Apologetics & Debate: Logic part 2

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Continuing our class, we will look at how to use logic to evaluate arguments.

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Well, welcome back to Passing the Torch, I'm your host Randy Adkins, and again today we are joined by Andrew Rappaport, who is striving for eternity and he will continue as he has been to teach us apologetics and debate.
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How are you brother? Well, I'm doing better than I deserve and I'm looking forward to class number seven, which means we have one class left.
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Right. Ah. It's flown by, isn't it? So quick. Yes. So, for folks who are taking the class for credit, remember we gave out those that are so to take it for credit, you want to, you know, either contact
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Randy, HAPS, or myself if you want to contact me, I'll just say it's info at striving for eternity .com.
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Info at striving for eternity .com. That will be one way you can get ahold of me and I will get it to whoever you need.
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But most of the folks are in Facebook, in Passing the
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Torch, and there is a group chat that we have and those in the chat have received already the links for both the midterm, which is due by next week, and a right now very empty list of people who are signing up for their debates.
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So students, you need to go to the spreadsheet and find a partner and do some debate to get some debates.
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Now, we will have for students only a private meeting that if you're, if you're with the class, in other words, you have to have taken your midterm final, signed up for a debate, and we will,
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I'm going to be setting up a private room where it'll be invite only to those who have taken the class and we will be reviewing the debate that I just had with Matt Slick in Utah at the
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Utah Christian Research Center on the topic of the continuation of gifts. We will be evaluating that.
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That will be a chance for you guys as students to review that ahead of time.
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It's going to be coming, it should be released I think around July 1st, but you guys will have the assignment of reviewing that beforehand.
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And then we will have a private meeting where we will discuss well, how well both of us did some of the things that you guys have been learning in class.
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We're going to use that as a way of examining some of the things we've been learning. So that is going to be for, again, only for those you have to take the midterm, the final and sign up for a debate.
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You've already missed the quiz? Well, there's still time. So Randy, I don't know if you still have the link for the midterm, but you can maybe put that up for folks to show.
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And so I literally just flew in this morning from Utah. I was out at the
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Utah Christian Research Center. I did eight sessions on different apologetic topics, the uniqueness of Christianity, can we trust the
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Bible, did one on Roman Catholicism. Yeah, there we go. Well, that's the, is that the quiz or is that the, you have to check, yeah, that's the right one.
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It was the one that you didn't put the mid, with the thing midterm on. So there's the link for the midterm for those who are watching.
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So eight sessions, did Roman Catholicism, did social justice, did a session on evangelism, defending the faith, did eight sessions in three days.
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And we wrapped up that night with a debate on do the charismatic gifts continue to today with Matt Slick and myself.
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Matt Slick is from karm .org. I see someone saying who won Slick versus Rappaport.
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I would say it was me, but I might be biased. My bride said it was me.
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So I'll say this. I'll say that the audience was polled and not everyone in the audience voted clearly because they only had like 11 votes.
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Three people thought it was a tie. Three people thought I won. Five people thought Matt won. Now, obviously not everyone voted, but that voting is actually tainted because we set up ahead of time that the loser between Matt and I had to sing happy birthday to Ed Romine, which
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Ed said, either way, it sounds like it's a torturous birthday present for him. And my theory was that the worst of us ends up having to be the one embarrassed.
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Well, we discovered that people voted against Matt because they just would rather hear me sing than him sing.
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And I said, that's not really a fair vote. So that backfired.
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They voted on who they didn't want to hear sing. I don't know if that's a good thing because I don't know.
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Matt might be better than me at singing. But I don't know. I don't know.
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I've never heard either of y 'all sing. That's a good thing for you. You can sing here if you want.
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No. So we are in class number seven now.
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So we have covered things about what is the purpose of doing debate and apologetics?
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What is apologetics? We talked about our character we should have when doing apologetics.
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We talked about the fact that debate and arguments are not necessarily bad.
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Being argumentative, that would be. We also discussed the two areas that we said we want to focus in on is the area.
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Laura would like to know if I would sing now. No, no, Laura, you do not.
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It's something that you know how you get a song in your head and you can't get it out. This is like a nightmare in your head that you can't get out.
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OK, you don't want that. Trust me. So we've looked at two areas that I said we're going to focus in on this class when it comes to apologetics and debate.
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And those are the two areas that I think if people want to do apologetics,
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Christian apologetics, the areas you need to know well. And that is hermeneutics and logic, because those are the two tools that you will use the most when it comes to debating.
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You want to know that you're following the rules of interpretation. That's what hermeneutics is.
