Defense of the Faith - Recognizing Logical Fallacies

If you have the handout from this week, it has a supplement on it that is a quick review of what were the slides plus some new additional logical fallacies. It was an incomplete list in my slides and it became apparent as I was going over the list of quotes from various secular humanists and that there was there was opportunity for me to provide more information.

So what we're going to do is we're actually going to go over the quotes again, and we're going to talk in detail about the fallacies. In the case of some of the items, we're going to actually take a look at scripture to take a deeper look at what does the Bible say. Are these assertions that the that the skeptic or the critic is making accurate? Do they reflect a biblical worldview when they try to represent that worldview or not?

So hopefully this will be a useful time continuing on what we did last week but with greater detail. As always, if you've got feedback, it's good because it lets us know where we can spend time on these things so that hopefully it's a fruitful time. I want to draw attention to, in the supplement, a few of the logical fallacies I added compared to the list that we had before, because I think that will be helpful when we go over what the fallacies are. We already had from our previous discussion ad hominem and ambiguity and appeal to authority and appeal to emotion and argument from silence. So that's good. But also now added here on the next two are begging the question, which assumes the answer to the question is true or that the arguer or the arguers conclusion and then using that same as the proof or same answer as a proof.

So science is the only method of finding truth. How do we know that? Well, I use science to tell me that that's what I need to do. Or, why can we trust in the Bible? I'm sorry, why can we trust in God? Because God gave us the Bible, and the Bible tells us about God.

It's circular logic, or it basically, it's begging the question. And so when we answer in these discussions and we're discussing with people, on these topics, we need to make sure that we're doing so honestly so that we can have honest interactions. The next one on here is burden of proof.

So stating that a lack of evidence for position A proves that B is true is actually a really dangerous one in various contexts. But, for example, you cannot prove that Santa does not exist, therefore Santa is real. Because there's no proof that Santa doesn't exist, makes him real, is not a logical conclusion. That's not a safe place to jump.

For those of you who just got here, just a quick We're going to continue on from where we were last week. There's a supplement this week that adds to the list of logical fallacies, and we're just quickly going over the ones that I've added so that when we dive into the logical fallacies and the discussion of that, you have context.

The next one on here that's new is middle ground. This assumes that a position between two opposite positions is true simply because it is the middle. If we've got position A and position Z, then somewhere around L or M must be the middle, and that must be an adequate truth, because it's in the middle.

Well, that's not logically actually consistent at all. So the next one that's on this list, or I'm sorry, let me give the example. I believe in evolutionary intelligent design, because evolution and God are both good ideas. Well, that's not a thing. That doesn't make either one of them true just because it blends them. The next one is actually one of my favorite because the name is just awesome.

It's called the No True Scotsman Argument. It's by making an appeal to purity and moving the mark for an argument. So, for example, if I were to say, no Christians like bluegrass, and then Joe McCulley, who's not here today to defend himself, says, I like bluegrass and I'm a Christian, I could say, no true Christian likes bluegrass, you should re-examine your position on bluegrass. That's not really an argument. It's kind of a variation on the ad hominem attack, where you move the mark and end up making something personal or authoritative that isn't really a provable position.

The next one on here is personal incredulity, and that's if a person doesn't understand the position, then it must be false. I don't understand how electricity works, therefore electricity is magic. That's my position because I don't understand it. Well, that's not a rational or reasoned position. That's just drawing a conclusion. It's not a position at all. It's just being lazy about not understanding something. But just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it's not true.

And I think that's an important thing to embrace or to understand when we take a look at some of these positions on the Bible, for example. We already know about the slippery slope argument and the straw man. There's more. If you take a look at page one on the bottom, there's a link in the footers to Wikipedia, which I always put a warning on Wikipedia. That's not really controlled content. It could be erroneous or bad or the link could disappear or any number of things. But Wikipedia has a very thorough list of logical fallacies.

