Five Arguments Catholics Should Stop Using

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.

The Defendant of the Gaps

Image source

I thought of this parallel a couple months ago or so, and am inspired to mention it in this post after encountering Whaddo You Meme?'s response to Genetically Modified Skeptic, which discussed the so-called God of the Gaps argument.

Suppose you are a juror in a court of law, and that you are evaluating a case of a man who has been charged with a crime.  The prosecuting attorney presents pieces of evidence that she argues warrants an inference that the defendant is guilty.  For now, you're leaning towards convicting him, but you'll wait to see what the defense says.  The defendant's attorney then comes up and says the following:

Your Honor, all I saw from the prosecution just then was one big argument from ignorance.  All she ever gave was a list of gaps in our current not-guilty-based understanding of the world, and she tried to then conclude that the defendant is guilty.  This is nothing more than a classic case of "the defendant of the gaps". 

 You see, throwing one's hand up and saying "The defendant did it!" is nothing more than a case of laziness.  I don't claim to know what the explanation of [whatever evidence was just presented], but at least I'm honest enough to admit that, and to work and try to figure out what the explanation is, instead of dishonestly claiming "the defendant did it!".

 "The defendant did it!" is a science-stopper.  It seeks to stifle scientific progress as we gradually find the real answers to these questions.  Over time, future people will find not-guilty explanations of what the prosecution just presented, and the gaps she will be able to fill with her defendant of the gaps will keep shrinking.

Now, how would you react to such a speech?  Would you take it to be convincing?  Would it change your mind as far as whether or not to convict the defendant?

Examining of a YouTube Video on the Problem of Evil

Image courtesy of Philosophy Dungeon.

This was a long Facebook post I made about a year ago, going point-by-point through an old YouTube video by cdk007 on the problem of evil.

[NAME], since this video seems to encapsulate the challenge you think the problem of evil levies against theism, I thought I'd do a point-by-point examination of the video, followed by some considerations regarding the definition of God's omni-attributes (which you often tend to bring up in the wake of objections to the PoE).

Ending at 2:07- This is where cdk007 paraphrases Epicurus, in saying that if God is unable to prevent evil, He is impotent, and if God is unwilling to prevent evil, He is malevolent.  However, the problem with this kind of deductive argument that has led philosophers to abandon the logical problem of evil, is that there are hidden premises that are being left out of the argument.  The most controversial premise is that if God is unwilling to prevent an instance of evil, He is malevolent.  The reason why this premise is controversial is because, in order to hold to it, one has to believe it is logically impossible for God to have a morally exonerating reason to prevent a given instance of evil.  This premise gives the atheist who runs the logical PoE a great burden of proof, which is extremely difficult (theists would argue impossible) to bear. 

The problem for the atheist levying this argument is made greater when theodicies are proposed, which seek to offer a "story" which makes it more clear how God could exist alongside evil.  Such a theodicy is offered in my own video on the topic.  In essence, the theodicy states that the reason for God's non-prevention of evil is that for God to prevent a given instance of evil, it would logically require Him to perform an act of evil, in the form of withholding His self-gift in some way (either by negating the maximal delegation of His powers, or by negating the maximal importance of a given individual).  It is therefore because God is perfectly good that He doesn't prevent evil.

Ending at 3:13- Cdk responds to the claim that evil is required for the good.  His responses to this "version" of the claim is pretty good, but at least among theists who are significantly aware of these kinds of questions, I rarely see such a position argued.  I more often see it argued that there are specific goods (such as courage, bravery, etc.) that couldn't exist without evil, or that somehow our perception or appreciation of the good is enhanced given the presence of evil.  While I wouldn't defend these other claims as theodicies, the fact that Cdk responds to the much less sophisticated "version" of the response suggests that he isn't very familiar with theistic objections to the PoE.

Ending at 3:33- Cdk responds to the claim that evil and good have to be "balanced out".  Similar to the previous claim he responded to (but even more so), I really don't see this said in Christian circles.  The closest thing to it is the idea put forth by someone like Dr. William Lane Craig, that perhaps the amount of good in the world (including good in the earthly/temporal realm, as well as the good that results from souls attaining knowledge of God) is only possible (or only possible given the "counterfactuals of creaturely freedom", a fancy term for "what free creatures would do in given circumstances"), given the amount of evil we see in the world.  Cdk says that this doesn't explain how evil is "imbalanced" in the world, but that doesn't seem to counter WLC's claim (which is the only Christian claim I really know of that's similar to what he responded to) at all.