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You're following those rules of interpretation so that you're not misrepresenting God's word.
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You also want to know those rules so that when someone else is violating those rules, you can spot it and point that out.
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There's the other thing that we want to be able to do is examine logic. And in the area of logic here, what we are doing is looking at statements or arguments people make to see are these good or bad arguments.
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Is there something they've said that is illogical in their statement? So we can have lots of examples.
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I could say that every person who has a goatee is a very mean person.
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Randy has a goatee. He must be a mean person. Now, is that a good argument?
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No. Just because it's personal to you or for other reasons, Randy? For other reasons.
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It's not logical. What would be wrong with that logical statement?
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So it's assuming that everybody who has a goatee is mean, right?
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That's the illogical aspect of it. Let's use it again. Everyone who has a goatee is mean.
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Randy has a goatee. Therefore, he's mean. This is a logically valid argument.
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We talked about this last week. Deductive argument is one where the statements are true and false.
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And therefore, they could be tested. And so when we look at it, it would be logically valid.
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Only because of the fact that, and Humble Clay says, bearded brothers are better brothers.
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We could use that as their, okay. It could be bearded brothers are better brothers. Andrew doesn't have a beard.
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Therefore, Andrew's not a good brother. Because this works both ways here, okay?
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Because it's got the same issue, okay? It is a valid argument because the premise, which is in this case, people who have goatees are mean.
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That's the premise. The conclusion is Randy has a goatee. Therefore, he's mean.
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The premise directly leads to the conclusion that makes it valid, but not sound.
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The reason it's not sound is because the premise in this case is false.
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That all men that have goatees are mean. It is true in the conclusion that Randy has a goatee, but because the premise is that, well, actually, the conclusion is that Randy is mean.
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So there's two premises here, one that is false and one that is true. The fact that all people that have goatees is mean is false.
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The fact that Randy has a goatee today is true, but that Randy is mean becomes false based on the fact that the initial premise is false.
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So when we talked about deductive, we mentioned the idea of sound arguments.
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I was mixing the two, logic and sound. Yeah. So sound is valid, a logically valid argument where all of the premises are true.
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So you need those two pieces. You not only need it to be where the premise directly leads to the conclusion, but you also have to have it that each of them are true.
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Now, we said deductive is the easiest. And if you're just tuning in and you're saying, hey, this is all new to me, well, then you got to go back to last week's show, right?
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And tune into that so that you can make sure that you have all of this, because this is really important to get down, because we're going to move on from this this week.
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But I want to review quickly. And so what we're looking at is the fact that as we look at this, a deductive argument is going to be one where it is valid.
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So the premises directly lead to the conclusion and all the premises are true.
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That makes it sound. If either of those are not true, either there's a premises that are not true or it's not valid, then it is not sound.
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It is an unsound argument. This is with deductive. So again, the deductive arguments are those where you have statements.
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And just to remind you, a statement is going to be a something that has a truth.
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It's going to provide information. A deductive argument is going to be one that is made up of statements, provide some information, and it has a truth value.
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Now, in the case of a deductive, that truth, it is clearly that it's a true or false.
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We also talked last week about an inductive argument. And the inductive argument are those that are going to be referred to as a strong or weak argument.
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Because here you're not having something where you can prove each of the premises as true or false.
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The deductive has a premise that is true or false, but in an inductive one, it is where your premises are something dealing with probability.
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What's the probability of something? Okay, so let's say, and I don't know where Randy lives,
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I don't remember, but we're going to give a different state just in case to protect his guilt. But if Randy lived in Texas, we could say all
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Texans or most Texans own guns. Randy lives in Texas.
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Therefore, Randy owns a gun. Now, if I said all
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Texans, that is deductive. If I say most Texans, I'm now talking about probability.
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So what is it going to take to make, to see if this is strong or weak? Well, what we're going to talk here, so we're not talking about valid or invalid.
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We're going to talk about its strength. Here, what we're going to look at is the probability.
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We might want to look at, well, how many Texans are there in Texas? And then how many of those own guns?
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If the probability is in the 90 percentile, it sounds like it might be a strong argument.
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However, there's a couple of things that we're going to see in the inductive argument.
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When we try to decide if something is a strong or weak argument, because when we look at this, we've got to figure out, well, what is the probability of something?
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And so today we're going to look a little bit deeper at that. But when we look at the inductive argument, we're going to look to see if it's strong or weak.
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Like I said, if say 95 percent of Texans own guns and Randy lives in Texas, there's a high probability, a high degree of probability that Randy owns a gun.
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I happen to know whether he does or does not own a gun, just saying, but we're not going to talk about that here.
