After spending a day or two doing some necessary gardening, and forcing unused muscles to do unaccustomed things so that they are now barely able to move without considerable, if not excruciating, pain, while all along reading various takes on Dawkins’ arguments and position in The God Delusion, in particular, John Haught’s God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, I am coming to the conclusion that much of the “criticial” argumentation is pure assertion, gussied up to look like profound theological reflection. Haught, for example, spends page after page taking the new atheists to task, but he scarcely ever quotes from them. He merely makes assertions, and we are to take these, doubtless, as actually representing things that the new atheists have said.
Not only that, of course, but Haught takes for granted about the Bible, opinions as to the Bible’s central message which are not based on the Bible at all, but on quite recent biblical exegesis and study. The liberation theologians, for example, think of the Bible as a manifesto of political liberation, and the prophets are placed in a central role as liberationists. Yet if you read the prophets with some critical attention you will find, as Hector Avalos points out in his remarkable deconstruction of biblical studies, The End of Biblical Studies (Promtheus Books,, 2007), that the prophets can be read most naturally as imperialists, and strongly opposed to ethnic and religious pluralism. Indeed, if, as Tom Thompson suggests, the Hebrew Bible is the ideology of imperial colonialists sent by the Persian Empire to settle and exert control over Transjordan and the Palestinian litoral, the prophetic message can be shown to be consistent with this mission. By giving substance and cultic purity to a collection of Canaanite myths, the Bible could then function as an instrument of cultural control over the indigenous inhabitants who were strictly excluded from the fellowship of the “returnees” who came to claim their patrimony — even if the history was made up of whole cloth and the severe and exclusive religion was but a selection from and an implied criticism of the status and beliefs of the aboriginal inhabitants (see the quote from Isaiah below).
I don’t want to carry this particular programmatic way of reading the Hebrew Bible too far, but, given the lack of historical support for the central myths of the Hebrew Bible, from the creation, through the Patriarchs, the sojourn in Egypt, to the return and conquest of Canaan, there is certainly very little reason to hold that the story that the Bible has to tell is anything more than an ex post facto justification of imperial and political arrangements that were put into practice for imperial reasons by the imperial masters of the “exiles” “returning” to Jerusalem. The point is, in case it needs spelling out, that the sacred scripture of the Jews, which became the first volume of a later two volume work held sacred by Christians, may be no more than imperialist propaganda. It’s vicious and bloody enough for imperial propaganda, and exhibits a process of reification of a local god (Yahweh), who once had far more relationship with the polytheism of Canaan than either Christians or Jews are prepared to acknowledge.
Nevertheless, if any of this “tall tale” turns out to be true, as it very well might, it raises some serious questions about the metaphysical standing of Yahweh, as well as the god of the Christians, for as Christians read the Hebrew scriptures, Christ is the theme of the story right from the beginning, though he is never mentioned until we come to the Christian scriptures, which took semit-final shape sometime in the fourth century CE. Jews and Christians — and Muslims, too, of course, since they are the resdiual legatees of the polyglot confusion that was left after Christians and Jews had carried out their reading and rereading of their scriptures, the Tanach for the Jews, and the Bible for the Christians. The Jews, in the Christian Empire, soon found themselves condemned for failing to acknowledge the Christian saviour as the Jewish Messiah, and the very status of that central Christian myth became a focus for controversy which, while given an uncompomising shape in early Christian orthodoxy as expressed by the early councils and enforced by imperial decree, was still a source of destructive encounters between the various heterodoxies throughout Mesopotamia, Persia, and the newly converted Tribes of the Danube and Rhine basins. Weakened as it already had been by internecene theological squabbles, the former territories of the Eastern Empire were unsurprisingly the first areas where an insurgent Islam, breaking out in fanatical hordes from the Arabian peninsula, enjoyed its first military successes, where vibrant cultures were to undergo an eclipse from which they have never recovered.
The important point to note is that Christianity, like Judaism or Islam, did not develop in a straight line from experience and evidence (such as it was) to authoritative expression. Like all human things, the development of religion is messy, often ungrounded, and frequently contested. Haught accuses the new atheists of failing to take account of sophisticated theologies which he has found helpful in, as he says, “shaping my own understanding of faith and atheism,” (xii) and in this connexion he says:
Specifically, I mean thinkers such as Paul Tillich, Alfred North Whitehead, Paul Ricoeur, Rudolf Bultmann, Edward Schillebeeckx, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Barth, John Bowker, Elizabeth Johnson, Karl Rahner, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Ian Barbour, David Tracy, Dorothee Soelle, Sallie McFague, Henri de Lubac, Hans Jonas, Emil Fackenheim, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, just to mention [he says, modestly,] a handful. [xii]
One wonders what this trip down one of Haught’s bookshelves is intended to achieve? He follows the catalogue up with the claim that
[c]learly the new atheists are not familiar with any of these religious thinkers, and the hostility to what they call “theology” has almost nothing to do with theology as I use the term. [xii]
Well, let me say it then. I am familiar with every one of these religious thinkers, and I have read quite of few of them. Indeed, I still possess books written by many of them. Now, I don’t know how Haught uses the term ‘theology’ — though it would be a very capacious term indeed to include all of these thinkers without qualification, since some of them would not sit well with others. Barth and Scheelebeeckx, for instance, would sit very uncomfortably together. And while we are discussing theologians, it is not irrelevant to point out that Karl Barth had a live-in research assistant/mistress with whom he used to vacation while his wife remained at home. Nor, perhaps, is it irrelevant to report that Paul Tillich, the great theologian of God as Ground of Being, used to make out with his female students at one end of a couch while his wife sat fuming in resentment at the other end. Does that discredit their thought? No, but it indicates, certainly, a kind of louche disregard of ordinary Christian morality, and perhaps emphasises the purely intellectual nature of the theological enterprise, as a kind of clever dialectic, rather than as a moral investment in important truths.