Again, I wouldn't espouse WLC's claim, even if true, as a theodicy (I don't think God's non-prevention of evil has to do with any kind of judgement about the evil being "worth it" in view of some greater good), but cdk's response is quite sub-par.

Ending at 4:35- Finally, cdk gets to a more popular Christian response to the PoE, namely that evils make the world better in certain ways (that salvation is only possible given sin, etc.).  He makes three separate responses, which each should be responded to separately.

[As a preliminary note, again, I don't actually use this theodicy.  I would actually argue that all evils are gratuitous (in the sense that they don't serve any greater good, apart from God's redemptive work to "re-integrate" them into justice).  These notes are given for the sake of thorough-ness, and also in order to demonstrate that cdk appears to have only a superficial familiarity with theistic responses to the problem of evil.]

1. Cdk argues that if a world with evil is better than a world without one, then this world is inferior to Heaven.  The problem with this counter, though, is that a person's heavenly existence would be "based off-of" what their earthly existence was.  When apologists talk about "worlds" with or without evil, they're more accurately talking about "possible realities", or something similar.  In other words, they'd be talking about possible realities that encapsulate both what life is like for people on Earth, as well as in the afterlife.  So the objection based on Heaven is based on a misunderstanding in that way.  [If the further counter is that "well God could have just created us directly in Heaven", that kind of objection will be addressed later.]

2. Cdk argues that if God created us with the need to experience evil to experience certain goods, He is either evil in doing so, or impotent in the sense of not having power over "the nature of good and evil".  This isn't necessarily true, however, if the idea is that the goods proposed by the apologist are logically impossible without their corresponding evils.  As I'll discuss after the examination of the video, a logically-impossible action isn't in the ambit of omnipotence, on any sober definition of the term (or any definition of the term that would allow the atheist to run a PoE argument in any form).

3. Cdk argues that there are evils that serve no effects whatsoever, and therefore serve no greater good.  However, the common response to this retort (that someone like Dr. Craig frequently uses) is that the atheist can't meet their burden of proof in order to claim something like this.  The "butterfly effect", for instance, entails that events can have causal effects that are perplexing, and would be impossible to discern to somebody witnessing the event.

Ending at 5:25- Cdk responds to the idea that evil is the absence of God, just as darkness is the absence of light.  He brings up that this negates God's omnipresence, and goes on a tangent regarding how God doesn't "go" where instances of evil happen.

While I admit that some theists do have this kind of superficial understanding of "privatio boni", it's important to put the idea of privatio boni in context, and to look at other possible ways of understanding such an idea.

There are some forms of the problem of evil that don't so much ask why God doesn't prevent evil, but how evil could metaphysically even exist given certain claims about God (that God is "being itself", created everything, is the ground of all being), etc. [This may be a subtle distinction to make, but an important one.]  I've seen this called the "problem of imperfection".

What "privatio boni" attempts to show is that evil isn't some kind of separate metaphysical, or ontological category, from good, but that it is somehow a "privation" of good.  Now, if one sees this privation as merely a matter of "lack", objections such as cdk's could perhaps be viable.  However, a more common understanding of privatio boni, and one that I would hold, is that evil is a privation of the good of the matter of ordering.  In other words, there is a good "ordering" of things, in which created persons' needs and desires correspond perfectly with both reality, as well as other persons' needs and desires.  Evil is what occurs when such an ordering is "dislocated", and where there is a lack of said correspondence. 

To use an analogy (that I believe came from Johanan Raatz), a porcelain plate is "good" when it is whole, and usable for eating (or decoration, or whatever purposes).  When such a plate breaks, however, the pieces become "evil".  Not because the substance of the plate has fundamentally changed, but because the plate is no longer able to function according to its intended purpose, and because the now "pieces" no longer work together to achieve such a purpose.

