Apologetics and Debate Class: Logic Part 3

Final Review of Logical Fallacies and Course Logistics

Welcome back to Passing the Torch. I'm your host, Randy Adkins, and we are joined again today for our final class in this series with Andrew Rappaport with Striving for Eternity, and he will, as he has been, continue to teach us apologetics and debate.

How are you, brother?

Are you still eating dinner? Did you bring food to class? Is that what you did?

Maybe.

And you didn't bring any for the teacher? I cannot believe you.

I tried to email you an apple, but it didn't work.

It is bad enough that you're trying to, you know, suck up to the teacher that you took the midterm twice. It would've been really funny if you failed, if you passed the first time and failed the second twice.

That would be funny, but I passed it twice.

You did.

Why don't you put up for folks the, and this is only gonna be good for those who are watching live, pretty much, because put up the midterm first, so the link for the midterm, because that is due tonight.

So if you're watching this later, it's too late. So that is the link for the midterm. May for the final, you should put like final exam colon, and then the link so folks know the difference. But the midterm is due tonight, July 1st.

2014, for whoever's watching later. People later on could take the midterm. That's not a big deal. But you will have to get it done tonight if you would like to be part of, well, I mean, it'd be really hard if you fail this one to pass the class and get to join.

What we're probably gonna do is have a debate review. The debate that I had with Matt Slick just dropped today. Go to strugglingwithstudying .org. You can find the article we put on it with a link to the debate.

And that debate is gonna be, it's from the Utah Christian Research Center. We will do a debate review for those who pass the class. And so that review will be private, only for those who pass the class.

Pass the class means a grade above 75. And so you're gonna wanna make sure that you get that in. Now, I am toying with the idea of inviting Matt Slick to that debate review so that we have both sides represented and we would be able to see how each of us feel the other did and which logical fallacies we think that each other did.

Which logical, looking at the arguments logically. Much different when you're reviewing the debate versus in the debate to think in that way. So that will be good for you. Now, the final exam, if you don't mind putting that one up and we'll leave that up.

Actually, before that, why don't you put up the debate one? We should do that. Part of the class, we had a quiz. You're looking for the debate one. You need me to send that to you again?

Yes. Oh, that? Okay.

The final I could send you now. Let's see if I will send that to you.

Technical difficulties.

I mean, I only sent it to you while you were building a deck.

Yes, yes.

So I just

I was gonna take a picture and then like pull that up,.

But we don't need to do that.

All right. I will send it to you in Messenger so that you can copy and paste again. I mean, it's already in Messenger, but I know that some people are technically challenged. So I get it.

With that stuff called technology.

Yeah.

So the midterm is going to be, and I have to log into Bitly to get the short version of the debate for you to put up. So the midterm is one where, or sorry, we had 15 of your grade was the quiz. We then had the midterm, which was 25%, the final 25%, and 35 for your debate.

And so I just sent you the link. So, okay, what you have up now is the final.

Yes.

You could have just copied the entire thing where I said final exam.

Hey, that would be a good idea. Let me do that.

Yeah, why don't you do that? Meanwhile, you could put up the, man, oh man. Meanwhile, you could put up the link to debate, the Bitly link for the debate. Brother John is making a comment. He says, what is a logical fallacy?

A logical fallacy is an error in reason that occurs when invalid arguments or irrelevant points are introduced without any evidence to support them. Pretty good. We're gonna be more specific. A logical fallacy is a form that you end up seeing where someone is, basically what you end up seeing with it is there's breakdowns in logic to that, and we're gonna look at a lot of different ones, but it is when people make bad logical arguments.

And so we talked about several of these over the last three weeks, about whether it's sound or cogent. And with each of those, we talked about valid or invalid versus strong and weak arguments, depending on whether it's a deductive or inductive.

And so Brother John says he Googled it. Well, you shouldn't be using Google. I mean, just saying. Use DuckDuckGo or anything else, because as a Christian

Huh?

Brave.

Brave, I use the Brave browser. And yeah, if you don't know, Google is limiting searches to Christian sites. And so I've gotten away from them as a Christian who might want to get Christian material.

Yeah.