So if you really enjoy this discussion and you want to study even more, they're available. And there's actually some good material out there with examples. That being said, I felt like this list covers more than what we need for what we're going to do this morning. But now you have it so you can review it and look at it, rather than having it just been on slides.

All right, so I have here, we're just going to skip straight to the quotes, and then we're going to talk about the fallacies that are in the quotes, and then hopefully some of the scripture that I think either counters those ideas or brings some light to the topic from a biblical perspective. So the first one, again, is Rene Descartes. And he says, in order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt as far as possible of all things. So, what is at least one logical fallacy in this quote?

And I have an answer that I think is an answer, but if you've got one based on that list that jumps out to you. Where do you stop doubting? Yeah, well, it begs the question, you know, how do I find truth? And I can't keep just doubting, because the question that I would ask then is, can I doubt that I can doubt all things?

If you doubt that you can doubt, you know, you basically have this logical conundrum that you've proposed something that is not possible. So it's not a really great position to be in. I think what you're looking for with Descartes is this idea that you don't just take all assumptions and buy into them. I think that's what he was approximately trying to say.

But one important question from a biblical perspective, from our biblical worldview, where does truth get its definition? Do we define truth from the dictionary? that God used at Merriam-Webster? That's God's dictionary, right? He reads King James and he uses the Webster dictionary? No? Nobody's nodding yes to that.

So where do we get our definition of truth? Biblically speaking. It's got to be proven from the world's perspective. What we're going to talk about from a Christian worldview, from a biblical worldview. Where do we understand truth to come from? from scripture. Truth gets its definition in God.

I've got Exodus 34.6. I don't do a lot of quoting of the Old Testament, so this is kind of fun.

In Exodus 34.6, it's Moses with the Lord. Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth. Okay, so the Lord is abounding in truth. Truth comes from Him, yeah. non-moral truth.

Like, people argue that climate change or global warming, that's not a moral truth. So I would think that's not really an issue. So when we're talking about truth, we're talking about moral truth, is that right? Well, we're talking about truth as a principle, truth as an idea. first, and then you can break that down into subcategories, which could be moral truth or could be some kind of factual truth. But yeah, I mean, there are multiple subcategories that could be broken down into, but we need to have an understanding of where do we get the idea from truth from? Where do we derive this idea?

From a Christian perspective, God has an absolute truth and a sense of truth both morally and what is actually factually true. God can speak declaratively about and it is propositionally true. From a humanistic perspective, all we have is the best that we know now. Because more data could come in.

Does that make sense? Like even with global warming, with a lot of those debates and discussions, There is a tremendous amount of data that we have, but there's even more that we don't have. How far can we go back historically to observe the climate with any precision? To observe these one or two tenths or whatever fractions of change over the time. So what we're doing is we're extrapolating.

So even the idea of truth in that context is really best put as the best information we have to date. Verses with moral truth, and we can talk about absolutes a little bit more cleanly for some people. It upsets the relativists, of course. But you're right, there are subcategories of truth, and it's important to observe those contexts depending on the discussion.

But God is, from a Christian perspective, the ultimate source and authority on truth. He's not waiting for more data. He has all the data. He's outside and above and created the time-space continuum so he can speak authoritatively from our worldview.

Any other questions or thoughts on that first quote? So the fallacy is ambiguity? Well, I would say in the first quote that I think it's begging the question that you're basically, you're looping back in an infinite circle of how do we discover truth? Well, we doubt everything. Well, if we doubt everything, how do we know we have truth? Well, we need to discover truth, so we doubt everything in it.

So it's kind of circular reasoning. So it begs the question. Ambiguity is actually not too disconnected from that, actually, in the sense that how do we define some of these things with a moving target? It's hard to define something with a moving target. So I have begging the question, but there is some ambiguity that is actually part of the problem of the logic. So the next question.