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Because, you know, he would probably, if he had a gun, shoot himself in the foot.
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But so how do you know that I haven't?
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It must have been someone else's. So now I know why you walk funny.
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I was always wondering that weak argument is one where the conclusion does not follow with a high degree of probability from its premises.
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OK, so what you're looking at in this is evaluating each premise, primacy, and look at the probability of it being true.
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So deductive, it is true or false. Inductive, it's the probability of it being true or false.
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OK, so we want to remember that. Now, how do we evaluate in the case of a deductive?
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Well, we saw that in or inductive. So deductive, it is that you have a sound argument when you have some a valid argument and all the premises are true.
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When it's when we come to deductive, we talked about a word cogent.
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So instead of it being sound or unsound, this is cogent or uncogent.
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And a cogent argument is going to be one that is strong. In other words, you have you have the premises are all a high probability of being true and they lead directly to the conclusion.
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And all of the premises are true. So in both cases, all the premises must be true to have a good argument.
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Deductive, you're looking for it to be valid. So it leads directly, the premises lead directly to the conclusion.
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Where in an inductive, you were talking about being cogent and cogent means that you have a strong probability of it being true.
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Now, when we look at this, there's something we have to keep in mind when we talk about probability.
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So let's let's do a scenario. If we have, let's say we have a number of tennis balls and we paint those tennis balls white and black and we put it into a machine that is going to shoot the tennis balls out to Randy, who is going to attempt to return the tennis ball across the net.
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Now, whether he makes it over the net or not doesn't matter in this scenario. The question is the probability of Randy getting a white ball or a black ball.
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Well, in that there's some things you're going to need to know. How many balls are there?
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OK, let's say there's 100. OK, how many of them are white?
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How many of them are black? Let's say they're 50 -50. Now, if they're 50 -50 and Randy has been receiving tennis balls, he has received 75 tennis balls and 45 were white.
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The probability of getting a black tennis ball is more likely now.
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Now, that gives you the higher probability. The difference becomes when we look at this, if we don't know certain things.
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So Randy is counting his white balls versus his black balls as they're shooting out of the tennis ball machine.
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And he's got to calculate because he's going to have to give this probability. And he realizes that he has 75 white balls that were shot at him and only five black ones.
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Now, he may, based on that alone, conclude that the probability of the next set of balls would be black, except for the fact that the missing piece of data could be that there were only seven black balls altogether.
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Now, all of a sudden, the probability is higher that the next set of ball, the next ball that comes at him would be white.
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So, if he had 500 balls in there, he's got 75 that came white, four, three that came black, but there were only five black ones altogether.
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And he's only seen 78 balls.
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But there's another 400 -some balls, right?
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The majority of them are all going to be white. With that difference in information, that radically ends up changing what
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Randy would expect to be a high probability. So, when we talk about inductive, we have to remember that with inductive, we are looking at the probability and there's several factors that we need to know.
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It's not enough to say, I know how many balls there are at the beginning. And how many are white and black?
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That would make it a lot easier. But a lot of the times, you're not going to know that. People are going to put an argument forth that is based on something where you have to use probability in an argument.
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And you may not know the information to be able to know if it's a high probability or not.
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So, let's use an argument you may get when you're out evangelizing. Someone may say that the earth is millions of years old because we can look at radiometric dating of rocks and know that the radiometric dating shows that the earth must be millions of years old.
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Now, this is something where we can evaluate each of these premises. So, in that argument,
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I gave you the conclusion up front. The earth is millions of years old, right? Everyone doesn't argue in a nice way where they start with their premises and lead to a conclusion.
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In this case, I gave you the conclusion up front and a series of premises. Now, we can look at this and say, can we do radiometric dating on rocks and things?
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Yes, that's something we can do on fossils, things like this. There's certain things that we end up seeing where we're now having to use probability.
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What is the probability of the radiometric dating to be able to measure millions of years?
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Now, the reality is that when you're looking at radiometric dating, it can only go 30 ,000 some years.
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With that piece of information, I now know that the probability of something going, of using this style to measure millions of years wouldn't work.
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So, what I'm now looking at is saying, well, this is a probability thing, and this suddenly becomes a weak argument if someone argues that way.
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But you have to know something about radiometric dating in this example. To know that it becomes a weak argument.
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Now, why am I saying it's not a false argument? Because it's not, the way that they'll do it is not an exact science.
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In other words, they may do some dating where they, one of the things when you submit like a fossil for dating, one of the issues they'll ask is, what layer did you find it in?
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Did you find it with something else that is dateable? What date do you think it might be?
