Having spent a great deal of time frequenting online theological debates, I've seen many arguments used repeatedly; some good, some not so good. As a Catholic, I decided to write this about the not so good ones that my fellow Catholics sometimes use. These are arguments that some Catholics consider to be decisive in certain dialectical contexts, but in fact are shown to be lacking under close examination. An important principle to remember is that if you don't know of a good answer or argument against something someone says, it's better to humbly admit the same than to advance a bad argument as if it were a strong one.
Some of these entries are going to be qualified, in that not all of these arguments are totally hopeless. Some of them can be salvaged if you change them up a little bit.
The Theologian's Fallacy
A Facebook friend once showcased a fallacious form of reasoning that you'll see from people in many theological traditions (or even in the context of discussing individual writers). The argument form goes roughly like this:
1. Person X claims that my/my tradition's commitments entail Y.
2. However, I/my tradition explicitly condemn(s) Y.
3. Therefore, Person X misunderstands me/my tradition.
The fallacy lies in the fact that in order for this argument to have hope of being valid, you need to add in a third premise which would assert something along the lines of, "My tradition is internally consistent." The problem, of course, is that no outsider is going to be committed to the notion that your tradition is internally consistent. A Catholic will have no problems believing that a given protestant tradition is internally inconsistent, and vice versa.
The reason why this fallacy is so prevalent, I think, is that it confuses an insider point of view with an outsider point of view. If someone has the gift of faith in the truth claims of Catholicism, it is of course true that the Theologian's Fallacy will be a sound argument form for them. However, that's only because they accept the underlying claim (the truth of Catholicism) that's being debated. As such, the Theologian's Fallacy ends up qualifying as a kind of begging the question in most contexts, under close inspection.
It's also a rather pernicious fallacy because the conclusion relates directly to the interlocutor. People convinced their interlocutor misunderstands them tend to tune their interlocutor out, or worse: suspect that their interlocutor is arguing in bad faith, and intentionally misrepresenting them. Such suspicions are very injurious to dialogue, and so the Theologian's Fallacy should be recognized and pointed out whenever it shows up.
My goal was to put these arguments roughly in ascending order of frequency, and at least personally I don't see this fallacy used by Catholics quite as often as the other arguments we'll be discussing. However, an example of the fallacy would be to say that the veneration of saints cannot constitute idolatry because the Church condemns idolatry. While that argument is a sound one for a Catholic first exposed to the protestant polemic (it produces a "knowing" that veneration=/=idolatry, even if not a "showing"), it's not a sound argument when used against any non-Catholic.
Flippant Usage of Matthew 18
In an often-quoted passage, Matthew 18:15-17, Jesus says that if someone sins against you and is unrepentant when confronted both individually and in front of a group, the next step is to tell the matter to the church.
The reason why Mt 18 makes this list is because I fairly often see Catholics use this passage in a simplistic and sloppy way. To be honest with you, I think for some Catholics the mere use of "church" is seen as dispositive. The standard line goes that protestants cannot follow this passage because they don't claim to have a visible universal Church in the way that Catholics (or Orthodox etc.) do. Of course, the problem with this argument is that most protestants who are going to be in debates like this do have visible local bodies of protestants that they call churches. There's nothing stopping a protestant from taking a dispute to their congregation.
In order to defend the idea that protestants can't apply Matthew 18, you're going to have to "get into the weeds" and make some more complex argument which is not encapsulated by the simple quip of "it says church, checkmate". For example, maybe you can argue that the use of "church" really does necessarily refer to the universal Church. If you can successfully argue that, then yeah, that becomes a problem for protestantism (although there are other problems you'd have to work out with such a view, such that it's obviously absurd for modern Catholics to take every personal dispute to the Holy See).
Another problem is that as I've alluded to before, the passage is primarily speaking of personal disputes ("if your brother sins against you..."), so it can't necessarily be equated to doctrinal disputes (although to be fair, the two are going to be intertwined). For example, it's problematic to argue that in order to apply Matthew 18, you need an infallible magisterium, because Catholics are generally not going to believe that the Church has an infallible ability to resolve every personal dispute correctly.
Jesus Didn't Correct His Audience in John 6!