Or the next quote here is, skepticism the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. Which is John Dewey's proposition there. This one has at least one good fallacy in there. So what fallacy do we see in this quote? Everything is empirical and therefore it can't be defined. Well, but what would be the name of the fallacy, if we look at the list of fallacies that we have there in the supplements, which one would be a good one to link to this quote? Strawman. Okay, Strawman is good. There's another one that I think ties to that.

I think this is a good example of the no true Scotsman fallacy, okay, and that's because Skepticism is the mark or the pose of the educated mind means that if you aren't skeptical, then you do not possess an educated mind. No true Scotsman, no true educated mind is not a skeptic.

So that's the position. Now, I'm skeptical of this skepticism. I'll just say it that way. Any opposing view is out of hand dismissed. Because he's already stated what his ideal perfection is. And if you disagree, you don't qualify. And you no longer matter in the discussion.

How about that? Well, education is an important thing. The funny thing is that Paul was, in the New Testament, incredibly educated. Moses was educated. The position is presupposing a whole lot of things about what the proper view is and discounts every single person who opposes the author of the quote.

So, how many of you have seen that Ben Stein movie about, oh shoot, I can't think of it now, the one about no God and science? Does anybody know what I'm talking about? If not, I'm going to look it up on the internet. I can't think of the name of it though. That's the embarrassing part. Have folks seen that? In the Ben Stein movie whose name I'm totally drawing a blank on, so I'm going to look it up on the internet. Expelled. That's what it is.

In the movie, he talks to scientists who were absolutely not allowed to publish articles in scientific journals because the journals are peer-reviewed. And the problem with the peer-reviewing is that if you disagree with evolution, for example, or you believe that there's a God, well, no one will peer review your article, so you can't be published. The position forces an outcome based on what I would consider to be bandwagon or group thinking, that you can't be published as a believer in certain contexts or certain circles because of its discrimination. And I think that's a very real and scary problem that we face as believers in a community. No one who believes in evolution will believe that you're a scientist or that you are an educated mind because you don't have the skepticism.

And that becomes kind of self-fulfilling and self-preserving. It defines education as having been sold on a worldview. Yes, your education is definitely defined. It doesn't matter what education you had or the amount or where you got it or anything else. It has to fit with this worldview or you're defined as uneducated.

That's really enlightened. And the thing is that the next quote actually I think is kind of an interesting juxtaposition to that. So the next one is from Carl Sagan. He says, I don't want to believe, I want to know. Okay. He must be educated. He wants to know, but not with skepticism of course, right? What does Carl Sagan believe? Well, yeah, exactly.

So what are some of the fallacies in that? Let's make sure we cover that half of the lesson here. What does it say about the humanist or secular mind, and what does it say about the believer's mind? That's a good way we can start to kind of discern what are the logical fallacies.

I think that There's two there's two, but I think one of them is a straw man argument. It says that someone who talks about belief Has no knowledge and cannot have knowledge which is a straw man presentation of a believer I'm on the next one with I don't want to believe I want to know Carl said This is Carl Sagan. Yeah, and A lot of these have this this other one and that is begging the question. Okay, so How do you know that you know everything? You can't. You can't technically know everything. That is inherently an impossibility in the universe as one single individual.

So, at some point in time, you're acting in belief. You're acting in faith. He's kind of mocking the idea of of having belief in something outside of you as being foolish. But the truth of the matter is that Carl Sagan, as educated as he was as an individual...

Has he passed away? I thought he passed away. Okay, good. I was like, I don't want to speak of him past tense, rudely. That wasn't my intent. But he was an educated man, but he also had beliefs that informed his position. And some of the positions of science have changed since he died. So things he thought he knew, he only believed. Yeah.

So we don't have this definition in this particular handout, but I wanted to briefly mention there's a part of philosophy called epistemology. And epistemology, I've heard defined One easy way to remember it is, how do we know what we know? But this week, as I was preparing for this lesson, I actually found another definition that I like a lot. So I'm going to share that with you also. And that is, epistemology is how we differentiate between what can be knowable and what is opinion. And I think that's an important distinction between how do we know what we know. Because in the end, when we talk about epistemology and we get to the point of the unknowns, Everybody walks by faith.