Ending at 7:39- Cdk responds to the concept of the free will theodicy with four objections to it.  The theodicy of divine chastity, which is what I hold to, is different from the free will theodicy in important ways, but some of his objections would seemingly apply to TDC, so it's important to respond to them.  I'll respond to these objections point-by-point (Note that he gets his numberings confused here.  In the video, 3 is a response to 2.  I ordered the points with respect to the points he responded to.  So "4" in the video will correspond to "3" in this listing, and "5" in the video will correspond to "4" in this listing.

1. Cdk argues that if God is all-knowing, He knew what we would do with our freedom, and thus He would have to be held responsible, at least in part, for the evil that then occurs.  This is a worthy objection, but it is responded to in my video.  Essentially, if God were to fail to create a person, fail to give them the same importance, or coerce them to act in certain ways, knowing that otherwise said created person would act evilly and cause a great evil to occur, God would be compromising His nature in a key way.  God would no longer be acting in perfect self-gift to each person, giving them goods for their own sake.  Instead, God's "modus operandi" would become self-restraint to manipulate outcomes/prevent certain outcomes from occurring.  But in that case, the perfect self-gift aforementioned, and thus perfect goodness itself, would cease to exist.  In this way, the reason why God doesn't create/give differently in light of what will happen is because doing so would contradict His perfectly-good nature.  It would be a matter of doing evil to prevent evil, which a perfectly-good being will never do.

[As a side note, the illustration cdk gives is an epic fail.  With reference to a theodicy pertaining to free will, he gives an illustration pertaining to... a robot.  There aren't any natural examples of people creating free agents (apart from reproduction), though, so perhaps some slack can be cut here.]

2. Cdk responds to the claim that free will is such a great good that it "compensates" for the evil that exists in our world. [It's important to note, here, that there's a distinction between the free will theodicy he's replying to on this point, and the theodicy of divine chastity.  TDC isn't consequentialist in nature, where God would "weigh" the good of free will on one side of the scale, and the evils we see on the other, and give the verdict "Well, I suppose it's worth it!".  Such a view implicitly diminishes the significance of evil, and posits that God's opposition to it is finite.  Instead, the idea of TDC is that God being perfectly good, can't do evil to prevent evil, even though the second "evil" is in fact infinitely offensive to Him.]

His response is that there's no reason why God could have created us with the ability to make choices, but for us to always air on the side of good.  The example he gives is Heaven, where presumably our freedom remains, but where evil is impossible.

This retort is also addressed in my video.

Essentially, freedom as it pertains to creatures would entail the ability to give oneself away in service of others, of one's own accord.  The reason persons in Heaven are incapable of sin is because they have fully given themselves away, such that said gift is irrevocable.  The next natural question would be why God couldn't create somebody in such a "fully-given-away" state.  Put simply, the answer is that the "given away" would be in scare-quotes, here.  Gift would have to do with a person choosing on their own accord to give themselves away, and God would in essence be making the decision for the creature by simply creating them in the "fully-given-away" state.

3. Cdk claims that free will is a "cop-out", which claims that our choices are detached from the causal chains of the universe, where, in fact, neuroscience has shown that decisions are purely the result of neural activity in the brain.  Let's break this into two components:

a) Free will can't be true because our choices can't be disconnected from the causal chains of the universe.  This implicitly assumes physicalism (that the mind is physical/a part of "the causal chains of the universe"), which is a controversial premise that needs to be supported.  It also assumes that the natural world is actually deterministic (in terms of physical things causing physical things), which is also controversial.  Modern findings pertinent to quantum mechanics (and other fields) at least open up the possibility that conscious agents are actually what constructs the physical world, or at least have the ability to cause effects in the physical world.  [For further exploration of this, I'd suggest several videos by the YouTuber Inspiring Philosophy.  His videos on the "case for the soul", as well as "Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism" and "How Free Will Works".]  Both of these possibilities would lend doubt to this hidden assumption.

b) Modern neuroscience has shown that decisions are the result of neural activity in the brain.  It is difficult to ascertain exactly what findings he is referring to (he displays a graphic, but I'm unsure what it's referring to), but 8:20 to 12:03 of this video addresses the Libet experiments, which may be what he is referring to.

4. Cdk claims that even if free will lets God "off the hook", there's still the question of why God doesn't prevent certain moral evils, or at least "limit" them in some way.  That's potentially a useful distinction, but it is addressed by divine chastity in aforementioned ways.  God fails to prevent given instances of moral evil, either because it would take away the importance/delegated power of said agent, or because it would take away the importance/delegated power of some other agent tasked with preventing said evil in some way.