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And so, what ends up happening is the fact that, and I know that one of the scientists there at the
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Institute of Creation Research put something in that they found two pieces of,
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I forget if it was wood or bone, that they sent in for dating. And they purposely gave, they found it in the same layer, it was right next to each other, sent both in for testing.
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One they said that they thought it was a few thousand years old, the other they said they thought it was a few million years old.
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And they basically gave it with the evidence. And it was amazing that both of them came back within the same dated period that they assumed it was.
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Right? And so, when you look at that, it's not a true or false argument.
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You have to know something about how they come up with the dating. So, when we look at this, we have to say that this is a probability.
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We're deducing the answer, not from the exact things that we have, but having to look at it and infer something.
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Okay? So, we deduce it through inference. That's what we're going to do in an inductive, is to induce something.
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We're going to infer it from the arguments. Okay? So, now, let's move on from this.
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So, those are the deductive that we looked at last week. We started last week on inductive. And now, we want to talk about ones that, well, they get even stickier.
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Because the next ones that we want to talk about are ones that are even less clear.
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And they are conditionals. When we look at a conditional type of argument, this is one that is going to have something that's going to state that there's going to be an antecedent and a consequence.
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So, the antecedent is the statement within the conditional statement that immediately follows something like the word if.
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And the consequent is the part of the statement that will follow something that has the word then.
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So, you could think of this as an if -then statement. So, if something, then something.
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The way we would say this is if A, then B. If B, then
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C. Therefore, if A, then C. So, if you have something, if we're saying in that example, we always like to start with nice, clean, easy examples.
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It's always good to do that. So, if you... Got a bird outside.
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Yeah, here. So, if we have something where we say, if you are a citizen of the
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United States, then you have a right to vote. If you...
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Well, let me do it differently. If you are a citizen of the
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United States, then... Or sorry, if you're a citizen of Texas, we'll stay with Texas, then you are a citizen of the
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United States. If you are a citizen of the United States, then you have a right to vote.
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Therefore, all citizens that live in Texas have a right to vote.
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So, what we're doing there is there's several if -thens, right, there's three of them in that case, that lead to the conclusion.
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So, in this case, you have the two antecedents, or the two premises that are made up of the antecedents.
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If you live in Texas, you're an American... If you're a citizen of Texas, you're an
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American citizen. If you're an American citizen, you have a right to vote. Those are your two premises.
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They both have the antecedent and the consequence. Your conclusion has the same.
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If you're a citizen of Texas, then you have a right to vote.
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So, you will see people that will do this. Now, when you have an if -then statement, what you're looking for here is to see, again, are each of these statements true?
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Do they directly connect from the premises to the conclusion?
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So, the basic pattern that we're seeing is the same. So, if you don't remember the difference between sound and cogent, that's okay.
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What I do want you to notice is the pattern. The pattern is that in each of these, you have statements that provide information you're looking for that are true or false statements.
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So, what you're looking for is you're looking for the premises making a connection to the conclusion.
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So, when you make these premises, they all have to lead to the conclusion in each one of these, regardless how it's labeled.
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And then the other thing you're looking for is are each of the premises true? Those are the two things that you need.
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And if you can learn to identify that, just those two things in each argument, you are able, even if you don't remember, is this sound?
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Is this cogent? That doesn't matter. What does matter is that you can show that the premises lead directly to a conclusion and that all the premises are true.
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That is what makes for a good argument, okay? Some arguments, though, are going to be harder to identify.
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You're going to have some arguments that an if, like the deductive ones are easy because they're clearly true.
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It's something where it's an all or nothing type of thing. It's true or false.
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There's no wiggle room. Hypothetical ones, the if -then condition, that actually is kind of easy.
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The ones we're going to deal with, conditional statements. So these are going to be somewhat easy to identify because you're going to hear if this, then that.
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Then you could be able to spot that. So what you're looking for there is you want to get all those together, okay?
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And so this one is one that's similar, okay, to the hypothetical syllogism, which is the one that we just talked about, the if -then.
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It's a conditional. There's ones that could be, that we refer to as chain reasoning or reasoning in a chain.
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Now, this is going to be, and by the way, I should have mentioned this from the beginning.
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One of the reading assignments you had was the book How to Think Clearly, a guide to critical thinking by Doug Earlison.
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And that is what I'm using to go through this class. Um, so that was one of the required readings.
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If you have not read that yet, you should have because we're almost done with class. No, but what it does mean is that if you haven't read it yet, when you get to this, these, to that book, this should be something then you're going to see, it's going to help you to dig a lot deeper.