Was Carl Sagan, was any evolutionist around four billion years ago to observe the universe at that point in time and writing it down and journaling it and logging it for us to use today for information? Well, no. So what we end up having with that is we have an extrapolation. That's not science, that's an extrapolation. It's not based on the facts, it's based on we have data and here's how we choose to interpret the data. So there's belief that's there. But epistemology is this idea that we can distinguish between what we have facts on and what is an opinion or an assumption.

Carl Sagan has some issues. with his opinion and his facts. Because the fact is, everybody has a certain set of beliefs that underlie their worldview that are not necessarily tangible, factual things. Alright, any questions on those before we keep moving? Begging the question and straw man are my two that I would say are in there Was because one of them is it just saying I want to know I don't want to believe Doesn't actually get you to knowledge and belief necessarily, it's You know Not everything can be known by man So at some point in time you run into belief. I believe in evolution for example as an underpinning idea that can't be known with articulated historical factual information year by year by year going back until there are no humans because we evolved from some primate-type existence before that, if that's the position. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that we evolved from primates.

But the problem is that even Sagan has to operate under belief. Alright, so now into this next section, agnosticism, with the first quote by Charles Darwin. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I, for one, must be content to remain an agnostic. And I love that the evolutionary atheists always cite Darwin as the start, but Darwin himself just claimed agnosticism. I actually think if you're going to be a skeptic, agnosticism is the best you can do rather than atheism, but that's its own other discussion. So what are the logical fallacies?

There's at least three here that I think are kind of tied together. Okay, four. So argument from silence is part of it. Begging the question is part of it. We can't know, so we need to know, but we're going to decide not to know. But we know that we don't know, which is begging the question, how do you know that you don't know? Actually, I think the first half of the statement is correct.

Well, by us, yes. The beginning of all things is insoluble by us. Yes. Yeah. But the second half is where he goes off into nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. Because it denies that God can reveal the beginning of all things. Yes. Which is... He has revealed the beginning of all things. Yeah.

So we have this idea of almost a loaded question there. He has proposed that we cannot know because he's refused to accept scripture. So if you buy into the first half, then you're agreeing to refuse scripture. So that's the loaded question part of it.

And the other thing is personal incredulity. I don't understand something, so therefore it's false. Well, that's giving yourself a lot of authority, necessarily, that that's not there. What about the real true Scotsman? It's almost a lot of these are tied together in this kind of idea like well Right Yeah So that's that's a good point. There's there's some purity issues there.

I wanted to read briefly Romans 120 as much as I can I think it's it's good to to bring in scripture and of course Romans 1 is a very apologetic Chapter so we keep going there, but it's for good reason So in Romans 1 20 says for since the creation of the world his invisible attributes his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse and so Paul's argument here is that the universe exists God has put this thing together and Darwin says We can't know it.

We can't know where things came from. And Paul says, well, they didn't come from nowhere. So where'd they come from? They had to come from somewhere. And at least everything that we have in our knowledge of science and physics indicates that matter doesn't populate from non-matter. So Paul's argument is basically, we have material around us, how do we cope with that?

And Darwin says, we'll never know. Because I refuse to look at what's revealed there. And that's an unfortunate position. But there's a lot of different fallacies that are actually all tied into that one quote. This next one, Clarence Darrow, I'm an agnostic. I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. That one has got a couple humdingers in there. What are some of those?

Yeah. Presupposing that you are second to some of the people who are rejects. Yeah. The implication is that if you are certain of anything you must be ignorant. Yeah. So it's basically also because of that an ad hominem attack. I'm going to go discredit you and make fun of your character and your personhood. The word ignorant there is not a mild word. When you tie that ignorance with the word pretend, you're not messing around.