To the end of the video: Cdk concludes by restating his previous points, that have been refuted above.

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NOTES ON THE DEFINITION OF GOD'S ATTRIBUTES
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Now, often you answer critiques of the PoE by saying they are strawmen; the PoE, you argue, critiques the idea of an omnipotent God, whereas these responses posit a God Who isn't actually omnipotent, because an omnipotent being would be able to do something that these critiques posit that God is unable to do.

However, such an argument is difficult to defend on close inspection, as in nearly every case of a theodicy, there is some case made that if God were to bring it about that evil (or a given kind of evil) didn't exist, it would logically necessitate something undesirable for a perfectly-good being.  As such, the retort you would have to make would be along the lines of "An omnipotent being would be able to make it such that [said undesirable thing(s)] wasn't so, and such that [the instance(s) of evil the theodicy seeks to explain] wasn't so."  However, such a claim would have to be collapsed into one of two categories:

a) It wouldn't, in fact, be logically impossible for God to prevent the given instance of evil without said undesirable thing(s) being entailed.

b) Even though it would be logically impossible for God to prevent the given instance(s) of evil without said undesirable thing(s) being entailed, an omnipotent being should still be able to do so.

If you claim that a) is true, then you must give an argument for why it actually would be logically possible for God to prevent the evil(s) without the undesirable thing(s) being entailed (as well as interact with any arguments presented for the opposite conclusion).  Remember, the problem of evil is an argument levied by the atheist, and it is thus on the atheist to substantiate the premises of said argument.

If you claim that b) is true, then as Dr. Craig mentions, any argument from evil loses any leg it could have to stand on, because it suddenly is in the ambit of omnipotence to "make it so God is good and God is not good", or to "make it so that evil exists and evil doesn't exist".  Indeed, it comes into the ambit of omnipotence to "make it such that God exists and evil exists", even if the atheist running the logical PoE is right, and God's and evil's existence really are logically mutually exclusive.

As such, in nearly all contexts relevant to theodicy, the claim that "if God were omnipotent, He could do X" either amounts to an assertion which then needs support, or undermines any attempt at an argument against the existence of God from evil to begin with.

Meta-discussion: Reflections on the Basics of Contradictions and Valid Arguments

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

"Meta-discussion": This is the first of what might be a series on this blog (but no guarantees) about foundational principles that are important in many kinds of discussions about controversial matters.

A key piece of groundwork to keep in mind is what constitutes a contradiction.  When talking about the logical problem of evil, Dr. William Lane Craig uses a framework of reflecting on contradictions that is useful.  Most basically, there are two kinds of contradictions:

Explicit contradiction: A simple statement of both a proposition and its negation.  (ex: "God exists." and "God does not exist." explicitly contradict each other)

Implicit contradiction: Two statements that aren't explicitly contradictory, but entail an explicit contradiction when combined with necessarily true premises. (ex: "John is a bachelor." and "John is married." is an implicit contradiction; one is not the direct negation of the other, but "John is a bachelor." combined with the necessarily true premise "All bachelors are not married." entails that "John is not married.", which does in fact make an explicit contradiction with "John is married.")

The key point to keep in mind, here, is that if two claims are implicitly contradictory, there should, in fact, be another "step" (or group of steps) which bring one from the implicit contradiction to an explicit one.

This is an important point to remember, because you may often come across people arguing against each other about a topic, but arguing for central points that may not actually contradict one another.  At the least, to conclude that their central points contradict one another, you may need to insert premises that aren't obviously or necessarily true- and thus it may be a good idea to pursue whether said premise really is true.

Another, related consideration I want to put forward is about the nature of arguments.  Throughout discussions on controversial questions, both sides generally trot out talking points, moral considerations, or evidence that they believe support the position they are trying to defend.  Many times, though, if you try to lay out their argument in a more formal way, there is a major problem with the argument that will be exposed.

A deductive argument (what we'll focus on for now) has four basic requirements to be a good argument:

1. The argument's conclusion should be in line with the position the person making the argument is trying to defend. (If you're trying to argue for X, but your argument's conclusion is Y, then there's a "gap" in your reasoning that needs to be filled.)

