Fame

Con­sider the famous; those you’ve never heard of.

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 pro­vided. Thus, to be absolutely cer­tain that an argu­ment has been refuted, one must show inad­e­qua­cies in both the argu­ment and the conclusion.

Definition of a Religion

It’s that time of year again.

No, no one that I know of is dis­cussing Hebrew ‘block logic’. They also aren’t describ­ing Ein­stein as a stu­dent whip­ping his pro­fes­sor. It’s that time of year where all your Facebook-Christian friends get together and say some­thing unthought­ful like, “Chris­tian­ity isn’t a reli­gion, it’s a rela­tion­ship!” Think I’m over­re­act­ing? These 23, 719 peo­ple all agree that Chris­tian­ity is NOT a reli­gion… Wel­come to the world of false dichotomies, I say — why can’t it be both? ‘Sun­day Chris­t­ian,’ ‘Face­book Chris­t­ian’… Someone’s going to hit me for say­ing this, but I find it really annoy­ing, and I’m Chris­t­ian. *Deep breath*

Now since I’ll get in trou­ble if  I leave com­ments for these well-meaning but uncrit­i­cal peo­ple, I fig­ure I would express my frus­tra­tion here. Let’s first of all deal with the dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of religion.

Accord­ing to Merriam-Webster, a reli­gion is “a per­sonal set or insti­tu­tion­al­ized sys­tem of reli­gious atti­tudes, beliefs, and prac­tices”; it can also mean “a cause, prin­ci­ple, or sys­tem of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”. Fair enough, what does Oxford have to say about reli­gion? Well, Oxford tells us that reli­gion is “the belief in and wor­ship of a super­hu­man con­trol­ling power , espe­cially a per­sonal God or gods” or “a par­tic­u­lar sys­tem of faith and wor­ship”. Surely there is a def­i­n­i­tion which pre­cludes the pos­si­bil­ity of a per­sonal rela­tion­ship, but not accord­ing to dictionary.com, which tells us that reli­gion is “a spe­cific fun­da­men­tal set of beliefs and prac­tices gen­er­ally agreed upon by a num­ber of per­sons or sects”.

Let’s put this in point form; reli­gion is:

1. A sys­tem of reli­gious atti­tudes, beliefs and practices
2. A sys­tem of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
3. The belief in and wor­ship of God
4. A sys­tem of faith and worship
5. An agreed upon set of practices

You know what is a really good exam­ple of the above? A church ser­vice. Heck, even James chap­ter 1 con­sid­ers ‘Chris­tian­ity’ to be a reli­gion… So why all the hate for the dic­tio­nary, and holy writ? I have no clue (so if you are one of these peo­ple, please enlighten me).

So let me say it clear as day: Chris­tian­ity is a reli­gion…
…and a relationship!

Some Johnny Cash

Upcoming Reviews

As things go, I am read­ing a num­ber of books for review in the upcom­ing weeks. Here is some infor­ma­tion on those books:

“Chris­t­ian Apolo­get­ics: A Com­pre­hen­sive Case for Bib­li­cal Faith” by Dou­glas Groothuis

This first book, pub­lished by IVP Aca­d­e­mic, is due to be released Sept. 2011. As the title makes plain, this is a rather large attempt (720 pages) at an argu­ment for bib­li­cal faith. Divided into three parts — Chris­t­ian Apolo­get­ics, The Case for Chris­t­ian The­ism and Objec­tions to Chris­t­ian the­ism — it pur­ports to answer such ques­tions as what the Bib­li­cal foun­da­tion for apolo­get­ics is (Part one), what the argu­ments for the exis­tence of God are (Part two), and pro­vides answers to some of the most com­mon objec­tions to Chris­t­ian the­ism (Part three). These and the other top­ics Groothuis engages — such as a defense of truth and expla­na­tion of the Chris­t­ian world view — con­sist of some very deep ques­tions, so it will be inter­est­ing to see how Groothuis han­dles them given only 720 pages (by mod­ern stan­dards this might seem long, but is actu­ally very lit­tle space if all of these top­ics are to be dwelt with in a sat­is­fac­tory manner).

For more infor­ma­tion about the book and a Google pre­view, head to IVP’s web­site, here. Author Dou­glas Groothuis, pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Den­ver Sem­i­nary, also has a per­sonal blog titled “The Con­struc­tive Cur­mud­geon,” which you can find here.