You have some strong opinions. And the funny thing is that it's a burden of proof. I don't have any proof. And I'm strongly here. So it's you prove to me. The burden of proof argument goes both directions. If there's no proof for something, it means that there's not a knowable position. But you don't get to say it's not true because you can't prove it or it's true and I can't prove it but you can't disprove it.

That's not a position. You could restate that and he could say, I am ignorant. I am ignorant. He does not know, so he's ignorant like the rest of the ignorant man. Yeah, well he's just not going to pretend. And that's fine if he wants to state it that way. But yeah, it's rather insulting. The ad hominem attack is an insulting attack. It's not a biblical one.

In Acts 1.30, I'm sorry, that's not right.

Acts 1.30.

There's not even an Acts 1.30.

Where did I write down Acts 1.34?

Acts 1.3. I added a zero for no reason whatsoever.

Acts 1.3. is being referred to, he says, to these he also presented himself alive after his suffering by many convincing proofs appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. There were witnesses to Christ. He was resurrected. He appeared and he was a witness and or he had witnesses to his appearance.

In fact when you read about the stranger on the road to Emmaus It's Jesus, and he shows up, and these two guys are walking, and, man, this guy knows a lot of stuff, and they sit down to break bread, and the Lord reveals himself to them, and they go, whoa, wait a minute! And they're so excited that even though they finished their journey, they then run back to Jerusalem to tell the people, we just walked with the Lord! That's really cool! And even though they'd arrived at their destination.

So, to say that these people are ignorant, or pretending, is again, an insult. We don't have faith in a myth or mystery. We have faith in the witnesses and the accounts and the facts and the revelation. It's not just in the hypothetical. We don't believe in pixies and a bunch of woo-woo stuff. There's revelation But there's also facts and historical things that tie in.

Well, yeah, absolutely. And so this week, here in Denver, we had Tony DeGrasse Tyson, whatever his... I don't have his last name properly said there, I'm sorry. He came and he spoke. And one of my co-workers that I work with actually went and listened to him and then happened to see him walking downtown and got his picture taken with him. He's very excited. My co-worker is an atheist. Who is this? Neil deGrasse Tyson is an atheist. I think he's an astrophysicist. But he speaks about evolutionary topics and the idea that Christianity is wrong quite regularly.

But evolution doesn't become true because I don't bandwagon or become an evolutionist because of the authority of Neil deGrasse Tyson. I still need to be able to observe things that are factual and consistent. So Clarence Darrow here, I'm not going to appeal to him as an authority, and this I think is because of the ad hominem attack and the burden of proof and things like that. It's probably not a great great authority to have. The next fallacy we've got here...

What did you end up with? Ad hominem and burden of proof are the two I wrote. Are you an agnostic? For Clarence Darrow. I'm an agnostic, yeah. The ad hominem attack I think is probably the most egregious because he uses the word pretend and ignorant and that's just insulting rather than actually There is no proof in what he's saying, he's just insulting.

And so it's burden of proof I have as a secondary one there. The next one, this guy's an agnostic and I think it's interesting, his approach to agnosticism is actually to approach this idea of pluralism, which is that multiple things are true, A and B. So he says, I deeply believe in pluralism. I believe in the close proximity of multiple systems or agnostic systems.

And I think that's really kind of a bizarre position. It's not a logical position. We can just say that. So if he's not embracing A or B, but he's embracing A and B, what logical fallacy is that? Yeah, which one on the list of logical fallacies is that? Which one? Well, it's rooted in skepticism, but the one I have is middle ground.

And the funny thing is it's an appeal to multiple authorities, which is also law. Just multiple authorities of different systems and saying they're all right. One of my favorite examples of this line of thinking is have you have you ever heard people talking about religion and they'll say something like I believe that the Buddha and Muhammad and Jesus and Moses all taught love and so all world religions can be summed up in love and we should just have love That one for me just gets under my skin and I find myself thinking things that are probably not very godly. So I usually don't respond to that because I would like to be silent rather than open my mouth and offend the heck out of somebody and maybe have them question my faith because I shot my mouth off. But this middle ground concept is that we'll just take multiple ideas, call them all equally true and blend them together Only then the reality is nothing is true. None of it is true.