On that particular point, you can't get to AOMEN .org through Google.

Really?

Yeah, from at least the searches I tried on Google.

Well, Matt Slick and I did an experiment one day. We did a search for what is the Trinity? On every single search engine that we know of, we tried at least a dozen of them. Every single one of them, CARM .org came with that question, was either in place one, two, or three with an article titled, what is the Trinity?

Google, it was like page three after Wikipedia, Denmark, Wikipedia, UK, Wikipedia, Australia. I mean, literally three pages of Wikipedia.

That's crazy.

Every Wikipedia there was known, like for every country before they'd pull up CARM. So that was an experiment. Both Matt and I were on the phone, we were testing it out, and we were like, yep, having the same results.

So he didn't know if it was just him, which, you know,.

But anyway.

So when we look at a logical fallacy, we have to recognize that, and we've said this earlier in the class, that people use the logical fallacies or really misuse them all the time. They will accuse people of a logical fallacy that is not actually a proper fallacy.

They'll misdefine it, but it just sounds really good when you say, you know, you've done, you know, that's a fallacy of the excluded middle. When you just say that, it makes you smarter or looks smarter, I should say.

It doesn't make you smarter. It makes you smarter only if you use it properly. Brother John, actually, I use that with him, and he's like, I had to look that up, and I felt bad because I didn't explain it in typing.

So I just took for assumption that since he listens to Apologetics Live on Thursday nights that he's heard me use that so many times, I took for granted he knew that I was wrong. So I'll publicly say, forgive me, John.

I took that for granted. Made him go look it up, and that was bad. Anyway, now our course book that we've been using for this class is How to Think Critically. So there are three books that we had required reading was, one of them was How to Think Clearly, A Guide to Critical Thinking.

And though he has several chapters on logical fallacies, are you getting more food?

Really?

You got more, you're bringing more food? I cannot, look, now you're handing, no, you don't have to hand it off.

I had to open something for my wife.

Oh, yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh.

You just show the food. I already have food, so.

Oh, man, man, oh, man, all right. So in Doug's book on How to Think Critically, A Guide to Critical Thinking, he lays out several fallacies, but in a very different order and not, if you've read the book, which you should have, there's, it's a lot of detail, lots of examples in the different fallacies that he's addressing in the book.

But the reason I don't wanna go through that is just because a lot of those fallacies are, basically what we end up seeing is that they are, they're good fallacies, I mean, they're describing the fallacies, but they're not always the most common ones we would deal with.

So since we're giving an overview of this, we got one class to deal with fallacies, I do not wanna just, I don't wanna go through, there's hundreds of fallacies. So I wanna, what I'm gonna do is take really,.

We'll see how many we get through,.

But I'm at, I'm gonna look at the ones from karm .org because these are ones that Matt has put together. The ones, and when I originally looked at this, a lot of these are the ones that we deal with often.

And I'm gonna start with the ones that we deal with the most as believers. And then we will look at some of the, if we have time, we'll look at some of the others because there's some that Matt will include, that Doug won't because we're dealing with Christian apologetics.

And so there's some that we see, and I'll mention one of them. And so what I want you to note is, so far in this class, what we've tried to do is prep you to have the right character in debate, the right mindset that when we're doing apologetics, it's for the sake of the gospel.

We talked about how to interpret the scripture because when we're gonna do Christian apologetics, we're arguing over what the scripture says. That's our only source of authority. And then we looked at logic, and we've spent the last two classes looking at deductive, inductive arguments.

We've looked at how to identify them. We have looked at what makes them a good or bad argument. And so all of that will be in your final exam, which is, you see the link below. So go there now. You have two weeks to do that.

Even though class ends tonight, I give two weeks for you to get the final exams in. We will do the debates, and whoever gets above 75 will be invited to a private viewing of the debate with probably Matt and I.

We'll see. It's gonna be a longer one because we'll probably go through the entire debate unless we just, Matt and I find really good clips of each other that we can poke fun at. But with that, one of the most common fallacies that is both used and abused is called an ad hominem.

Now I say it's the most used and abused because a lot of people accuse people of doing an ad hominem when they don't actually make an ad hominem argument. Now an ad hominem properly defined is when you're attacking the individual instead of attacking the argument.