“Doing Phi­los­o­phy as a Chris­t­ian” by Gar­ret J. DeWeese

The next book I will be review­ing, also to be pub­lished by IVP Aca­d­e­mic in Sept. 2011, is Gar­ret J. DeWeese’s (pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy of reli­gion and ethics at Tal­bot School of The­ol­ogy) “Doing Phi­los­o­phy as a Chris­t­ian”.  I haven’t had much time (yet) to skim through this book, but I do know a few things about it. Firstly, this is a book aimed at Chris­tians major­ing in or enter­ing into the pro­fes­sion of phi­los­o­phy. Sec­ondly, it isn’t an intro­duc­tion to major top­ics in phi­los­o­phy but rather a guide as to how best think about these top­ics as Chris­tians. Finally, it isn’t an apolo­get­ics text, unlike the book above.

Oth­er­wise, DeWeese devotes chap­ters to meta­physics, epis­te­mol­ogy, ethics and aes­thet­ics; the phi­los­o­phy of the mind, the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence and Jesus and phi­los­o­phy. If you’re a stu­dent of or inter­ested in phi­los­o­phy, this might just be worth pick­ing up. To find out more infor­ma­tion about Doing Phi­los­o­phy as a Chris­t­ian please check out IVP’s infor­ma­tion page here.

“The End of Chris­tian­ity” ed. John W. Loftus

The sequel to John W. Lof­tus’ The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion, this lat­est effort rep­re­sents another vol­ley from (fun­da­men­tal­ist) ‘new Athe­ism’ against fun­da­men­tal­ist Christianity.

Again tak­ing the form of a col­lec­tion of essays, Lof­tus (M.A., M.Div, Th.M) and com­pany pre­sum­ably plan to build an cumu­la­tive case against Chris­t­ian the­ism, show­ing it to be irra­tional at best, destruc­tive at worst. Divided into four sec­tions, chap­ters are devoted to top­ics such as the res­ur­rec­tion, nat­u­ral­ism and moral­ity, the atone­ment, evo­lu­tion of Chris­tian­ity and Hell (among oth­ers). While Lof­tus’ last effort wasn’t as dev­as­tat­ing as he would prob­a­bly like to think (after all, why write a sec­ond book if the first did the job?), it was still described as one of the best works to con­sult to under­stand the  “posi­tion of con­tem­po­rary free thinkers” (Matthew Flan­na­gan, Philosophia Christi, Vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, p.  236.) We can hope that this work rep­re­sents another such effort.

For more infor­ma­tion about The End of Chris­tian­ity you can visit the books web­site, here, the pub­lish­ers page here, or John Lof­tus’ blog, Debunk­ing Chris­tian­ity.

Peter Kreeft, Refuting an Argument

On my down-time I’ve been going through Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic (3^rd 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 of that con­clu­sion. ²

To demon­strate this fal­lacy, I’ll pro­vide a stream­lined form of John Wilkinson’s argu­ment that “Truth is not grasped but man­u­fac­tured” ³. Accord­ing to Wilkinson:

1. “Jan­u­ary is cold” is a true state­ment.⁴
2. “Jan­u­ary is cold” is not a true state­ment in Aus­tralia, where, in fact, Jan­u­ary is warm.
3. It thus seems that the truth of the state­ment “Jan­u­ary is cold” depends on our per­spec­tive.
4. There­fore, per­spec­tive deter­mines truth.

The instinct of most is to refute the con­clu­sion (4) by ask­ing the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, “is that a mat­ter of per­spec­tive?” It is also most peo­ples instinct to leave the rest of the argu­ment alon. The bulk of the argu­ment has unfor­tu­nately been untouched, and for all we know the premises may be cor­rect in and of themselves.

As with the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion above, an incom­plete refu­ta­tion would look some­thing as follows:

1. “Jan­u­ary is cold” is a true state­ment.
2. “Jan­u­ary is cold” is not a true state­ment in Aus­tralia, where, in fact, Jan­u­ary is warm.
3. It thus seems that our geo­graphic loca­tion deter­mines our expe­ri­ence of ‘Jan­u­ary’.
4. There­fore, per­spec­tive does not deter­mine truth.

This argu­ment refutes Wilkinson’s con­clu­sion (truth is not a mat­ter of per­spec­tive), but leaves his actual line of argu­ment alone. The result is two very sim­i­lar argu­ments pur­port­ing to prove two con­tra­dic­tory con­clu­sions. The end result is con­fu­sion for the reader.