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Okay. I'm not going to ask Randy whether he did. He's probably been up on a roof.
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And it's really hard to read a book on a hot roof while roofing and not fall down when you have the book in your hand.
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Just saying. It was actually, it was a deck. Oh, it's a deck. Yeah, it's 40 foot long.
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Yeah, it's a decent sized deck. If you fall off the 40 foot deck, that's only less than a foot off the ground.
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It's nine feet off the ground. Okay. So that would hurt you if you fall off.
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Okay. Put the book down. Read it, read it. Not when you're working and not when you're driving.
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Okay. So you can see that there'll be chain arguments. These are going to be ones that they're like the hypothetical ones that are conditional, but these are going to have usually a word like all.
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So this is to give the way all A are B, all
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B are C, therefore, all A are C. So this is going to be a little bit different because what you're doing here is looking for things that are chained together.
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I'm going to give the example here and it may not always have the all, but you can chain arguments together.
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And so I want to make the distinction here to say that when you're chaining it together, these are ones that are going to say all.
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You can chain statements together that don't necessarily have the word all because you can have multiple premises.
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So I just want to state that so people think reasoning in a chain. Um, this is reasoning in a chain with when you're using all, not most.
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If I say most, Randy, if I say most, which one of these do
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I have? Deductive, inductive, hypothetical, or a chain?
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Inductive. Inductive because you're looking at probability. Good. So with this, what we're looking for is all.
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So all tennis balls are yellow. All, let's see, how would
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I use this one? Because I should have like written some examples down, but all tennis balls are yellow. All, all tennis balls are round.
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Therefore, all round balls are yellow. Now that's, that's not a good argument because well, actually not all tennis balls are yellow.
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Right. So therefore, even though it is formed correctly, right?
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We talked about the form, that being whether it's valid, whether it's cogent, or sorry, whether it's, uh, whether it's valid or whether it's a high probability, right?
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That's, that's the form. And then the premises have to be true. So in this case, though, the form might be right.
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What we end up seeing is that one of the premises is false. Okay. We could, we could look at some others where you have a disjunctive syllogism.
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And in this case, you're going to be looking for words here that are like either, not.
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So the way that we would do this one is to say either A or B, not
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A, therefore B. So, so the way that you end up seeing this one come in is this is going to be something where, as an example, if I say, uh, and I know
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Randy, this is a hard one for some people in our culture to, to understand these days, but it is still biblically and true.
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And it is well, absolutely true. But if we use this as an example, uh, that Randy, that people are either male or female,
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Randy is not female. Therefore Randy's male. Right.
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Okay. What you have there in the either, or is a, what we would refer to as a true dichotomy.
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So it's, it's only two possibilities. If we were talking to some leftists, they're going to look at that argument and say, that's not true because you have a third option and they make up some new gender
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Z or whatever it is. They call themselves, right? So they would say, this is not logically valid because they find a third option.
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When we talk next week about logical fallacies, this, that would be a fallacy of the excluded middle.
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And the idea there is that if I say something, if I said that, um, uh, the
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Bible is only to be read in the King James or the
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Bible is only in King James English or new world translation. The Bible is not in new world translation.
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Therefore it's in King James. The problem with that is in that first premise, we have other translations, right?
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So there's other things that could be substituted. So when we talk about this, the either, or has to be a true dichotomy.
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In other words, there's only A or B. There's no other options. There is no C. That's why with genders, you're male or female.
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If we were to say the light either is on or is not on, well, there's no other option there.
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So in that we can, we could take this. The reason this argument is called the disjunctive syllogism is because it always has the either or statement in it.
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So that's how you can notice this one. Some people refer to it as either as an either or argument, but this one is going to be, you can spot it by that language, either or.
43:55
And so with this one, what you're again doing, you're looking at the form and the truth of the premises.
44:02
And if you just remember those two things you have to identify, it will be much easier for you to see, because what you want to do, and I said this in the very first class, you want to be looking at what the premises are, because if any of those premises are false, you can then point that out.
44:23
This is what I end up doing in debate. I'm listening for the premises, more so than the conclusion, a lot of times.
44:31
Now what I am looking for the conclusion, I'm just looking is, okay, is this formed well?
44:37
Does the premises lead to the conclusion properly? And then the other thing I'm listening for is each premise to see, okay, does the premise come to be true?
44:49
Is it true? Or in the case of inductive, I'm going to have to look at whether it is strong, whether there's a higher or weak probability.
44:59
And so I'm trying to make this easy. I want you guys to learn some of the technical stuff as well, because most people just look at it and say, oh, well, we're just going to look at the logical fallacies and people memorize the fallacies.