Theologians, for Haught, are “biblically informed, critically reflective, religious thinkers.” (xii) The trouble is that being biblically informed is not the best place to start when asking about god. The atheist, or any critical person assessing the value of the Bible as revelatory of the being about which it speaks so much, must first ask the prior question: Does this being exist? To take the Bible as evidence for the existence of the god spoken of throughout it is, not to put too fine a point on it, begging the question. This is especially the case when the Bible itself holds up to ridicule others who believe in other gods. Far worse, even than that. Take this passage from Isaiah, for example:
The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he makes it in human form, with human beauty, to be set up in a shrine. He cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!” They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?” [Isaiah 44:13-21]
Of course, it’s okay, they’re only idolaters, after all. Besides, they are only the people of the land, not those empowered by Persian letters of credit. But because some bow down to images and others to concepts of the mind, makes very little difference. It is still necessary to show that there is, or that there is not, something that the idol or the concept represents, and not all the biblical knowledge or theological knowledge in the world will confirm this. Haught does not seem to see that his Bible is like the idolater’s idol. Tillich can say that, if we take something finite, and give it ultimacy in our lives, this is idolatry. But, just by speaking of the ground of being he has not achieved ultimacy. We are still talking about words and concepts, things that men and women use make to make sense of their world.
Let me ride my hobby-horse for a moment. Human life, say the religious, is sacred. It belongs to god alone. We may not, saving some circumstances having to do with punishment or just war, take a human life without offending the one to whom innocent life belongs. This is sufficient warrant for thousands of people to oppose assistance in dying, even for those who are suffering intolerably. They assert that, if we break this divine law, then we will, eventually, lay waste to life itself. It is perhaps the stupidest argument ever dreamed up by the mind of man (and they’re almost all men, though they do dragoon women in to support them, by carrying out one of the most relentless efforts at propaganda ever launched). And it’s all based on a premise that not one of these people can confirm, that there exists a supernatural being who created us and cares for us and has a right to determine what we may or may not do.
There is not a shred of evidence for this claim. Not a shred. Take William Lane Craig’s debating points.
- The Resurrection of Jesus. He thinks, mirabile dictu, that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is sound. This is so preposterous that it scarcely deserves attention, and yet, this underlies the claims that he makes against his opponents. He does not vary or qualify this with any criticism that might be brought to bear. It is sheer assertion.
- The Creation of Life. Craig says he is agnostic about intelligent design or evolution, yet he knows that, if he admits evolution, the game is up for him. Some religious people talk about theistic evolution, but since there is not a shred of evidence, this can only be bare assertion, just to keep the theology intact.
- The Cosmological Argument. This, for Craig, depends upon the contradictions that would infect an actual infinity. So, the universe must be finite in time and space. It must, therefore, have had a beginning. This beginning could not be a physical cause, since the problems of infinity would break out again. So it must be a spiritual cause, though we know of no case where spirits (whatever they are) exercise physical causation.
Having fielded his arguments, he sits back and waits for his opponents to demolish them. Well, they can’t be demolished. He knows this. They’re just sheer assertion, and how do you demolish sheer assertion? This is why he is always so cocky and self-assured. He knows that no one can counter his arguments — not because there is no counter, but because the arguments are basically circular. If you enter into the lists with him over these points, he’s going to win, because he will just take you round and round the mulberry bush until you tire, and then he will simply declare a victory. Go to his website, and listen to him crow. He does it all in the most unlovely way, completely undeterred by what most people call humility and consider a virtue.
What must the religious do to get back into the argument? The answer to that question is simple. Since almost all of them in the end depend upon a supposed sacred text, they must show that these texts are genuinely revealed by a power not of this earth. This is what all the religions of the book claim, and there is not one single piece of evidence to which any of them can point to show that the words of their sacred text are revealed. Proving that they are revealed would not only support the special claims made for these texts; it would also answer the question of the existence of a supernatural being who is in communication with us. Not one of the books claimed by the religions has met this challenge. It’s assertion all the way down.
If I had a dime for every time I said, “You can’t just assert that, you have to say why…”
This sums it up very nicely.
I think that needs correction.