2. The argument has to be valid. (The conclusion has to logically follow from its premises.  You can look up the logical rules of inference; you may be scared of logic-speak, but most of them are fairly easy to grasp on an intuitive level.)

3. Every premise has to be reasonable to believe to be true (the more reasonable, the better).  The reasonableness can be explicitly argued for, or it can be an assumption that the interlocutors share.

[I'd argue this condition will depend on the context of the conversation, meaning that some arguments can be better in some contexts than others.  

For example, if a Catholic were to defend a particular doctrine to another Catholic by quoting some Church document, that would be a good argument for that doctrine for the purpose of that discussion.  But if that same Catholic were to quote that same document to a non-Catholic in support of the same doctrine, it wouldn't constitute as good an argument for the purposes of that discussion.

A good argument starts with assumptions that the interlocutors can agree on, and then tries to demonstrate, normally with at least one controversial premise that is argued for, that the arguer’s interlocutor should accept the conclusion.]

4. The reasons for believing the truth of the premises can't be dependent on already believing the conclusion.  This is the criterion Dr. Craig uses for the fallacy of begging the question, and I think it's a good one.  Note that it’s okay if the premises entail the conclusion; in fact, it’s necessary for that to be so, see the second criterion.

Now, I understand that not every argument made in a real-life (or internet) context will be neatly laid out in premise-conclusion form; nor am I suggesting that they should always be.  But you want to keep in mind that every good deductive argument should at least be able to be written as a formal argument that fulfills the above four criteria.  This post is more focused on the first two.

A good exercise you might want to consider is: when you’re in a discussion with someone about a controversial issue (particularly a heated one, where it will be most important of all to parse everything out), try to write down (or type out) what they are saying in premise-conclusion form.  Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is the conclusion something you disagree with in the first place?  [Related: Does the conclusion actually contradict what you were trying to get across?]

2. Does the conclusion logically follow from its premises? [Related: Are they using key terms in the same sense when they use it in multiple premises?]

3. If the answer to 2 is no, try to insert or change premises as needed to try to make the argument valid.  When you do so, is there a premise in the new, valid form of the argument that’s dubious, and that your interlocutor didn’t really argue for?

If the answer to 1 is no, or if the answers to 2 and 3 are no and yes respectively, then while the interlocutor may be rhetorically effective, have a bunch of social media followers as an “amen” choir horde, and even be making true points in support of true conclusions, but none of that actually undermines your central point, and thus their contribution to the discussion is much less valuable than a valid argument that really does attempt to contradict what you are saying.

You may find that you will answer the questions the above way in many instances, and that therefore, you'll be able to have better focus on those arguments that really are relevant to the issues you are interested in debating.

Of course, you should also ask the questions in reverse when thinking about your own arguments, to make sure you are arguing effectively and not engaging in red herrings.

Depending on how I (or others) use this post in the future, it's possible you've been directed here because you're either making an invalid argument, or because you're arguing for a conclusion that I (or your interlocutor) don't actually disagree with, and doesn't actually contradict my beliefs.

Everything Wrong With Sye Ten Bruggencate's Presuppositionalism, Part 1

This is part one of a response to/commentary on a two-part talk Sye Ten Bruggencate gave on his method of apologetics commonly known as presuppositional apologetics.  The part of the talk I am responding to in this post can be found here: youtube.com/watch?v=RWxVxXNgU4A

As a rough outline of this apologetics method, Sye attempts to respond to attacks on Christianity (sometimes people who use his method even use it on fellow Christians who do not use said method) by asking them questions about the foundations of their knowledge, and what truth is, with his point being that non-Christian worldviews cannot account for truth, and thus any attack on Christianity borrows from it.  He has an interactive website called proofthatgodexists.org which takes the visitor of the site through his script.

So without further ado, let's begin.  I will respond to different parts of his talk by identifying the timestamp of when the thing Sye says that I am responding to ends.  There are some things which Sye says which I agree with however, and I will not comment on them.