45:14
But there's a ton of fallacies. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. You have to memorize all of those.
45:22
But instead of memorizing all of those, an easier way is just to get in the practice of identifying the form and the truthfulness of the premises.
45:32
That is a much easier way. So I may not remember the fallacy and we're going to go over probably at least a dozen of them next week.
45:40
Okay, that'll be the last class. But that is not, like,
45:46
I may not remember them all. There are so many different fallacies out there. And we have to understand those, but I don't need to understand those to know, for example, the one that I just gave, if there is a third option,
46:01
I don't have to remember what the fallacy of the excluded middle. It's also sometimes called the either or fallacy.
46:11
But what I do have to be able to identify is if I can spot that there's a problem with the premise, you're saying it's got to be
46:21
A or B. But if I know of a C, then that answers it. So the example often given for this would be, or we say, like, if it rains.
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Okay, sorry, the ground is either dry or wet.
46:41
Or, you know, I'm trying to think of a good one offhand, because the typical one we would use for stuff is say, like, if it rains, the ground is wet, the ground is wet, therefore it rains, right?
46:52
When I look at that, I can immediately say, well, there's something missing because there's other options. Right? Same thing with the either or.
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In the either or, it has to be a true dichotomy. So there can only be two options. So if someone says, if you hear them in their argument say either or, right, and they give you two things, they're giving you this type of destructive syllogism.
47:22
So now what you're looking for is, the first thing I look for when I hear that is, is there a third option? If there's a third option,
47:30
I now know that that argument is a bad argument. And what am I going to do? Point that out.
47:35
Do I need to say, sorry, you're violating the fallacy of excluded middle?
47:41
No. I don't need to remember that. What I do need to know is how to point out that the argument's bad.
47:51
I had, when I was out in Utah, the talk that I thought was the least controversial was the one on evangelism.
48:01
I mean, I talked about social justice. Everyone was in agreement. Fine. I talked about how to defend the
48:08
Bible. I talked about differences of evidential apologetics and presuppositional apologetics.
48:15
No problems. I talked about the uniqueness of Christianity. No problem. Whether you could trust the
48:21
Bible. No problem. I talked about evangelism and people were triggered. We had a couple that was triggered and they made statements that, you know, well, here's basically the statement.
48:32
They said, Jesus didn't die, like no one goes to hell for their sin. When Jesus was on the cross, he paid for all their sin.
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Universalist. And well, no, not because they said the only reason people are in hell is for the sin of unbelief.
48:50
Now, I noticed something in there. Now, by the way, when I said something to him and he said, that's a straw man.
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And I had to say, I'm sorry, but it's not a straw man because I'm using the proper definition.
49:07
He wanted to talk about election. And when I answered, he said, that's a straw man.
49:13
I said, no. I said, a straw man is when you set up a false definition to easily knock it down.
49:23
Now, that is where you hear people that throw something out. That's a straw man argument. And if you don't know what the straw man is, you might think, oh, okay, but when you, and that's why we are going to look at some of the fallacies so that you know what they are.
49:37
So if someone does that to you and throws it out, it's like, you can spot that that's a problem. But there was a logical problem that I pointed out in his argument.
49:46
Jesus died for all sins. Unbelief is a sin.
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People go to hell for their unbelief. You see, if Jesus paid for all sins, that is an all category.
50:05
Well, unbelief is a sin. So if unbelief is a sin, then it had to have been paid for.
50:16
And this is where I tried to reason with him logically to see that there was a problem.
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Now, it was kind of funny because they said that earlier in the conversation. And so I knew what their view was, but I continued the conversation.
50:29
But I said, did Christ die for all sins? And they both, this couple, both of them said, yes.
50:35
So I said, is unbelief a sin? And the wife said, yes. And the husband went, well, it depends.
50:45
Now, why did he say that? Because he knew if he says yes, he had a illogical argument.
50:54
He had a bad argument. So he wanted some wiggle room. The reality is he had already stated to me that the only sin that people go to hell for is the sin of unbelief.
51:09
So by getting that up front, I could use that later. So this is an example of how it's used.
51:18
And if you go, you can go to Utah, just search for the Utah Christian Research Center.
51:26
They will have these out on their YouTube page. They're going to be doing it over a period of eight days. The first one will be the debate, and then they will do them all together.
51:36
So the video I'm referring to there will be video number nine. So you got to wait nine days.
51:42
Once the debate comes out, you got to wait nine days for it. And you can see the exchange. So this is how we try to use these.
51:51
And I really, really want to emphasize that you don't need to know all the fallacies.