So this is one where people use this, misuse this by just saying, well, if you disagree with me, it's an ad hominem. This is when you attack the person, okay? So this is sometimes referred to as a fallacy of attacking the person, but most often referred to as ad hominem.

So this is where you make an argument where if I say Randy is so idiotic he cannot possibly say anything that's true. That would be an argument that is attacking Randy's character rather than addressing the argument, okay?

And John is Googling some more and he's just said ad hominem is a phrase from Latin which means aimed at the man, which is true. So instead of addressing the argument someone's making, you attack the person.

If you want, I told Randy that I was almost tempted to just bring up the entire Donald Trump, Joe Biden debate and just play clips of it because there are so many arguments or fallacies that I saw in that debate.

I saw the argument of ad hominem, appeal to force, appeal to pity, appeal to popular, the excluded middle. There were so many fallacies in that debate. For guys that are supposedly claimed to be great debaters, they really failed, okay?

Now this is part of the issue I have with the way we do presidential debates. I'd rather see them but just ask each other questions and go for it and actually have positions where they have to actually make a case instead of just insulting one another.

An ad hominem is gonna be seen when instead of addressing the argument someone makes, for example, if just for an example, if Randy was to claim that I told him he could bring dinner to class so that he would be in class on time.

And my response was, Randy, clearly, you have been in the sun all day so much that you can't even think straight to make such a claim. Now I'm attacking his person when in fact, Randy would be accurate in saying what he said because I actually did tell him better to bring dinner to class and be on time.

But you see, what I'm doing in that argument though is instead of addressing what Randy is saying, and you usually see an attack of the person when someone says something that's true, okay? An ad hominem attack is often used when the other person says something that's right.

And the person that uses the ad hominem has their, basically their pride is one where they attack the person because there's nothing they could say about the argument. Now, why do I point that out? Because one of the things I do very regularly when someone uses an ad hominem with me is to point it out.

Now, what do I do? I say, well, I'll say, well, Randy, that was an ad hominem attack. And that means you're attacking me as a person rather than addressing my argument. Is that because you cannot counter the argument?

Is it that you recognize that the argument is true so your pride makes you attack me? In which case they usually attack you more. They double down, right?

Okay?

But that's fine. When you're doing apologetics, especially if others are watching, the reality is the others see that. When you point out what they're doing, it's really what it is to the audience. And I do this regularly on Apologetics Live.

I will stop someone that came in to debate me and I'll say, hold on, I just wanna stop for a moment because I wanna explain something to the audience. What you're seeing he's doing is doing an ad hominem attack and he's probably doing that because he can't actually address the things I said.

He can't defend it. So instead of dealing with the actual argument I said, since he can't defend that, he attacks me. Okay, let's get back to the discussion.

And then they do what?

They do a second ad hominem, right? But people in the audience then see that.

Okay?

So yes, that is a debate tactic that you can use. You're kind of appealing to the audience because when you're doing a debate, that's who you're trying to win over. When you're doing Christian apologetics, you're hopefully trying to win over the person you're speaking to, but sometimes there's others who are watching.

And you're gonna wanna win them over.

Now, hopefully you're gonna explain this and someone's gonna later go, you know, that's right. That guy was right. I really didn't have an answer for that. You don't know. And so you hope for that. So this is why I think it's sometimes good to know some of these so that you can point them out.

Now, I said it for the last two classes. If you don't know all the names of the fallacies,.

That's okay.

Know how to understand if an argument someone's making is good or bad, right? And we spent two weeks explaining that. That's more important. To know whether the argument that they make is formed properly and that all the premises are true.

Those are the two elements that you're looking for, okay? And the reason I give you, if you just go to karm .org and search for logical fallacies, he's gonna give you a list of 20 of them. And the reason I'm gonna give you that as a resource is the fact that he basically gives it to you where you have a one line definition and a couple of examples for each one of them.

So if you want to learn the fallacies, this becomes an easy page to just go through them, okay? So the ad hominem. It's when you attack the person rather than address the argument they made. All right, another popular one that's often used in Christian apologetics is called the fallacy of appeal to popularity or argumentum of populum.