Excellent work again, Eric. I’m going to chew on this for a while. For the moment, I don’t have anything to say about content, only to be a grammatical pedant, “polyglot confusion that was left after Christians and Jews had carried out there reading . . .” I do believe we have a malapropism trying to hang out and be cool with the rest of us, and one shouldn’t want the wrong “kind” of words hanging out with us. It would be inseamly, ewe no?
Thank you Ken, corrected.
What a great synopsis Eric.
When I was an Evangelical Christian for a good part of my adult life, I willingly swallowed the lies of the apologists. I understood the Bible to be a reliable source of historical and spiritual truth. Once I finally got brave enough to verify and investigate things for myself, I discovered that the “Old Testament” histories were anything but history and merely pious fictions. I became a lot more suspicious of the New Testament and there too found huge anachronistic inconsistencies and unmistakable hallmarks of pious fiction and wishful thinking.
To assert (there’s that word again) that this ambiguous, incoherent and contradictory collection of heavily redacted writings that we call the Holy Bible is the revealed word of the Supreme Sky-God, the same precision-freak creator of the Super Nova and the Genome, is clearly untenable. (A failed 5th Avenue advertising executive could do a better job of communicating his intent than the imaginary author of these works.) To further assert that if one fails to recognize that God has spoken through this doubtful medium will result in an eternity of hellish torture and punishment would be laughable if it were not for its awful consequences in the lives of those oppressed by this belief.
What is remarkable is how such a ridiculous set of unsubstantiated assertions can hold sway over a person’s mind for their entire life. I am thankful to come out of this shadow & only wish I had been brave enough to seek the truth earlier in my life.
Thanks for your great summary Eric.
-evan
That item about Tillich – it indicates a good deal more than “a kind of louche disregard of ordinary Christian morality” – it’s just plain mean. The hell with ordinary Christian morality; what kind of pig makes out with girls in front of his wife while she fumes in resentment?!
“And it’s all based on a premise that not one of these people can confirm, that there exists a supernatural being who created us and cares for us and has a right to determine what we may or may not do.”
Precisely, and this is why it matters – this imaginary tyrant. Darrel Falk thinks we have no business deciding our lives for ourselves – he thinks only the imaginary tyrant has any business doing that.
I can see how anyone can be ‘convinced’ by a ‘personal revelation’. I can see how many people can adopt someone’s appealing ideas. Of course once you have a body of believers there is a great deal of social pressure to conform, and to support the group beliefs – and over time these beliefs get elaborated. Just think of the recent ‘Judgement Day’ fiasco.
Could it just be that the elite shamen/priests/theologians are more interested in shoring up their beliefs (and livelihood) than challenging the status quo?
And what explains the differing revelations?
Bible historians might be more dangerous to Christianity than evolutionary biologists. The more you know about the history of the Bible, the less reason there appears to treat it like a holy book.
It’s also one of the reasons why I think it’s often fair to lump “liberal” Christians in with the more fundamentalist ones. They both use the same arguments (or rather, the same assertions) to give the Bible a special status.
“And what explains the differing revelations?”
Well, they’re all true in their own way, don’cha know. Just use Jesus and an x-acto knife to cut away all the differences and every religion is truly harmonious.
Yes, it was mean, and she was humiliated, no doubt. But theirs was a strange relationship. She wrote a book, From Time to Time, about their life together, which scandalised his colleagues, but it also speaks of her own sexual experimentation. Apparently, jilted lovers of the theologian would complain to her about his faithlessness! They remained together, however, until his death in 1965. She died in 1988, 92 years old.
If I remember correctly (it’s a long time since I read about this), Tillich had a collection of pornographic pictures of crucified women.
A Time article says that:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908007,00.html#ixzz1NP1o9P5F
In the same article the story is told of how
There was, I think, something mean about the things he did, but it took place within a very morally louche context, which is why I described it that way.
Then out comes an a priori justification as to why it should just be obvious that it requires no explanation as to why… it just is, and who are you to question God anyway!
So far as evolution goes, you can always do what the pope does, just say that God uses evolution as the means of creation. However, biblical criticism (or qu’ranic criticism) inevitably undermines the protected status of the text. This is why Islam has so far stood firmly against any historical criticism of the text of the Qu’ran. The truth is that the Qu’ran is a terrific hodgepodge of Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and pagan elements, all stirred up and served with graphic warnings of hellfire and incitements to violence. No one can seriously consider these texts and retain respect for them. To think that any of these texts is the best that a god could do is simply ludicrous. Anyone who thinks this lacks imagination.
Just yesterday, a Christian claimed that the archaeological evidence supported biblical assertions, compared with assertions regarding Hercules.
I really, really, really needed to have Avalos on hand.
Of course, there are no archeological underpinnings of the vast majority of the OT, and none whatsoever (aside from “tradition) for the NT.
Which is why folks like Ben Goren and I are so completely suspicious about whether or not there was an actual person named Joshua bar Joseph who got into trouble with the Sanhedrin back in the day.