Randy, the fact that he says, deeply, deeply believe, in a sense, that's kind of an appeal to emotion. That's true. Saying that, you know, I am a believer, and I deeply believe in this proposition. So, you know, we'll see a lot of this tomorrow, or today, but that's who we are. Yeah, marketing the multiple ideas. Push that button. And the funny thing is that what is interesting is he uses the word believe here.

It's not, I deeply, but he's honest, because in the end it's a belief thing, it's not a fact thing, it's not a truth or a scientific thing. Do all religious leaders teach love? and therefore their teachings are equivalent. Well, no. So it's not a logical position. Any thoughts or questions on that? See how much love they teach there. Otherwise I'm in no other comments.

I'm ready to move on to the the most Moses and Jesus Both represented a personal God Buddha knew nothing of God Yeah, and those branches of Buddhism that Believe in a God believe in an impersonal God. Yeah So their their teachings are not If you go to an artificially high level, you can come up with some sense of sameness, but there's actually a lot of ambiguity, the argument of ambiguity that has to tie into that. Stan?

And that's my frustration with trying to talk to Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and a lot of the cultic religions, because they're saying that they're Christian. And then you have to start off by disproving that they aren't. It becomes infuriating for me so I tend to pour as little energy into that as possible because I find I just get frustrated. So the next quote here as we move into this atheism section, I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

There's at least two that are here. Strawman, for one. Yeah, strawman is definitely one of them. And I also actually think that false causality is one of those. He's saying that if you are religious, it will cause you to be satisfied with not understanding the world. I know lots of atheists or agnostics who also really don't care about understanding the world.

They care about football. They care about baseball. They care about money. They care about cars. But they really don't care about understanding the world. And assigning religion to that position is an artificial correlation. It's not accurate causality.

One of the things that I love is that actually the idea of knowledge and wisdom is encouraged in the scriptures. Now, it's rooted in the idea that God is the God of the universe, but knowledge and wisdom are an important piece of what's revealed in Scripture.

How many of you have read through the Proverbs before, or the book of Psalms? In Psalm 119, 104, I always love Psalm 119 because it's so long, and you could say, let's read Psalm 119 and have a whole class go ash and white because they know, oh no, we're going to be here a while, right? Psalm 119. In Psalm 119, verse 104, he says, From your precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every false way.

From God's revelation, from God's position as God of the universe, I begin to get understanding, and I reject all the false things. That doesn't mean that I understand everything, but what I don't understand, I just go hide under a rock and don't worry about it. It's that I have a place that I'm starting my understanding from that is a foundation that's solid.

But when we read through the Psalms and the Proverbs, we get that there needs to be understanding. When we read Job, what does God attack Job on? Some of what He attacks Job on is his understanding and his thinking on things. You try to reason your way through this difficult time, and you attribute things that are not true, and you assume things that are not true. If you don't understand it, don't assume it. But that also doesn't mean that we don't learn, that we don't want to seek out that which is true.

So the idea of saying that Christians or religious people because because Dawkins hates all religion. So I want to be careful that we don't assume that Dawkins is just talking about Christianity It teaches them that they should be Not learning and that's just a straw man argument and it's false causality Alright, so we're down to our last couple quotes here but the next one is also Richard Dawkins quote and Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. The problem with that is, if you look at Isaac Newton, he was not a theist in this at all. He strongly believed that God is one of those who understand all he can. A lot of the message in the book is underlying the things that can't be proved.

You're laughing. I happen to have a couple dozen of Dawkins books. And I have them in PDF format so I can search through them. And cut and paste and things like that. He writes in several different books going on and on, sometimes for chapters about bats, for example.

Yeah. And he'll talk about the evolution of bats and all that. It turns out that there's absolutely zero fossil evidence for the evolution of bats. None. Zip. Yeah. The only thing is he believes that they evolved from rodents based on absolutely no evidence. Not whatsoever. Yeah.