51:57
You just need to be able to look for the form. In other words, do the premises lead to the conclusion?
52:04
And are the premises true? So it's the form and the truth of the premises. That's what you're looking for.
52:10
Okay. And as long as you do that, you'll be able to spot it, even if you don't know which fallacy it is.
52:18
Okay. So now, one of the things that we want to look at in a little bit of time that we have left is, you know, we want to think about what to do when someone makes an illogical statement.
52:36
You have a couple options. When you're doing apologetics or debate, you don't have to point it out right away.
52:44
You don't have to point it out at all. Or you could. You have the option.
52:51
But I mean, I tend to want to point it out. And, you know, so that it's clear, right?
52:59
I'm not going to say what this is. But in the private viewing that we'll have for the debate, and I may invite
53:10
Matt Slick in for that so that we can get both sides in the discussion of the debate.
53:16
But you will see in that debate that there's something that I will state up front using a harmonetical principle that I will state in my opening that we then see that will be a major point for Matt's argument, which is why, you know, you'll have to decide whether he made a good harmonetical argument for why he does that.
53:41
The difference is I will lay out which rule it is. I'll explain the rule. And Matt ends up explaining the way he does study.
53:50
Okay, so you'll have to decide whether he followed the rules or not. So that's the sort of things we look for in this.
53:57
We're looking for are the premises true? Are they following to the conclusions? And so therefore,
54:04
I don't necessarily need to know all of those things. So let's take just quickly talk about some issues with the one we're going to deal with the most.
54:20
We kind of dealt with it already, but we have the inductive, right?
54:26
And that's going to be harder because, you know, the inductive reasoning is going to be something that it's, you're dealing with probabilities, right?
54:38
And so you're looking at the trying to predict what's going to happen.
54:44
These are going to be ones that these are the hardest ones to deal with. Okay, and that's why
54:50
I wanted to come back. I started it last week. I wanted to finish up with it this week is because it is one of the more difficult ones to deal with.
55:01
And it is one that is what you're going to deal with the most. It would be great if everything is deductive.
55:07
And I could just say it's true. It's false. Done. Okay. Oh, I just saw a comment there.
55:15
That last comment, if you want to put that one up, I should really answer that very important question. Who bought dinner,
55:22
Andrew? Well, I am happy to announce that once again, Matt Slick called me a jerk.
55:30
Because as smart as he thought he was in getting a meal paid, he failed in his logic.
55:38
So here's what happened, Humble Clay. We went to a
55:44
Mexican restaurant. Matt figuring that I don't know Spanish. He could talk to the cashier in Spanish to say that he wants to pay for the guy behind him and the woman.
55:57
So he says to her that he wants to pay for the two of us. He's already ordered.
56:02
I've yet to order. He assumes that because I don't know Spanish, I don't know what he's doing as he hands her the credit card and she puts it on the side of the counter.
56:13
Well, Matt makes a major fupa. He decides to walk off and use the restroom.
56:20
As I am ordering, I lean over the register and take Matt's credit card, which he no longer has in her possession.
56:29
And I hand her my credit card. So as Matt is walking out of the restroom, comes around the corner.
56:36
She has now rung up the bill on my credit card. I am waving his credit card in his face in my hands saying, sorry,
56:44
Matt, you didn't buy lunch. So the goal was that the winner of the debate was going to be able to buy dinner.
56:53
Matt said on his radio show that he was going to be buying me lunch. And I said, fine,
56:59
I'll buy dinner, you know. But it turns out we only had dinner and I got to buy. So that's yeah, humble clay.
57:07
It was a fail again. For folks who don't know Matt Slick, it took him nine years to actually buy me.
57:15
We've had this kind of, you know, fun contest back and forth where he tries to outsmart me. And every time
57:21
I get him, he did get me in epic fashion on the 100th episode of Apologetics Live.
57:27
He had food delivered during the show. It was great.
57:33
So you can go back to episode 100 of Apologetics Live and watch that. Poor poor Jason Lyles is explaining his brilliance and why
57:40
Apologetics is important. And I got someone at the door giving me food. It was really funny.
57:48
So all of that aside, what we end up seeing when we do the inductive, we're looking for arguments with the strength of their arguments by based on the probability.
58:01
And this is where it does become hard, especially if you're in the area of a debate, because you may not know all of the pieces of information that's needed to be able to decide that this argument is strong or weak.
58:20
You might not know the probability. The examples I gave when we talked about the tennis balls, how many of them are white?
58:27
How many of them are white? You may need to know how many are left and how many of each color, right?
