Saturday, March 27, 2010

Logical Fallacies: Appeal to Tradition

I've decided to start a periodic series on logical fallacies. It's called "Logical Fallacies: How to Argue Like a Fundamentalist and 'Win' Every Time." I'll leave out the subtitle most of the time.

Today's fallacy is the appeal to tradition. In its purest form, it simply means: X is old/traditional, ergo X is better. While not a pure example of such, I found the ongoing comment thread on Art Boulet's recent post to have hints of it from one of the commenters.

In biblical studies, an example of appeal to tradition might be an appeal to theology or an appeal to the divine origin of Scripture. Since this appeal is based on an unverifiable presupposition of the one making the argument, it doesn't really count as public evidence admissible for academic proof. It's a sectarian claim no matter how strongly we might believe it to be true. Here's an example of this sort of reasoning:
The Bible is old, of divine origin, and venerated by generations of faithful Jews and Christians. Therefore the Bible must be true. We will believe the Bible is true unless proven otherwise. The burden of proof is on you to disprove it because so many people have believed it.
And that's a good segue for our next segment in the Logical Fallacies series: The Burden of Proof. I'm also trying to find a name for the fallacy of stringing together assertions without proof and claiming you're right. Minimalists, maximalists, and fundamentalists use that one a lot.

9 comments:

  1. Can the divine origin of Scripture be proven at all? Similar to the existence of God?

    I would think if we are going to try, we would be to go by what the Bible says about itself and what it says about God. But this is no good for people of no faith.
    Jeff

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  2. Jeff, the issue isn't about having faith and believing the claims of the text versus not believing and having no faith. The issue is finding common ground to talk about the Bible in an academic setting and making arguments that are based on the biblical data first, not based first on an unprovable belief about the biblical data.

    Of course, you're right that for people of faith the ultimate reality that the text witnesses to is far more important than being able to make a sound rational argument.

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  3. I believe the fallacy of rapidly stringing together a series of unsupported claims is called the "Gish Gallop". Please see:
    http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gish_gallop

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  4. I am excited about this series! The fallacy you are talking about in your last sentence sounds similar to the non sequitur fallacy, which is also a fine comic strip.

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  5. If I start my own comic strip, I'll call it "The Burden of Proof."

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  6. For some reason when I hear (or read) the word "academic" I think secular. Do you mean academic as in seminaries etc.? Christians of all people should know that "what so many people have done" isn't a good way to look at something.
    Jeff

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  7. Academic doesn't have to be limited to secular. It's a way to describe an approach to the Bible that is open to free thought and inquiry, not afraid of a line of inquiry because of where it might lead (which is another fallacy I'll get to). Academic in a confessional context (i.e. seminary or Christian college) is a different thing. More theology than critical inquiry. Also, one of the problems with fallacies is that we often don't recognize our own and they usually manifest themselves much more subtly than in my example (which was intentionally blatant).

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  8. Joseph, non sequitur might fit what I was thinking about. I still have to follow Marc's link to see what this Gish Gallop is about.

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  9. First: GREAT idea for a series!

    Okay, now: In every seminary that I've been involved with, we are engaging in *academic* ("secular" as a matter of method) biblical studies, albeit also (for most students) "in service to the church."

    The issue is not whether one is *bringing* faith commitments to biblical study. The issue is whether one is willing to base one's claims on warrants that are publicly shared (e.g., the details of the text, other textual or non-textual physical evidence) over against warrants that are not shared (e.g., private revelation, sectarian creeds).

    In seminary, we will normally *also go on* to incorporate the fruits of biblical studies into our sectarian concerns, but the *doing of biblical studies* is of a kind that could easily be shared with a secular university or with any faith community that will do "academic" biblical studies as I've described it.

    I know that there are also seminaries and colleges who do biblical studies differently: that is, who base their arguments on unshared faith-claims. (You can do archaeology or literary criticism, e.g., but approved methodology will guarantee that the results don't contradict certain sectarian claims about the Bible or about God and the world). However, there is absolutely no reason that a faith community, as a faith community, has to limit their inquiries in this way.

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