In all of the chapters and chapters of writing about bats, he never lets on that there is zero fossil evidence for the evolution of bats. Talk and talk and talk about it. So the lack of evidence seems to be a problem he also faces by faith. He has faith in the evolution of bats even though there is zero evidence for it.

What's interesting, in that movie Expelled with Ben Stein, he actually interviews Richard Dawkins. If you haven't seen it, it's an interesting movie. I don't think it's the best piece of film that's been produced in the world, but there's some interesting discussions with people.

One of the things he does in his discussion with Dawkins is he asks him, where do you think life on the planet Earth came from? Where is the probability that life on the Earth came from? Dawkins' serious, straight-faced answer is aliens. Somewhere else. And he says it's probable. Again, if you say Richard Dawkins believes fully in his heart that all life came from aliens, that would be a misquote. But Ben Stein asks him, where do you think there is a great likelihood that life on the Earth came from? And his answer is some alien source.

Now, I don't know what your position is on the whole Area 51 thing, but I don't think that we have tangible evidence of aliens. To my knowledge, I have never seen tangible evidence of that. I don't think it's revealed in scripture, so I feel like from a Christian worldview, I don't spend a lot of energy thinking about aliens. But there seems to be a lack of evidence of aliens, and so going to that as a source for life on this planet seems Like faith. It seems a lot like belief in spite of or perhaps because of the lack of evidence. But you need something that isn't God.

What I heard him say was that they came from stellar space, which would indicate that aliens would come from there. Particles from stellar space could come to Earth and then procreate into a species. Yeah, continue to evolve here. Stellar space is a wonderful way of saying it didn't happen here. It was from there. But the general idea is that you end up having this really hypothetical that we've never been able to reproduce or see from a scientific perspective, but it's a position.

I think that there's not an actual misdefinition, logical fallacy, but I think he really tries to redefine faith and really tries to redefine what the Christian is trying to do. which is a strawman argument, and it's an ad hominem attack. When we look at the Bereans in Acts chapter 17, what do the Bereans do? They double-check the work. They're thinking and they're trying to be critical of what they're hearing and say, is this consistent with what God's Word says? They're not just believing it in faith and just going, that sounds good.

So from a Christian perspective, when I hear a person teaching a doctrine and I'm not familiar with what the scripture says, I go back and I double-check the scriptures. If I hear a doctrine that I am familiar with, I still should go back and make sure that I have a consistent understanding of scripture. The Bereans are a great example of that, and I love that it's recorded by Luke there. So, strawman, ad hominem, those would be the two fallacies that I would put there.

The next one is actually very similar to an earlier quote when we looked at John Dewey's quote about skepticism. He says, all thinking men are atheists. And that's Ernest Hemingway. That's at least a No True Scotsman argument. No true thinking man is not an atheist. or a theist, if we're going to say it that way, or a Christian. So we have the no true Scotsman argument there. The next, go ahead.

I guess, yeah, you'd be attributing, if you're thinking you will become an atheist, and all thinking men become atheists is a causality that I don't think you can prove, so that's a good point. Well, yeah, it does present non-atheists as not thinking men, so that there's an element of straw man there. For sure, yeah. The last quote here, and we're running out of time, but I really wanted to hit on it, is, properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. Isaac Asimov.

So, properly read. Really, really, really important two words there. Well, how do you properly read the Bible? If the outcome must be that the Bible is false and wrong and that you must come out the other side an atheist, then properly read is very carefully articulated and anti-properly read, what I understand. because I understand properly reading the Bible as God is revealing himself and that God had a plan and that mankind participates in that plan and God reveals himself and is gracious and loving and merciful and I read the Bible and I find myself falling in love more and more deeply with the Lord not becoming more and more of an angry atheist and I think I'm properly reading the Bible So what are some of the logical fallacies in that statement?