Many protestants don't think that John 6 shouldn't be taken in a realist fashion (i.e. we are to eat and drink Jesus' flesh and blood in an objectively real way). But many who heard Jesus did take it in a realist fashion (verse 52), they left Jesus (verse 66), and Jesus never corrected them! What gives? If Jesus didn't mean what He said, why not correct those people!?
Many, many Catholics use this argument, and it's often seen as a "knock-out punch" that destroys any non-realist interpretation of the passage. However, there's a big problem with the argument: it cuts both ways.
What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, think about what the Catholic view is. The Catholic view is that in the consecration of the Eucharist, the reality of bread and wine is, in a way outside our minds, supernaturally changed into the reality of Jesus' body, blood, soul and divinity, although in such a way that the visible properties of bread and wine remain. In Aristotelian terms, this is called transubstantiation.
Where this argument cuts both ways, though, is that it's very unlikely that Jesus' audience had the Catholic belief of transubstantiation in mind when they heard Jesus' words. Jesus spoke of bread and of His flesh, sure, but that doesn't mean they would have made all of the relevant connections (that there would be such a thing as the Lord's supper as we know it to begin with, and that such a transubstantial change would occur in it).
In fact, Jesus' audience seemed to have a much more crude understanding of eating Jesus' flesh, as evidenced by the comment: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”. Such a "crude" (or "carnal") understanding of cannibalism is inconsistent with the Catholic understanding, as much as it's inconsistent with the many protestant ones. Augustine, in his Exposition on Psalm 99, points this out:
“It seemed unto them hard that He said, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, you have no life in you: they received it foolishly, they thought of it carnally, and imagined that the Lord would cut off parts from His body, and give unto them; and they said, This is a hard saying. It was they who were hard, not the saying.”
But if all sides can agree that Jesus' audience incorrectly interpreted His words, then it is no longer consistent for a Catholic to use the argument under discussion against protestants who advance non-Eucharistic interpretations of John 6. The same basis is there to wonder why Jesus didn't explain the Catholic view, as there is to wonder why Jesus didn't explain the Zwinglian view.
Most Uses of "We Gave You the Scriptures"
You often hear Catholics say that protestantism cuts off its own tail, because while protestants (claim/attempt to) base their religion on the Scriptures, the Catholic Church gave them those Scriptures to begin with. In many cases, it's used to respond to claims that the Catholic Church is contrary to the Scriptures; that's impossible, it's claimed, because the Catholic Church is responsible for the Scriptures being there in the first place.
In order to unpack this argument, it will be useful to distinguish three senses of the claim, "The Catholic Church gave us the Scriptures."
1. The Catholic Church authored the books of Scripture (in that the writers were themselves Catholic).
2. The Catholic Church passed down the Scriptures materially, by way of the copying of manuscripts.
3. The Catholic Church passed down the Scriptures formally, by way of its recognition of the canon.
It should be obvious that the first species of this argument is question-begging. No knowledgeable non-Catholic Christian is going to concede that the authors of Scripture were Catholic (in the sense that the same Church currently headed by Pope Francis existed back then, and is/was identical to the church Christ founded).
The second species of the argument is also deeply flawed, because of the uncontrolled nature of the textual transmission of the Christian Scriptures. No centralized authority ever controlled the text, so even if you suppose that a heretical (in some protestants' eyes) Catholic Church was in full force by the early-to-mid first millennium (which by the way, not every protestant is going to say), it's incorrect to say that protestants have to trust said Church to have faithfully transmitted the biblical texts. An uncontrolled transmission (plus the vast numbers of manuscripts) means that every reading would have been extremely difficult to extinguish from the manuscript tradition, and the antiquity of the manuscript tradition means that additions from any heretical church would have been visible to modern textual critics' eyes (if not every addition, then at least enough of them to ring alarm bells). Because of this uncontrolled transmission, even the most restorationist of protestants has reason to be confident that the original biblical texts haven't been substantially corrupted, whatever ill they may speak of the ancient and/or medieval Church.
The third species of the argument, related to the canon, is more complicated, hence why the header said "most" uses of the argument in question. The canon is the "front lines" of the Catholic-protestant discussion in many ways, and I'm not going to paint the topic with a broad brush. Unlike some, I'm not wholesale skeptical of any Catholic appeals to the canon as a polemic against protestants. There are some forms of the canon argument I find problematic (like that a fallible list of infallible books is incoherent; which would similarly undermine fallible lists of infallible Catholic doctrines), but others that I think do have some potential (if it can be established that a protestant contradicts the consensus of the historical Church on one matter, I think it can be legitimately asked of them why they trust the consensus of the historical Church on the canon).