And then, there is always the archaeological underpinnings of The Odyssey. Just because we can locate an actual city of Troy, this then means that Achilles was truly impervious to injury, except for his heel? Of course, there is also the famous meteorite in Mecca — are we to assume that because the faithful can view it that Mohammed then really did ride a flying horse to heaven?
It’s just an awful argument; but theists of certain stripes are quite fond of it.
Agreed. I think we can also quote Dennett in this context: “Anybody who goes through seminary and comes out believing in God hasn’t been paying attention.”
Though I tend to think that anyone who thinks that evolution is the best a God can do lacks imagination too.
And London is evidence of Hogwarts.
William Lane Craig is absolutely correct in his assertions. The proof is in the text. Similarly, we can know for a certainty that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. The text demonstrates that when Dr. Watson went to 221b Baker Street he found Mr. Holmes there at home. How could this be possible if Holmes were imaginary? Could the good Doctor Watson, with all his rigorous medical scientific training be fooled by a fiction?
Since he is a Roman Catholic theologian, I wonder what in his reading of all those “sophisticated theologies” has led him to the conclusion that it is a mortal sin for a young African wife to use a condom if her husband is HIV-positive?
Or why it is forbidden for a couple who want children to use in-vitro fertilisation
Or why the “unbounded ground of Being” or however he phrases it, is absolutely aghast that two people of the same sex might rub their naughty bits together.
Hi Eric. Lots of good stuff here. But I’d like to pick you up on something.
The problem with the arguments you mention is not that they’re circular. For example, it’s not circular to claim that the Bible is evidence of God. It would be circular to claim the Bible is reliable evidence of God _because_ it’s the word of God. But I don’t think most theologians would commit such an obvious fallacy.
In fact I would say that in a strict sense the Bible _is_ evidence of God, but it’s such weak evidence as not to be taken seriously. Arguably, however, in normal parlance, to say “X is evidence of Y” implies that the evidence is of a strength to be taken seriously, so we might say in that sense that the Bible is not evidence of God. Neverthless, I think the correct criticism here is that the apologist is applying an unreasonable standard of evidence, not that he is committing a logical fallacy.
You wrote: “Having fielded his arguments, he sits back and waits for his opponents to demolish them. Well, they can’t be demolished. He knows this. They’re just sheer assertion, and how do you demolish sheer assertion?”
I’m not very familiar with Craig’s arguments, but from what I’ve read I don’t think you can reasonably say that that they are sheer assertion. In the case of his argument for the Resurrection he cites evidence in support of his conclusion. Again, the correct broad criticism is that he is applying an unreasonable standard of evidence. (There may be more detailed criticisms to be made too.) In the case of the Cosmological (Kalam) Argument, I believe he sets out a very thorough deductive argument. The problem lies in his attempts to justify the premises of the argument.
Harsh criticism of apologetic arguments is certainly justified, but I’d like to feel we are making the _right_ harsh criticisms.
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Well, Richard, but I don’t think he does present evidence for the resurrection (to take that by way of example). He refers to the gospel accounts, but this is mere circularity, since the gospel accounts are premised on the belief that Jesus rose from the dead. The appeal to scripture is always circular. How can it be anything else? Is there one thing, independent of the Bible, that can be referred to as evidence? It’s always internal since the Bible is in the nature of its own evidence. It has to be. It’s revelation precisely of the “events” recorded. Jesus was god because of his remarkable works and words. But the Bible tells us about them. What is the evidence that what the Bible says is true? Well, the disciples, after the crucifixion, didn’t simply give up, they started a movement that became worldwide. How do you know? Well, it’s in the book.
The same goes for the divine nature of scripture. It reports events which are taken for divine — why? The evidence is always internal to the text. There is no extra-textual evidence.
Even his Kalam argument is sheer assertion. He just assumes in the argument what must be proved, that an infinite universe cannot exist. What does that mean? He doesn’t say. Does he know it? No, because human thought gets tief up in knots dealing with the infinite, but he can’t extrapolate from that to the claim that the universe could not be infinite. We can’t think it, therefore it can’t be so? In what way is this an argument? Read through Aquinas’ five ways, and see how its done. There’s always a measure of circularity. You say, rightly, that the problem is justifying the premises, but of course that is true of all deductive arguments. They are simply assertion unless the premises are justified.
As for the apologist demanding an unreasonable standard of evidence. But, of course, that’s the point. The problems are all internal to the arguments themselves. They never gets outside themselves. It really is just assertion all the way down. Like the ontological argument, assumptions are being plugged in at the beginning. The point is that Craig, being clever about this, makes it seem as if he is really arguing, but he’s not. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
Actually, I was trying to figure out, quite aside from is pompous, smiling delivery, what was wrong, and this was my conclusion. Arguments, to be substantive, must get outside of themselves. Craig’s never do. And he does the same thing over and over again. In debate he’s a clever robot.
Does Craig say we should accept the gospel accounts because Jesus rose from the dead? If not, he isn’t making that circular argument. If he gives no reasons for accepting some premise you should say so, not attribute to him an argument he doesn’t make.
You wrote: “The appeal to scripture is always circular. How can it be anything else?”