Yeah, okay, so there's some straw man to that. Okay, so there's an ad hominem where where you're saying that you're attacking people who don't come up with the result that you came up with as being improper or stupid or something. Okay? So if the pursuit of atheism is to find empirical truth.

If that's the case, then their goal in reading the Bible is to find out the error that's there and come to the saving knowledge of truth in atheism. Saving you from religion. That's their position. John 17, 17, Jesus says, he's praying for saints, he says, sanctify them in the truth, and he's speaking to the Father, Your word is truth. So if I'm properly reading the Bible, I'm going to, according to the Bible, discover truth. I'm going to discover things that are revealed as truth.

Isaac Asimov proposes the opposite of that. I'm going to find that it's not true, and that it's going to drive people to atheism. I don't think that's an accurate statement. I think it's a misrepresentation. It's definitely one of those no true Scotsman type of arguments, because if you didn't come through reading the Bible and become an atheist, then you didn't really properly read the Bible, according to his definition of things. Alright, that's the end of our list. We are about out of time for this lesson.

Is there anything in particular that you guys want to discuss or ask questions? disagreements, observations. Tom? If someone is willing to listen to what you have to say, and look at what scripture says, and you learn about grace, it deals with the issue of sin in ways that Humanism can't. Grace deals with sin and humanism doesn't. It can't. Were you going to say something? It's interesting to me.

We've been through a bunch of quotes here. in great part as you begin reading through a lot of the atheist literature, and I look at it quite a bit, what you find is just multiple logical fallacies again and again and again. There is a pretty regularly stated idea that atheism or agnosticism doesn't want to include faith in the discussion. But they fail to recognize that they are operating by faith or by a belief system in what they do. Their worldview, by trying to take belief out of the equation, is floating mid-air and has no grounding. And when you say, oh well, we don't have belief, in anything, just what we know today, you presume a lot about what you know today.

So, in the end, every worldview ends up walking by faith, whether they like it or not. And that's something that is sobering for a lot of people that I've had discussions with over time. The thing is that once you get somebody to the point of accepting that they're walking by faith, then you can discuss what are reasonable things to be walking by faith in. And as we go through the rest of this series, we're going to hit on topics like, is the Bible a reasonable book to get your information and truth from? Is the idea of evolution reasonable? If we can't prove that bats came from From what? From rats? From mice? Rodents of some sort?

It doesn't necessarily by itself make it unreasonable, but are there reasonable things that tie in there? The last thing I want to say, as we've talked about logical fallacies, is it's really important as believers that we don't commit these same logical fallacies ourselves in discussing it with people who are skeptical or atheists or agnostic. Logical fallacies can be committed by everybody. But if we're honest and we think about what we're saying, we can approach things in a way that reduces the chances of people saying, oh, they had like six logical fallacies in the discussion. They don't know what they're talking about and they dismiss you. That's really disconcerting. You want to avoid that. Stan?

I think that would probably, part of that comes from Whether it's your desire to persuade, or whether it's your desire to tell the truth, and then through that persuade. Because if you start off just trying to persuade somebody, then you have a tendency to fall into these arguments. Because that's what these people are doing, correct? They're trying to persuade.

I wrote an entire lesson that I didn't present to you this morning, and as I was thinking about it, there was a lot of stuff that I wasn't prepared to put into such a short lesson. But one of the things that was in what I wrote is the idea that a lot of arguing takes place in a loaded question scenario. We talk about things in the middle, assuming that a lot of stuff is already established. And when you do that, one, it's easy to lose because you've bought the question. And two, it's easy to go around in circles and not really address things. You need to listen to what's being said and hit the root issues. What's the base issue?

There's a whole line of people waiting to come in. We should close. We'll pray real quick. I apologize. But this is obviously a really cool topic for us to be able to explore and see what God's Word says. Heavenly Father, we ask that you just continue to reveal your truth and yourself to us and help us to be gracious, loving lights, and addressing the world with reason. And we thank you that you give us that reason. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.