That would be the Latin. It's the argument to population. This is one where you're basically making a position that will the majority of people hold to something as if the majority must be right. So all scientists, or they'll say, most scientists believe in evolution.

So therefore evolution must be right. Well, the fact that most people believe in something, does that make it right? We could argue, and the way to argue that is most Germans supported the Nazis in killing Jewish people.

Does that make killing Jewish people right? In fact, when the Nazis were put on trial after World War II, that was exactly the argument they made. They made an argument that there was not an absolute morality and the population supported it.

And those that were on the council said, sorry, you should have known it was wrong. And so when people argue for an argument from popular, they're gonna say, well, everyone else is doing something, therefore it's right to do.

The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn't make it right to do. In the time of 1000 BC, everyone, all the guys had multiple wives. Does that mean having multiple wives is right in God's eyes? No, it doesn't matter what others are doing.

The appeal to popularity is an appeal to the masses, but what it does is avoid what's true. So what you're gonna have people when they say, when they do this, how do we know it's a bad argument? Well, if we say that everyone, most scientists believe, even if you say all scientists believe in evolution, therefore evolution is true.

The reason it's a fallacy is again, back to the form. The premise does not directly connect the conclusion. Even if the premise is true, it doesn't have the connection to the conclusion. And therefore it would be an invalid argument.

Not only invalid, but I would say a false one because we could find plenty of scientists who don't believe in evolution if they say all. Now, if they say most, so Randy, here's a question. If they say all scientists, I want you to tell me which of the logical arguments would that be, deductive or inductive?

And if they say most, which one would that be?

And why?

If they say most, that would be popular, the populum argument.

No, no, no. Which?

Oh, I'm sorry.

Is it deductive or inductive?

Inductive.

Okay, so most would be inductive, which by default means that all would be deductive. It's deductive because when you say all scientists, that can be proven, those statements are gonna be true or false.

All you gotta do is find one scientist that doesn't believe in evolution and you can prove that false. Jason Lyle. Plenty of others, but hundreds of others.

He was just the first one that popped in my head. This is my favorite.

And as Laura is saying rightly, inductive is with probability. So when we say most, now what we're looking for is the probability. Is it a high probability? If it's a high probability, it's a strong, it's gonna be a strong argument, right?

So that is what you're looking at. So the appeal to popularity is going to have a premise that does not directly connect to the conclusion. And actually, that's gonna be the case with fallacies. Where these fallacies are, it's the connection of how the premises, the premise connects to the conclusion or the lack thereof, right?

So the ad hominem, you have the premise, you attack the person, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the conclusion. The fact that Randy is an idiot has no bearing on the fact that what he says can't be true, right?

It's true.

It's true.

Right?

Another, so that's the ad hominem, the appeal to popularity. One that you're gonna see more in Christian apologetics than you might in other areas is an appeal to tradition. This is one where you're gonna have people that argue based on a traditional system that they are at.

You can look at whatever, it could be the way people have always done it, therefore we should do it this way. It could be, well, the Catholic Church has, or the Mormon Church, put in any of them, they have a tradition that demonstrates this doctrine, therefore this doctrine is true, whatever that doctrine may be.

What they're appealing to is a tradition, something that's been held to for a long time. And what we have to recognize is that tradition that may not directly connect to the conclusion. Sometimes it might, but the tradition by itself does not.

So you need to have the tradition, so you can have a premise that appeals to the tradition, but it can't be just that to the conclusion. So in the appeal to tradition rightly used, to rightly use tradition, you could state the tradition as a premise, but you need to support why that leads to the conclusion.

It is not enough to say that because you have the tradition, it makes the conclusion true. And so that's what you're looking for in that one. You're gonna look for people that appeal to their tradition and say, well, that's what makes it right.

Another common one is, and you see this a lot, is called begging the question. A begging the question is when someone is gonna assume their conclusion to be true. So they'll argue that you first have to assume their conclusion to be able to see that their support is right.

It's a circular argument. I saw this in a debate that I moderated on charismatic gifts, where the person who is saying that the gifts continue argued that you cannot understand the Bible rightly until you first accept that the charismatic gifts continue.