“X is true because it says so in scripture” may be a lousy argument, but it’s not a circular one.
You wrote: “You say, rightly, that the problem is justifying the premises, but of course that is true of all deductive arguments. They are simply assertion unless the premises are justified.”
Arguments and assertions are quite different things, and an argument doesn’t become an assertion just because its premises are unjustified. In fact philosophers have a name for an argument whose premises are unjustified. It’s called an “unsound” argument.
If there’s very little distance between the premises and the conclusion, you might be justified in treating the argument as negligible and saying that it hardly goes beyond asserting the premises. But Craig does quite a lot of arguing from his premises to his conclusions. And he doesn’t just assert the impossibility of an actual infinite, he argues for it:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/#4.2
I’m not saying it’s a good argument. But an argument doesn’t cease to be an argument just because it’s bad.
Oops. That was a reply to Eric’s reply to me, but I forgot to post it as a reply. So it’s come out in the wrong place.
Yes, of course he argues for these things, over and over and over again. And thus they become sheer assertion, even if, as you say, there is a distinction between assertion and argument.If I am arguing with you, and use an argument, and you counter with an argument of your own, if I only parrot back my argument again, I am asserting, no longer arguing, whether the form of my assertion takes the form of premises and conclusion or not. If you keep repeating an unsound argument, and Craig and others do this again and again and again, then you are simply asserting, not arguing. This goes for the idea of an actual infinite, which is disputed, and he knows it, so introducting it into his debates simply is begging the question.
As for the resurrection. There is no independent evidence for the resurrection. The resurrection is supposed to explain the empty tomb, for example. But the tomb is only empty in the story. So it is circular to continue to argue for the historical reliability of the resurrection and depend upon the only textual evidence we have for its occurrence — and there is no physical evidence.
A sound argument can be sheer assertion, since soundness is only a logical property of argument forms — modus ponens, for example. But offering such arguments without justifying the premises is a circular procedure, since the truth of the conclusion depends upon the truth of the premises which cannot be simply presupposed. Thus his Kalam cosmological argument. Showing — if he has indeed done so — that we get all tied up in logical conundrums or even contradictions when we use the concept of infinity does not show that a temporal or physical infinity could not exist. So he has to sneak that premise in to his cosmological argument. That seems to me to be circular.
“If you keep repeating an unsound argument, and Craig and others do this again and again and again, then you are simply asserting, not arguing.”
We’re talking about the nature of the argument, not how often it’s made.
“But offering such arguments without justifying the premises is a circular procedure, since the truth of the conclusion depends upon the truth of the premises which cannot be simply presupposed.”
The term “circular argument” has a well-defined and accepted meaning, but you are using it to mean something quite different. A circular argument means one where the conclusion is _contained_ in the premises. It does not mean one where the premises have not been justified. If you don’t believe me, please look it up.
Sorry, I forgot to click on “reply” again!
Come, come Richard. I probably was involved in doing symbolic logic before you were ever in rompers!
However, have you never been in an argument where the person kept repeating over and over again the very same argument even though, (i) you have already said that this is not a compelling argument; (ii) you have shown the premises to be either (a) not proven or (b) shown to be false or questionable or, (ii) you have already shown that the argument is unsound. Then, you have to assume, either the person hasn’t heard you, has not understood you, or has assumed something throughout that is not being made plain, and no matter how often you say this, the person sticks to his “argument”, and thinks he has won a great victory. That, it seems to me, having listened to a number of debates with WLC, is precisely what he does. I say that is argument by assertion, and, in a very real sense, begs all the questions at issue, even though, in a formal context, this may not be what we mean by ‘begging the question’ or ‘arguing in a circle’. And WLC does it again and again. I know of no other way to describe it, even though it may not follow the strict logical defintion of a petitio. Whenever I find myself in this situation, I say, “Well, here we go round the mulberry bush again!” That’s a circle, whether it’s a formal petition or not. And whatever else it is, its simply argument by assertion. An argument can be asserted, you know, not used in argumentation.
You say that we are talking about the nature of argument. You say that offering the Bible as evidence for god is an argument, but not a very good one. I say it’s a petitio. The Bible itself is about god. Nowhere in the Bible is there any evidence that the words about god are revealed by god. If you repeat over and over again that the Bible is evidence for god, it becomes even more assertion rather than argument. Craig’s argument for the resurrection is another case in point. He says it accounts for the facts better than any other argument, but the facts are all recorded in the Bible as deriving from the resurreciton and presuppose it. Again, its a petitio. You can’t make arguments that easily.
I am still trying to understand what point you want to make in response to what I said in my original post, and I feel as though I am on the other side of the looking glass.
“X is true because it says so in scripture”
This abstraction of these sorts of argument makes it less obviously circular, but it’s still circular. Do remember that, in these arguments, X itself is a part of scripture. A more accurate abstraction is this:
“A certain part of scripture, X, is true because scripture is true” OR “My interpretation of a certain part of scripture, X-prime, is true because scripture is true”.