58:33
There's more you have to do to understand that. And so this is when we look at the ones that we're looking at the cogent, whether the argument is cogent or uncogent, these are going to be harder.
58:48
And so you want to be able to spot whether it is one of these inductive type of arguments or whether it's one of the deductive type.
58:55
Because that will make the difference. Now, next week, what we will be doing is we will look at different logical fallacies.
59:06
We're going to spend our time looking at, well, I mentioned some straw man argument, ad hominem argument, the excluded middle argument, true
59:17
Scotsman argument. All of these different ones we're going to look at so that you have some ideas of how to answer these things, how to spot them.
59:25
Now, it is helpful when you can say that you know, hey, that's a no true
59:37
Scotsman fallacy. If you recognize what it is and you know how to say that, you know how to point it out, it will strengthen the point.
59:47
You should be able to point out, as I did in this class, with the fallacy of the excluded middle.
59:55
I would point it out. So Randy gives me an argument and he says, you know, tennis balls are either yellow or orange.
01:00:09
Now, I could say that is a logical fallacy. That's the fallacy of the excluded middle because I happen to have some tennis balls that are blue or the tennis balls could be blue.
01:00:22
So what am I doing there? And this is a tactic that you can use in debate.
01:00:28
This isn't for apologetics, not so much. Because apologetics, what's our goal? The gospel, right?
01:00:35
But you may be doing a debate. And in a debate, it's good to be able to point out what the fallacy is they're doing.
01:00:43
Now, when you're doing apologetics, you could still do that because someone is, you know, it is a form of debate.
01:00:52
And it strengthens your argument when you rightly know what the fallacy is and can point it out.
01:01:00
But don't just point it out, explain the fallacy. Why? Because when you explain the fallacy, it adds weight to it.
01:01:11
If the gentleman who told me, well, that's a straw man argument. Well, he didn't actually have the right definition of a straw man.
01:01:18
So later, when he said something to me that actually was a straw man, I was able to point out, well, that actually is a straw man argument because the definition you're using for election is not the right definition.
01:01:34
So you're saying that Calvinists are wrong in their use of election, but you're using a different definition of election.
01:01:42
That change of definition is what makes it a straw man. So when you not only use the fallacy, but explain why it's a fallacy, two things happen, especially if you're doing apologetics and there's other people around.
01:01:56
If you say that's a fallacy of the excluded middle and the other person has no clue what that is and the people that are listening have no clue what it is, they just move on and ignore it.
01:02:09
If I say that's a fallacy of the excluded middle and I'm talking to Randy and Randy knows what it is, but someone else is sitting there listening in and they don't know what it is, they don't know what's wrong with the argument.
01:02:20
Right? If your goal is to convince the two people you're talking to and only one understands it, then that doesn't help you.
01:02:28
So by giving the definition, by saying, well, that is a fallacy of the excluded middle because there is a third option.
01:02:35
It is not a true dichotomy. The tennis ball could be blue, right?
01:02:41
Now what I've done is define it so that the others know and that way it strengthens, it's a tactic you can use in debate, but it strengthens your argument by defining it, pointing out why it's a logical fallacy.
01:02:59
Now, if you don't know the logical fallacy, that's okay. Because if you remember what we learned in this class, as long as you are sitting there and looking for are all the premises true and the form is properly formed, you're looking for that or not.
01:03:15
So if you find any of the premises that are false or you see that it's not properly formed, then you can point that out whether you know which fallacy it is or not.
01:03:26
Okay? So I hope that this has been helpful. I hope that you've learned a lot.
01:03:31
If you have, may I suggest that you share these classes with people, right? Join us in the
01:03:38
Passing the Torch Facebook group so that you can be part of the quizzes and tests.
01:03:46
Again, the midterm is due next week. So if you want to be part of that private group that is going to be evaluating the debate that Matt and I had, you better make sure you get your midterm in right there at the bottom.
01:04:01
I think I did mine though, right? You did yours? Yes, you did. But you must get at least the midterm, the final, and schedule the debate.
01:04:13
Okay? So those are the three things you have to do. We will have next week,
01:04:19
I will give you the link to schedule the debates so that we can have that ready for you.
01:04:27
So that if you want to do that, you'll be able to. So I think that is all that we have for today.
01:04:35
So with that, I will hand it over to you. To close out class.
01:04:42
All right. All right. Well, you heard him. If you want to join the class, if you want to join us and all those things, midterm, get a hold of one of us, me on Facebook, Randy Adkins.
01:04:58
You said it was info at strivingforeternity .com? Dot com, correct. Okay. For reaching
01:05:04
Andrew Rappaport. And with that, have a blessed day.