Ending at 11:20- Sye uses Romans 1 to try to make a point about the evidential apologetics he used to appeal to, but the argument is very weak.  He argues that since Romans 1 says everyone knows that God exists, that therefore we shouldn't give people evidence for a God that they already know exists.  The section of Romans 1 that he cites is directed at those who surpress the truth of God in unrighteousness, and nowhere is it indicated that it refers to everybody that isn't a Christian.  Whether an atheist, or anyone else, is fully aware of the truth of Christianity and is surpressing it is not something that anybody can know other than that individual and God.  One of the things God has given mankind so that we can know Him is reason, and there is nothing wrong with using reason to that effect with non-Christians.

Ending at 12:55- Sye makes an argument that is tangential to the issue of apologetic methods but one that I think needs addressing.  He says that the reason we send missionaries is because people who do not know about Christ are going to Hell without Him.  He argues against the doctrine of invincible ignorance by strawmanning it- he says that if the ignorant would be going to Heaven anyway then we would build walls around them rather than send them missionaries.  The problem of course, is that he treats the ignorant as one monolithic whole that are either all going to Heaven or all going to Hell, which of course is a false dichotomy.  There is a third option, which is that the ignorant, like everyone else, are judged by how they responded to God's grace in their lives.

Ending at 15:49- Sye responds to the question of why do apologetics if everyone knows that God exists by saying that we should do so because God tells us to do so in the Bible.  However, this response avoids the issue.  If the argument that there's no point in apologetics if everyone knows that God exists, if it went through, would prove that God had no reason to command us to do apologetics.  Saying that the Bible tells us to do apologetics does not answer the question of why God inspired said commands into the Bible.  Furthermore, this question that Sye is responding to can be used as a response to Sye's argument that we shouldn't do evidential apologetics if everyone knows that God exists.  What's poison for the evidential goose is poison for the presuppositional gander, and Sye does not address this.  Also, wouldn't the justification for apologetics he gives be turned around against what he said about missions also?  By Sye's logic, one could accept Sye's strawman of the doctrine of invincible ignorance, and say that everyone who dies ignorant of Christ goes to Heaven anyway, but that you should still go on missions because the Bible tells us to.

Ending at 20:41- Sye says that Romans 8:38-39 cannot be true of God is "probable" (we'll get to why he uses this terminology later).  However this is just a non-sequitur.  The passage simply says that nothing can "separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord".  Saying that nothing could make God not love us has no implications with regards to apologetic methods.

Ending at 21:34- Sye continues on and distinguishes between a "probable god", which he cites Pascal's Wager as an example of an argument which argues for such a god, as opposed to the "certain God" which he believes in.  However, whether a being can be known to exist and to what confidence someone can be justified in believing in something is not a property of something, and thus distinguishing between a "possible god" and a "certain God" the way Sye does is nonsense.  

Ending at 32:32- Sye does a quick critique of some of the theistic arguments he claimed to have defended previously.

Sye attacks the Kalam Cosmological Argument in ways that if he had known about the traditional theistic arguments as much as he would want us to believe, he would not have brought up.  I'm sorry, but if you're going to say "who created God?" in response to the Kalam, then you did not now the first thing about it back when you defended it.  He also goes on to critisize the Kalam because it doesn't argue for Christianity, but instead argues for a "general god" which a Christian could then go on to argue is the Christian God.  However, he never explains why this is problematic.  

Sye responds to the teleological argument (he never brought up the fine-tuning argument, which he would have known about had he studied the theistic arguments for any decent amount of time) by appealing to much of the same responses he used with the Kalam.  He then goes on to make an argument built on "probable vs. certain God" argument- he says that arguing from the odds of some feature of the universe being here without God is inprobable- no matter how improbable- is still arguing for a "probable god", and that given any huge number-to-one odds, the unbeliever will take that "one" any day of the week if they don't want to believe in God.  This is a huge concession on Sye's part.  He admits that these types of arguments can make disbelief in God irrational!  An apologetic could not ask for more than that- that's kind of the whole point of apologetics (offensive apologetics anyways, which are what these arguments usually are).  

Sye responds to the argument for the Resurrection by saying that the Resurrection could be argued to be a natural event.  This is absurd.  Some people believe that Jesus could have survived the crucifixion, and that itself is almost universally rejected by modern scholarship simply because of what we know about what Roman crucifixion was.  But nobody believes that Jesus could have died of a Roman crucifixion and then naturally rise from the dead.  If you can drive a non-Christian into believing that rather than believing in Christianity then you have done all the job you can do as an apologist.