In other words, scripture is true because scripture is true. This is clearly circular.
Apologies for the X-prime business… No clue how to do sub/superscripts on the intertubes.
Yep… The “Bible, therefore, God” argument is a paradigm example of circular reasoning used in introduction to philosophy courses everywhere. It’s a pretty non-controversial point to have made.
Recently I e-mailed a famous theologian, and asked him how he knows there is a god, how he knows that science isn’t the only way to gain knowledge, and other similar questions. He replied in part by asking me what did I mean by “know”?, and he didn’t answer my questions, but suggested that I read several of his books, and then I could talk to him.
So, I went to Google Books, and took a look, and saw that his books were filled with stark naked assertions, some of which were strange indeed (god is the ground of being, all matter is imbued with mind, Christ gathers the entire universe into his eucharistic body, the universe is bent on “intensifying its inherent beauty”).
Now, I certainly don’t want to waste my time reading such trash, and the theologian does’t seem to want to talk to me unless I do, so I guess I’ll never talk to him (Oh darn!).
“Come, come Richard. I probably was involved in doing symbolic logic before you were ever in rompers!”
Well, I’m 53. Does that make a difference?
“He says it accounts for the facts better than any other argument, but the facts are all recorded in the Bible as deriving from the resurreciton and presuppose it. Again, its a petitio.”
No, that’s not a petitio. How is the conclusion contained in the premises? You don’t even say what Craig’s premises are. You say, “the facts are all recorded in the Bible as deriving from the resurreciton and presuppose it”, but that is at best a fact about the Bible. It isn’t a premise of Craig’s argument unless he makes it one.
BTW it’s not even clear what you mean. What does it mean, for example, to say that the alleged fact of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is “derived from the resurrection” or that it “presupposes” it? Please choose your words more carefully if you want to see this matter clearly. I think you’re confusing yourself through unclear wording.
“I am still trying to understand what point you want to make in response to what I said in my original post, and I feel as though I am on the other side of the looking glass.”
Is it so hard to understand that I think we shouldn’t call an argument “circular” when it isn’t?
I won’t say anything more about your accusation of “sheer assertion”, though I think that accusation is misguided. But as “sheer assertion” isn’t a well-defined term you have more wiggle room there. However “petitio principii” is a very well-defined term, and you are definitely misusing it.
Oh dear. The argument for the resurrection is based on the New Testament record. There is no independent testimony to the resurrection of Jesus. Yet Christians want to argue, on the basis of this text, that the resurrection is the most reasonable account of the “facts”. But we don’t have any facts. It is simply presupposed that the NT records facts. It doesn’t.
Thus. The resurrection gives us the best explanation for the empty tomb. But the tomb is empty only because the story says it was. It needs no explanation. The argument begs the question. I don’t need to tell you what his argument is. All I need is to show that there is no way out of the circle. In order to get out of it, Craig must be able to support one of his premises with independent testimony. There is none.
How is Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem derived from the resurrection? Easy. Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus is, therefore, the Messiah, given the redefinition of Messiah as someone who comes, not as king, but as servant (see Isaiah 53). The Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem (according to Matthew, who quotes the prophet tendentiously to this effect). Thus, belief in Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem derives from his having been raised from the dead.
This whole discussion about petition derived from this statement (in the original post):
You want to reduce the thing to an argument with premises: premise 1, premise 2, therefore conclusion. Show me the premise that presupposes the conclusion, you ask. Well, to get very specific. The only place in the entire Christian Bible where there is any suggeston that the scriptures are divinely inspired is in 2 Timothy 3.16, where it is said that the scriptures are “god-breathed”, but this is, itself, considered a part of scripture. That is a petitio.
Regarding rompers. In my childhood boys wore shorts until they were around ten or twelve. You’d have been in shorts.
Regarding sheer assertion, I won’t comment further either. I think WLC is shameless in the way he uses arguments as assertions. He doesn’t expect them to be answered, probably with some justice. He frames debates to his own satisfaction and defines what will be victory for him. I find his whole method of debating rebarbative and and repugnant. But it’s sheer assertion to my way of thinking. And there’s a whole lot of petitio involved as well, though I know I won’t convince you of this, since you have decided to take your definition from a book, instead of observing how arguments actually work in practice. Take a look at a few books on critical thinking and notice how petitio is so often hidden in verbiage. That’s what WLC does, in my estimation. He’s not a serious thinker, and I think this will have to be my last word about the charlatan.
“Show me the premise that presupposes the conclusion, you ask. Well, to get very specific. The only place in the entire Christian Bible where there is any suggeston that the scriptures are divinely inspired is in 2 Timothy 3.16, where it is said that the scriptures are “god-breathed”, but this is, itself, considered a part of scripture. That is a petitio.”
So what’s the premise of Craig’s argument? You still haven’t given one. You’re still just telling me a fact about the Bible. Sorry, but you seem deeply confused here. Still, you’re obviously not going to take a lesson from me, so I’ll say no more. I suggest you consult a logician you respect before you keep repeating the same errors.
