ers’. You see, I’m argu­ing that this dif­fer­ence (which the dic­tio­nary illus­trates) … (Read more)