To prop­erly refute this argu­ment, we would need to expose a “term used ambigu­ously or a false premise or a log­i­cal fal­lacy”. In this case it seems to me the sim­plest way to go about this is to dis­pute premise 1, “‘Jan­u­ary is a cold’ is a true state­ment.” This premise lacks qual­i­fi­ca­tion, as the most obvi­ous ques­tion goes unan­swered, where is Jan­u­ary cold? It goes with­out say­ing that in recent years, New York expe­ri­ences a cold Jan­u­ary while Aus­tralia expe­ri­ences a warm Jan­u­ary. This isn’t a mat­ter of per­spec­tive — no New Yorker could sud­denly decide Jan­u­ary was warm, just as no Aus­tralian could sud­denly decide Jan­u­ary is cold — but of geo­graphic loca­tion. Wilkin­son thus glosses over why we expe­ri­ence a cer­tain sort of Jan­u­ary (our loca­tion) and incor­rectly con­cludes that (in this instance) our per­spec­tive deter­mines the truth of a par­tic­u­lar statement.

Such a refu­ta­tion would look as follows:

1. It is true that New York­ers expe­ri­ence a cold Jan­u­ary.
2. It is like­wise true that Australian’s liv­ing in Syd­ney expe­ri­ence a warm Jan­u­ary.
3. Our expe­ri­ence of Jan­u­ary depends upon our geo­graphic loca­tion.
4. There­fore, per­spec­tive has not been shown to deter­mine truth.

By refut­ing only the con­clu­sion in each exam­ple, we leave a poten­tially con­vinc­ing line of argu­ment open to the reader. The result is con­fu­sion -  two con­vinc­ing argu­ments pro­vid­ing con­tra­dic­tory con­clu­sions. To avert such a stale­mate, the argu­ment as well as the con­clu­sion must be shown inadequate.

So there you have it; if you’re going to refute a con­clu­sion, make sure to also refute the argu­ment lead­ing up to that par­tic­u­lar conclusion.

Editor of Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” Talks About the Book

In a recent blog post, edi­tor (?) of Love Wins, Mickey Maudlin, dis­cusses what he per­ceives to be an overly hos­tile and sec­tar­ian response to Bell’s lat­est effort. Read here: http://www.newsandpews.com/2011/07/rob-bells-hell-by-mickey-maudlin-harperone-senior-v-p-executive-editor/

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 in this por­tion of the book, I am not sure if the exam­ple being used is an inven­tion of Wilkin­son or James — I have not read James out­side of a few quotes.

So that sen­tence, “Jan­u­ary is cold,” which our author describes as a “true state­ment,” is the crux of the argu­ment.³ This sen­tence is actu­ally a bit prob­lem­atic, because it lacks the qual­i­fier found in the pre­ced­ing sen­tence: “if it is Jan­u­ary in Amer­ica it makes sense that it is cold out­side“⁴. Fair enough, you think; Wilkin­son is assum­ing that his read­ers will carry over that qual­i­fier. When we read “Jan­u­ary is cold” we under­stand that what is meant is “Jan­u­ary is cold [In Amer­ica]”. While this would make sense, this isn’t what Wilkin­son has done from what I can tell.

Wilkin­son continues:

Of course it would make no sense to go out­side in your bathing suit [in Jan­u­ary]… If some­one went out­side in a bathing suit in the mid­dle of Jan­u­ary, we would say they are crazy because bathing suits in Jan­u­ary don’t fit our way of think­ing. Jan­u­ary and cold go together, there­fore a twenty-five degree day on Jan­u­ary 1 in New York City makes sense. It fits the sense data stored in our mem­o­ries.⁵

But, you think, ‘Jan­u­ary is cold’ isn’t true in a place like Aus­tralia. Wilkin­son would agree with you, point­ing out that in a place like Aus­tralia, bathing suits would be nor­mal in Jan­u­ary (as would “cook­ing on the grill”).⁶ It’s all a mat­ter of per­spec­tive, Wilkin­son would argue. It is true that it is ‘cold in Jan­u­ary’ in Amer­ica, and ‘warm in Jan­u­ary’ in Aus­tralia. It’s all a mat­ter of per­spec­tive⁷, and there­fore, truth is manufactured.

So it turns out that it was impor­tant, after all, for Wilkin­son to move from “Jan­u­ary is cold in Amer­ica” to “Jan­u­ary is cold”. It’s a dis­hon­est trick, whether inten­tional or not.