I’m a patient man, by nature, Richard, but you really are trying my patience. This was not about Craig’s argument, it was simply about the point that I made in my post. Two different things. I’m not going to listen to Craig again in order to analyse his arguments. Time wasted, as is this discussion. Your arrogance astounds me, but your simple inability to understand a few simple points is really irritating.
Richard:
I don’t know if you’re being willfully obtuse about this or not, but… While Eric is applying these terms in ways that don’t obviously fit in with your narrow textbook understandings of them, this doesn’t mean he’s not using them properly. He is, and here’s why.
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Let’s start with the form of WLC’s argument, again:
“A certain part of scripture, X, is true because scripture is true”.
X is, in this case, “the resurrection story”. (The Bible-God thing fits as well. If that’s what you want to talk about, replace X with “the Bible is the word of God”.) So we get:
“The resurrection story is true because scripture is true”.
If you want to break it down into premises, here you go:
1. The resurrection story (is a part of scripture).
2. [Insert scriptural evidence for (1) here]
3. Scripture is true.
4. Therefore, the resurrection story is true.
The details of WLC’s argument don’t matter: the resurrection story and ALL purported evidence are contained ONLY in the Bible. The conclusion [that a certian part of] scripture is true is contained in the premises [scripture is true]. This is circular. It’s a petitio.
Additionally, as there is no non-scriptual evidence for (3), either the sub-argument for (3) is also circular — see Eric’s comments re: Timothy — or it must simply be asserted — which, I think, is the very point Eric is trying to make here.
Incidentally, this is all theology in general can do precisely because it relies on the Bible for its claims and its evidence. These arguments might be okay in the theology “language game” but they’re not outside of it. One simply cannot prove a part of scripture true by appealing to scripture for evidence. This is not just a bad argument, but circular. Again, this is just reiterating Eric’s point, as I understand it.
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As for the accusation that WLC’s arguments wind up being mere proof by assertion as he keeps repeating them… Let’s start by setting our terms. Proof by assertion is “is a logical fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction” (Wiki, just because I don’t feel like digging up a textbook). The part that bothers you about what Eric’s written, if I’m reading you right, is that it’s a whole argument, not a proposition that’s being repeated? So it’s not proof by assertion, just a bad argument, repeated ad nauseum?
Since WLC keeps making the same argument, regardless of contradiction, and without considering any evidence to the contrary, means, essentially, that although he keeps repeating the whole argument, he’s really just asserting, over and over, his conclusion. It pays to remember, too, that, since his conclusion and premises are effectively the same, repeating the whole argument is tantamount to repeating just the conclusion. Proof. By. Assertion.
Again, incidentally, this is all theologians in general can do when they try to move out of their little game to insist that parts of scripture (or their interpretations thereof) are true. Repeating the same, tired old arguments — arguments that, moreover, pretty much necessarily beg the question — regardless of evidence to the contrary and other forms of contradiction is simply a blinkered attempt to prove by asserting while hoping that no one notices. Well, Eric noticed and he called a spade a spade.
AR:
“Let’s start with the form of WLC’s argument, again:
“A certain part of scripture, X, is true because scripture is true”.”
But that’s not an argument we’ve been discussing, not one of the arguments Eric attributed to WLC, and so not one that I’ve denied is circular.
I also doubt whether WLC makes that argument.
P.S. You mentioned this version of the argument too:
“The resurrection story is true because scripture is true”.
Again, that’s not one that Eric and I discussed. I’m happy to agree that this is circular, though again I doubt it’s one that WLC actually makes.
I’m also quite willing to believe that WLC does make some circular arguments, though I doubt they’re as obviously circular as this.
My argument with Eric was over a number of specific arguments which he claimed to be circular but which are not.
Richard: “Again, that’s not one that Eric and I discussed. I’m happy to agree that this is circular, though again I doubt it’s one that WLC actually makes.
WLC does make these arguments. Have you not listened or watched his debates? A great example would be his debate with Barth Ehrman where WLC waxes on & on with all kinds of arguments and even complex mathematical formulae to show that the best explanation for the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection is that it really really happened. What is laughable is that not for one moment does he discuss the possibility that the Gospel accounts could be unreliable as history. That they are actually co-dependent pious fictions is not admissable to the discussion. (I understand that he has refused to debate others who would like to discuss this aspect of his thesis.) He seems oblivious to the the notion of “Garbage in, Garbage out.” He is not interested in truth – he is an apologist/evangelist with an agenda.
I agree with Eric, that at its heart WLC’s arguments are impervious to outsiders’ objections or real discussion as they are entirely circular at their core.
-evan
Richard:
A quotation from your post, above:
““X is true because it says so in scripture” may be a lousy argument, but it’s not a circular one.”
This is precisely the form of argument I’m talking about. I just replaced X, as WLC does, with the resurrection story which he, in turn, uses to prove the existence of God. So, this is precisely the form of argument that you are talking about, Richard. You just tried to manipulate it into something that appears less circular.