So what he's saying is that his opponent is not interpreting the Bible correctly because he doesn't understand, he doesn't believe in the gifts. And therefore, the fact that he believes in the gifts, he rightly interprets the scripture.

To which at the end of the debate, I explained to him what that logical fallacy was, right? So his fallacy is

I know the debate that you're talking about.

Yes.

And I had two questions I wavered between asking of my own. And so I probably should have switched them just for fun, but what he was doing was starting with his conclusion. The conclusion was you have to believe in the gifts to be able to interpret the Bible.

Therefore, if you don't accept the gifts, you can't properly interpret the Bible. Now, I don't think he lost the debate on that purpose, but that was his core argument. And he kept going back to that.

And in that argument, when you have that, the whole argument was based upon a fallacy. He never actually was addressing the issues. And so what people do when they do this is they're gonna argue for their conclusion.

So they usually will state the conclusion as if it's an undeniable fact, and then say that you have to accept that fact to be able to understand that fact. So a way of looking at this is someone might say, God does not exist, and you can't understand the science that proves it unless you start realizing that God does not exist.

Okay, so their conclusion, God doesn't exist. But they're begging the question in their premise is that you first have to start with God not existing to be able to argue, to be able to understand that he doesn't exist, okay?

So that is something you see a lot with people, because what, and with each of these fallacies, what I'm trying to do is explain how people use it and the why. So why do people use the begging the question fallacy?

Most often because they have not thought through the issues they are discussing. They will make arguments that, where they make conclusions. And when my position is, when someone makes a claim, I ask a question, therefore, I don't have to argue for their bad thinking.

But what a lot of people will do is they get into debating back and forth an argument. And what ends up happening is they don't recognize why the person's doing it, because they're not thinking through.

So asking a question forces them to think. An example, I had a person on the street that told me that God does not exist because there's evil in the world. Now, that's a logical fallacy, because there's evil in the world, that's the premise, there's evil in the world, conclusion, therefore, God does not exist.

But can you explain God's existence without evil? Well, yes, you can, okay? Now, you could argue, some people might try to argue this is a begging the question fallacy, it's not. We'll get to the fallacy, it is later.

But the fact of evil has nothing to do with God's existence or not. In fact, well, I would say it does, actually, but not the way he thought. Mike, what I did was I just turned to him and said, how can you have evil without God?

Now, see, he never had to think about that. To the point where he kept asking me what evil is, and I told him I didn't say it exists, he did, he should have a definition of it, right? See, but because of the way he argues, he never had to provide answers.

And you'll see this with a begging the question fallacy as well. So when he finally asked me to define it, I said, evil is the absence of good. Good is defined by the nature of God. Therefore, how can you have evil without God?

Now, what did I do? I said, I defined what evil is by the absence of good. That's what it is. I defined good by the nature of God because that's what it is. Those are two things we can test to know if they're true.

And according to God, they are. And so I can appeal to those. Therefore, you can't have evil without God. Could I have applied a different logic? Sure, I could have made a different statement for that to say that the idea of evil is immaterial.

If we have an immaterial part of us, there must be an immaterial source of that because material things can't produce the immaterial. Therefore, there must be an immaterial God that provided the immaterial evil.

So I could argue different ways, but when you have someone that's doing the begging the question fallacy, what they're often doing is they're avoiding the support. They don't wanna think about supporting their arguments.

So I wanna give one that Matt gives as an example. He says, and this is an argument that's made against Christians all the time. God exists because the Bible says so. Well, he's saying the Bible is inspired.

Therefore, we know God exists. Now, that is the argument that people say Christians make. Now, why is that circular? The argument here is that you first assume the Bible's inspired. The Bible says God exists and that's the only way.

So you have to first assume that the Bible's inspired. I would not argue that way. That would be circular. But if I argue the Bible says God exists, God wrote the Bible, God cannot lie. Therefore, we know God exists.

That's different because it's not based on the Bible saying. See, it's not that circular argument. It's based on the nature of God. Okay, now, they will still argue that that's circular, okay? Ultimately, a lot of, almost all arguments become circular.