Sye then wraps up his critiques of traditional apologetics by giving a summary of what happens when a non-Christian becomes a Christian by way of traditional apologetics: "Yep, I have all the evidence I need that Christianity is true, and based on the overwhelming evidence, I want to become a Christian".  Sye thinks that this is bad because said non-believer assumes the position of God by saying that they will come to Christianity because of the evidence.  Err, isn't that how everyone comes to Christianity? Everyone decides that they are going to become a Christian.  If we go by Sye's logic we should never encourage anybody to become a Christian, because by doing so they are assuming the position of God.  This is absolute nonsense.  

Ending at 33:30- Sye attempts to defend his ridiculous argument by saying that when an unbeliever becomes a Christian via traditional apologetics, they are becoming the judge iver whether God exists rather than God being the judge over them.  This is to equivocate on the term judge.  Obviously, nobody is saying that if someone examines the evidence and concludes that God does not exist that that makes God not exist somehow, or makes belief in God irrational somehow.  This obviously has nothing to do with the way which God is the judge over us.  Furthermore, even with Sye's apologetic, Sye is giving his apologetic to the unbeliever to show them the error in what they are saying.  Wouldn't giving them this apologetic and leaving it up to them to understand it count as putting them in the judge's seat by Sye's logic?  Again, what's poison for the evidential goose is poison for the presuppositional gander.

Ending at 34:48- Sye expands on what he said previously and applies it to the Garden of Eden- Eve weighed what God told her to do and what Satan told her, Sye says, and she said that she would choose between the two.  This again is nonsense- is Sye seriously saying that if Eve said "this is what God says, this is what Satan says, and I am going to choose God because I love God and want to obey Him" that that would be sinful?  What Sye said Eve should have done is to tell Satan to go away and say "thus sayeth the Lord".  But how would Eve decide to do that?  Again, she would have to make a choice to choose God over Satan, which would be idolatry by Sye's standards.

Ending at 35:19- Sye cites Scriptures to try to prove a point about apologetic methods.

Sye cites Proverbs 9:10, "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom".  If taken in the way Sye takes it however, it proves too much- notice how it says "the fear of the LORD" is the beginning of wisdom.  You see, what Sye tries to do is say that all you need to do to have knowledge is to believe in God, but not necessarily worship God or be a Christian.  However, if you were to take this literally (and convert wisdom to knowledge so it applies here), you would say that because everyone knows things everyone fears the Lord.  Oopsies!

Sye cites Collossians 2:3, "In (Christ) are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge".  However neither side of the issue of which apologetic method we should use denies this.  We all believe Jesus is God and is omniscient.

Ending at 37:00- Sye cites Scriptures to try to prove that Christians have to know Christianity is true with certainty (it is unclear what he means by certainty, but in order for his argument to work it needs to be a certainty that the traditional apologetic method cannot provide).  However, when you look at the context of these passages it's pretty clear that they don't mean what he wants them to mean.  

In Luke 1 Luke is simply saying that he has carefully investigated what he put into his gospel so we can be sure they were true.  It's pretty clear this is just the common usage of the word "sure"/"certain", and there is no reason to extrapolate from this usage of the word anything more profound about apologetic methods, especially as the context has nothing to do with apologetics.

John 17:8 is another such case.  There is no reason to put Sye's spin on Jesus' usage of "certainty" here, and it is especially ridiculous to apply this to apologetics, as what Jesus was saying has nothing to do with apologetics.

Acts 2:36 is a particularly dubious case.  The word here for certainty doesn't even mean certainty, it means assuredly (http://biblehub.com/greek/806.htm).  Applying this to apologetics is again ridiculous, as Peter said what he did right after the crowd had heard the apostles speak in tongues for themselves.

At the end of the first part Sye gives a bit of a preview of what is to come in the second.  I'll leave my comments on those for my response to the second part of the talk.

Update 1/28/2024: I remember around the time I originally wrote this, my understanding of certainty might have been contrary to the teaching of the Church.  Though I still don't have all of the details of certainty ironed out, I thought it might be helpful to paste these quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church to help clarify Church teaching and that I adhere to it:

CCC 36: ""Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God's revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created "in the image of God"."

CCC 157: "Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but "the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives." "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.""