PS. I’m not sure you’re having the discussion you think you’re having with Eric. He seems to have been pretty clear that this is not about Craig’s specific arguments, the details of which do not really matter to the point he’s trying to make. They’re of the same form: scripture is true because scripture is true, no matter how you want to dress up the details. That form of argument — i.e., depending on scripture to prove the truth of scripture — is circular. And repeating the damn argument ad nauseum = sheer assertion.
eheffa:
Thank you! I was thinking of this as I wrote the above, I had just forgotten where it was.
`which he, in turn, uses to prove the existence of God“
Ooops. Dunno if he does that. That was a C&P error.
(Sorry, Eric, for the flurry of posts. I`m a disaster today and keep leaving things off, etc.)
Here’s the transcript of that debate if anyone is interested…
http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/p96.htm
AR, bear in mind that the two arguments you gave are not _strictly_ circular. You wrote earlier:
“The conclusion [that a certian part of] scripture is true is contained in the premises [scripture is true]. This is circular. It’s a petitio.”
That’s not correct. The conclusion follows trivially from the premises, but that’s not the same as being contained in them. Perhap “contained in” is not the best term to use. I think the more usual terms are “assumed by” or “presupposed by”.
Nevertheless, if the conclusion follows _too_ trivially from a premise, we might say that virtually no work is being done by the argument, so it’s little different from saying “X therefore X”. And maybe we can call it “circular” without doing too much violence to that term. But it’s not strictly circular. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have said I was “happy” to call your second case circular. I wouldn’t call it circular myself, though I might call it “as good as circular”. Anyway I’m not going to object if someone says informally that it’s circular.)
The argument you quote from me is another step removed from being circular, because unlike your cases, the premise “scripture is true” is not present. More important, it wasn’t one of the arguments that Eric called circular. It’s an example I brought up myself, and maybe it was poorly chosen. Let’s look at the original case under discussion.
You wrote:
“PS. I’m not sure you’re having the discussion you think you’re having with Eric. He seems to have been pretty clear that this is not about Craig’s specific arguments, the details of which do not really matter to the point he’s trying to make. They’re of the same form: scripture is true because scripture is true, no matter how you want to dress up the details.”
I think you need to re-read Eric’s OP and my initial reply to it (as I’ve just done). Eric referred to certain specific (if vaguely described) arguments, and they didn’t include that one. The one I originally addressed was the one from Haught, which probably comes closest to yours, but is significantly different:
“To take the Bible as evidence for the existence of the god spoken of throughout it is, not to put too fine a point on it, begging the question.”
I addressed this as follows:
“For example, it’s not circular to claim that the Bible is evidence of God. It would be circular to claim the Bible is reliable evidence of God _because_ it’s the word of God. But I don’t think most theologians would commit such an obvious fallacy.”
I still maintain that it’s not circular to take the Bible as evidence for the existence of God. If you disagree, let’s discuss that claim.
It occurs to me now that, when Eric said “begging the question” he could have been using it in the modern informal sense of “leaving the most important premise unaddressed”, not the traditional logician’s sense of “circular argument”. (The OP only used the word “circular” to describe Craig’s 3 arguments.) So mea culpa for not thinking of that at the outset. Nevertheless, in response to me Eric picked up and ran with the term “circular argument”, so I continued to assume that this was what we were talking about.
Looking back it’s now clear that Eric was always (or almost always) using “circular argument” as a substitute for the _informal_ sense of “begging the question”, i.e. to mean “leaving the most important point unaddressed”. But that’s not what “circular argument” means. There’s nothing “circular” about leaving something unaddressed. “Circular argument” is equivalent to the _formal_ sense of “begging the question”, i.e. one with a premise that presupposes the conclusion. Unfortunately, even when I specifically gave this definition, Eric didn’t take it on board.
So he and I were talking at cross-purposes almost throughout. I was using “circular argument” in its normal sense. Eric was using it to mean something quite different.
Incidentally, here’s an interesting article on the history of the term “begging the question”:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290
P.S. It may not have been clear that the “two arguments” I was referring at the beginning of my post are these two:
“A certain part of scripture, X, is true because scripture is true”.
“The resurrection story is true because scripture is true”.
I’m not particularly interested in going through all posts and making sure that I’m talking about what you’re talking about what Eric’s talking about, etc. The return on my time in that task is just not great enough for me to pursue it.
Though, if you’ll note, although I do expand on the version of the argument using X = “the resurrection story”, I do say that you can replace X with “God exists”, and run the argument that way to the same effect. (Eric’s numbered point 1 under WLC provided the starting point for the way I cast the argument, and it is an argument WLC uses, so I went with that.) In any case, God exists works just as well for X.
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“the premise “scripture is true” is not present”
Huh? It’s certainly implied — and implied premises make an argument circular just as well as stated ones do.
AR: “I’m not particularly interested in going through all posts and making sure that I’m talking about what you’re talking about what Eric’s talking about, etc. The return on my time in that task is just not great enough for me to pursue it.”
That’s fair enough. But then there’s nothing further for us to discuss here. Thanks, though, for drawing my attention to a couple of things that needed clarifying.
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