One last point I want to make about "we gave you the Scriptures" is that it has potential to have a latent Theologian's Fallacy built into it. For example, it could be that a Catholic is gesturing at the great lengths to which the Catholic tradition values and treasures the Scriptures. If the Church loves the Bible so much, how could you say she contradicts the Bible? It should be clear, though, that this argument form is a species of the Theologian's Fallacy. The fact that the Catholic Church treasures the book of Romans doesn't refute protestant arguments that she contradicts Romans in her doctrines, any more than the fact that protestants include James in their canon refutes Catholic arguments that sola fide contradicts James.
Natural Appeals to Tradition
The Catholic Church, and its tradition, has been around for a long time. Catholics will say two thousand years; even non-Catholics will generally at least admit it's been around for many centuries.
Related to this fact, many Catholics appeal to this age in numerous direct or indirect ways. They might say that if so many smart people through so many different eras believed something, that's reason to think it's true. They might say that anybody who disagrees with all of said people must be arrogant, in presuming themselves smarter. They might say that anyone who brings up an objection to Catholic doctrine is also arrogant, in assuming that centuries upon centuries of Catholic thinkers could have failed to come up with, or address said objection.
To this point, there are a few observations I want to make:
1. The antiquity of the Church is in many ways very relevant to her truth claims, but only in conjunction with certain promises of Christ (that the gates of hell wouldn't prevail, that His disciples would be led into all truth, etc.) That's why I speak of and criticize natural appeals to tradition- claims that the age of the Catholic tradition in its own right is dispositive of its veracity. These are to be understood as distinct from supernatural appeals to tradition, which combine the natural facts with those divine promises from supernatural revelation.
2. The important fact to underline, here, is that everybody is committed to rejecting some long-standing tradition or another. The Catholic tradition has been around for many centuries, but so has the Islamic tradition, the rabbinic Jewish tradition, the Hindu tradition, and in a way even the atheistic tradition goes back to ancient times. Heck, there's a decent chance that 1,000 some-odd years from now, we'll be talking about the protestant tradition as having stood the test of time.
Of course, given the contradictory truth claims of all of these various intellectual/religious traditions, everybody is of necessity committed to believing that some of these traditions have held onto erroneous positions for a very long time. Everyone is committed to believing themselves "smarter" than said traditions, in that they are correct in a way the tradition is incorrect. And realistically speaking, it's even likely true that some of the objections these traditions have been engaging with for a very long time are in fact successful objections. As such, there's nothing extraordinary or unique about someone claiming to have refuted a tradition that goes back centuries.
3. Of course, there are many people who are overconfident in the veracity of their objections to a particular tradition (be it the Catholic tradition or another). It's definitely true that someone can go to r/atheism for a while and believe themselves to be armed with numerous death-blow refutations of Christianity. However, I don't think it's necessary to make a natural appeal to tradition to address such people. An alternative approach is to say something like, "If you haven't familiarized yourself with our rejoinders to your objection, you probably shouldn't be so confident that it refutes our position." That's a completely fair thing to say, and it doesn't require making a connection between the antiquity of a belief and its truth.
4. In some cases of ecumenical dialogue, the ancient consensus of the early Church in favor of the Catholic position on a point of doctrine is itself under dispute, so a natural appeal to tradition will in some sense be question-begging (or at least, you'd have to first establish said consensus).
5. In some cases, a protestant is up against a consensus of Christians throughout history on a given point of doctrine. In that case, pointing this out is less of an appeal to tradition as it is an appeal to consensus. "Most Christians/Christian thinkers throughout history have thought that Christianity entails X" could have a similar natural force as arguments from the consensus of climate scientists regarding the reality of human-caused climate change, for example. I've changed my mind sporadically regarding how much weight I put into natural appeals to consensus (I would personally rather just engage in terms of the underlying reasons why most experts believe a certain thing), but I don't think a natural appeal to consensus is as flawed as a natural appeal to tradition is.
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