Because here is the odd thing. At the bot­tom of page 36, and the top of page 37, we read: “Just think of it: the idea of cold really does not exist out­side the human expe­ri­ence. Cold is just a word we have given to atoms that travel at a slow speed”. What I don’t under­stand is why Wilkin­son hasn’t grasped that he’s argu­ing “cold is arbi­trary” on one hand, while on the other affirm­ing that “cold is a descrip­tive state­ment about a par­tic­u­lar atomic state”. No human would argue, for instance, that –150 Cel­sius is not cold, and this should be Wilkinson’s proper focus: the state we under­stand as ‘cold’. By con­flat­ing “what is cold” with “Jan­u­ary is dif­fer­ent in New York than it is in Aus­tralia” he misses the point by focus­ing on sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence to the exclu­sion of all else.⁸

We ought to thank Wilkin­son for point­ing out the obvi­ous and then scold him for fail­ing to show that truth is man­u­fac­tured. This is an espe­cially egre­gious error when con­sid­er­ing some­thing other than Jan­u­ary, per­haps the sen­tence “YHWH is God”. Would Wilkin­son be will­ing to claim that we don’t grasp this truth about YHWH, we man­u­fac­ture it? Being a pas­tor, I hope not.

John Wilkinson: No Argument for God

To the left is a book I just received, John Wilkinson’s No Argu­ment for God: Going Beyond Rea­son in Con­ver­sa­tions About Faith (Inter­var­sity Press). I have to say that look­ing at the book, I’m a lit­tle ner­vous. It just so hap­pens that I’m read­ing a rather sub­stan­tial apolo­get­ics text at the moment, so to receive this book, which describes itself as a ‘Post-Apologetics Apolo­getic’ (I’m quite hon­estly get­ting tired of ‘post-’ what­ever ter­mi­nol­ogy), is quite ironic (or, at least, I think so).

I’m ner­vous when­ever any book claims to ‘go beyond rea­son’. It’s one of those odd things, one must gen­er­ally use rea­son and logic and argu­men­ta­tion to ‘go beyond’ rea­son and logic and argu­men­ta­tion. I also won­der what the sig­nif­i­cance of the dead bird is?

In any case, the back-cover reads as follows:   

New athe­ists trum­pet the claim loudly, so much so that it’s become a sort of con­ven­tional wis­dom. Pro­fess­ing your faith in God sounds increas­ingly like a con­fes­sion of intel­lec­tual fee­ble­ness. Believe in God sounds as cute and quaint as it does point­less. John Wilkin­son con­tends that the irra­tional­ity of faith is its great­est asset, because ratio­nal­ism itself sets arti­fi­cial lim­its on all that we’ve seen–which itself is hint­ing at some­thing greater that can’t be seen. In No Argu­ment for GOd he turns the tables on the cult of rea­son, show­ing that it lim­its con­ver­sa­tion to what hap­pened, when what we really want is the why behind it. We set­tle for inves­ti­ga­tion when what we need is revelation–the answer to all our long­ings. Read this book and break through the grid­lock of apolo­getic argu­ments to a life-giving encounter with the God who sat­is­fies our minds and seeks our good.

Softening the Truth

One of my favourite kinds of stores is the book store. What bet­ter place to be, than some­where con­tain­ing vol­umes of knowl­edge (the library, some­one quips). When I went to the book­store I made sure to always browse the phi­los­o­phy, his­tory, reli­gion and Chris­tian­ity sec­tions. (I use the past tense, ‘when,’ because book­stores where I am from charge a ridicu­lous exchange rate and pre­vent me from buy­ing — not that I could buy any­thing any­way.) The Chris­tian­ity sec­tion, as these things go, was filled with all sorts of non­sense and inter­est­ing read­ing. It’s inter­est­ing the kind of books they put on dis­play, ahead of all the oth­ers; books by Rob Bell and Brian McLaren, books by Tony Jones and Pete Rollins… Even books by the ‘New Athe­ists’. In other words, books by those who are gifted com­mu­ni­ca­tors, able to tell a story that sounds new and inter­est­ing and invit­ing (or controversial).

I remem­ber flip­ping through these books (many of which I own) and think­ing to myself, ‘How great would it be to use this mate­r­ial to reach peo­ple?’ It’s not all bad, I used to think to myself; there is some good here… But then I would con­sider my motive for why I wanted to use the mate­r­ial of authors like these and oth­ers. Was I doing it to bet­ter reach peo­ple, or to soften the mes­sage? Have you ever seen a book­store pro­mote a book on the real­ity of Hell, or the exclu­siv­ity of sal­va­tion? Have you ever seen a book­store pro­mote a book on the real­ity of sin and redemp­tion? Truth be told, I haven’t. I’ve never seen a book pro­moted that wasn’t in some way ‘ear tick­ling’. Nor have a seen a book pro­moted sim­ply because it was con­tro­ver­sial. The con­tro­ver­sial book pro­mot­ing the real­ity of Hell is not so much seen as the con­tro­ver­sial book chal­leng­ing the real­ity of Hell.

I call it ‘soft­en­ing the truth’ in the title, but really it isn’t. What it really is, is lying, and decep­tion — a way to sugar coat and soften an at once very easy and very hard message.