It's a question whether they're viciously circular or not. And so the issue is that in any circular argument, it comes down to that there's got to be an axiom, some ultimate truth that you have to stop to.

Let me give an example. Descartes used to argue that he was trying to get to prove, this is the thing atheists don't understand, he was looking to prove whether God exists or not. And in that, he figured if he kept questioning, questioning, questioning, questioning, getting out of the vicious circular arguments, could he prove that God exists?

And he eventually realized, I think, therefore, I am. Now, where atheists try to use that to say that he's proving God does not exist, if they actually read Descartes and read where he says this and what he's arguing, they'd realize he actually was arguing that the fact that he thinks is the proof that there's an immaterial part of him,.

Therefore, he exists.

And if he exists, there has to be a God because there has to be some immaterial creator. So it's always fun when I debate atheists and they bring up Descartes, because then I quickly pull that up and go, you know, I actually had a debate, an atheist on the show that Matt and I did previously to Apologetics Live.

And the guy came in, used Descartes, and I stated this, and he was quick to go to Google to show me how wrong I am. And as he's reading it, literally, he is reading it.

Like, I'm just sitting there waiting.

And he goes, oh, oh, you're right. Thank you. So the begging the question fallacy, when people use that, what you want to do is you want to start asking questions immediately. You wanna ask questions of their conclusion and their premises.

Because what that shows you is that they do not understand the argument, okay? So another common one that we have is, well, Matt in his calls it the false dilemma or false dichotomy, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle, okay?

This is where someone is given only two choices as if they're the only two possible choices when there could be a third. So for example, we used this last week, but if I tell Randy that tennis balls can only be yellow or black, or yellow or blue, I think I said in last class.

Yellow or blue.

You said white or black, and then you added blue.

Well, no, when I used this fallacy, I think I said yellow and blue, and then referred to a black one. We used yellow and blue.

Yeah, that's right, that's right.

So one of us paid more attention in class.

It was the teacher.

Yes, well, he better have paid more attention, I guess.

So if I say tennis balls can only be yellow or blue, and you produce a black tennis ball, that is a third option. And so this is one where the way to recognize it is someone will give you an either or, and this is how we talked about it, the either or.

They give two things as if those are the only two options. When you don't have a, you know, where it's not a true dichotomy, where there's a second, you know, maybe fifth option. The common one that I hear when we talk about ethics, people will say, okay, you're, and this is the biggest argument for situational ethics.

People say, well, you have the Nazis come to your house and ask you, are you hiding Jews? Do you say yes or no? Now, the way that's worded is as if there's only a yes or no to that. That's a fallacy of the excluded middle.

Whenever I'm asked that, why? Because I don't have to answer period. I don't have to say anything, do I?

Nope.

In fact, I could do something completely different. I can get angry and yell at them and ask them why they think I have Jews in the house. I could do, well, you know, I could do what I did in New York when someone tried to mug me.

Oh, you're gonna love this one, Randy. I probably never told you this story. You'll love this. So I was in New York and someone walked up and asked for the time and I looked at my watch and gave him the time and he pulled out a knife and said, give me your wallet.

Now, I don't know what possessed me, but I thought of the account with King David where he started drooling in his beard and acting crazy. So that's exactly what I did. I started to have an argument with myself whether I had a wallet or not.

Then I argued with myself that he had a knife and I should do what he says. And I argued against myself that it wasn't a real knife. It's something that was used in, a rubber knife used in Hollywood. And I just had an argument with myself over and over and over until that guy thought I was just nuts and walked away.

And so you see, there are other options. And this is why in ethics, I would be what is referred to, you have a different view of ethics. We talked about situational ethics, which use that, Laura's going, that's the greatest story ever.

I love it.

Hey, I kept my money. Some would say I never had my sanity to keep it. But when it comes to ethics, I am what would be referred to as a non-conforming absolutist. So what that means is, I think that lying is always wrong.

There is never a case where you should lie. Lying would be a sin. So now there's a difference in, when we get into ethics, war ethics, there's gonna be differences. But even when I had a job where part of my job was to tell lies, part of my job was to have cover stories.