How to Spot Fuzzy Thinking

5/20/2018 How to Spot Fuzzy Thinking

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HOW TO SPOT FUZZY THINKING (This Rock: August 1990)

F e a t u r e A r t i c l e

HOW TO SPOT FUZZY THINKING

(First of two parts)

By GERRY MATATICS

HE WHO will not reason," William Drummond once said, "is a bigot; he who cannot is afool; and he who dares not is a slave."

Having no overpowering urge to appear either a bigot, a fool, or a slave, the average manmakes a casual attempt to reason a little now and then, as time permits. He doesn'tsuppose it can do him any real harm, and anyway, it's free, it's non-fattening, and, whoknows, it occasionally might be fun. He may also have read somewhere that the ability toreason also have read somewhere that the ability to reason--to use his mind to arrive attruth (that is, to think) and to communicate that truth to others (that is, to argue)--iswhat sets him above the animals, and he has no wish to be confused with a cat or acuttlefish.

BUT SOONER or later he may discover that reasoning (both the thinking part as well as

the arguing part) can be done well or poorly--and that doing it well requires effort. Helearns, as Henry Ford observed, that "thinking is the hardest work there is, which is theprobable reason why so few engage in it."

He becomes aware, through bloodying experience, that there is a wrong way to reasonand a right way. He slowly realizes that reasoning, like life in general, has rules, whichmen call logic, and that these rules must be known and followed for his thinking to becorrect and his arguments to be cogent and credible.

He comes to see that when men violate these rules, either because they don't know themor because they disregard them, they engage in fuzzy thinking and arrive at unsound

conclusions. And when they employ their fuzzy thinking to convert others to theirconclusions, they only compound the fracture.

At Catholic Answers we encounter fuzzy thinking all the time. We wish it weren't so.There's nothing more disappointing, more downright depressing, than wanting todiscuss the truth or falsity of the Catholic faith in a clear, cool, logical manner, only tofind the other person lapsing into fallacious logic.


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Maybe you too encounter (or even occasionally engage in) fuzzy thinking and find itfrustrating. What can we do about it? One thing we can all do is learn to identify the tell-tale signs of fuzzy thinking so we can avoid it ourselves and can help those with whomwe talk to avoid it.

THIS ARTICLE and its sequel are a guide to fuzzy thinking. They list the varied waysone can stray from the path of proper reasoning. The names for many of these deductivedetours and dead-ends are as old as the (seven) hills (of Rome): Roman philosophers(like the Greeks before them) liked to catalogue not only the rules of sound reasoning,but also the most common transgressions thereof.

Some of the names they came up with have stuck, so a lot of the entries in this lexicon oflogical lapses are in Latin (with an English equivalent always added). Other errors haveacquired English labels, some of long standing, others of rather recent minting, and oneor two I've even coined myself. Each entry is illustrated by at least one example drawnfrom real-life letters, conversations, and debates we've had with a wide spectrum of

heterodox Catholics, Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, mainline Protestants, cultmembers, New Agers, atheists, and secular humanists.

THIS ENCYCLOPEDIETTE of errors is not exhaustive. There is no discussion ofargumentum ad crumenam(the appeal to self-interest; literally, "to the purse") or ofobscurum per obscurius(the explanation of something obscure by something even moreobscure); these are not arguments likely to be advanced by critics of Catholicism. Butthere is enough of a sampling to get your feet wet.

If, in addition to wetting your feet, I succeed in whetting your appetite for a more in-depth look at logic, I'll be most grateful. The day is long overdue for logic to be

reintroduced as a requirement into the curriculum of our schools. The ability to thinkcritically and logically should be considered as basic a skill as reading, writing, andarithmetic--in fact, more basic, since one needs to think in order to engage in any ofthese activities.

Christians have an even higher motive to master the laws of logic, since logic is nothingless than the light of Christ himself (the Logos of God), desiring to illuminate the mindof every man (John 1:1, 9). Christians are called to "have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor.2:16) and thus "think God's thoughts after him." The force of many of the argumentsthat Christ and his apostles (especially Paul) employ are lost on the reader who has nograsp of the elementary principles of logic. We need to equip ourselves intellectually so

we can respond fully to the gracious summons of God, "Come now, let us reasontogether, says the Lord" (Isa. 1:18).

AD HOMINEM

HAVE YOU ever heard a politician or a preacher attack someone's person when heought to have been attacking his position? If so, then you've heardargumentum adhominem, which in Latin means arguing "to the man" (as opposed to arguingad rem,


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"to the point").Ad hominemcan take a variety of forms. It might consist of name-calling: calling a Catholic a "papist," a Fundamentalist a "Bible-thumper," a charismatica "snake-handler," a political conservative a "fascist," or a liberal a "communist." If youdon't happen to suffer from the "Call-me-a-name-and-I'll-crumble" syndrome, this sortof ad hominemattack isn't going to ruin your day.

Ad hominemmight also take the form I call "let's-play-amateur-psychoanalyst." Thiswould-be reader of the tea leaves of your mind volunteers the Earth-shattering insightthat "You're a Catholic because you're insecure and you need some strong authority tolook up to." Non-Catholic Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses,and others would do well to avoid using this "argument," since it could backfire onthem: Freud, in The Future of An Illusion, used this very reasoning to "disprove" theismitself.

ANOTHER SORT of ad hominemcasts aspersions not on someone's mental health, buton his moral character. First of all, this is generally irrelevant. The person's character

isn't necessarily connected to the cogency of his case. Even if you prove the personyou're arguing with is the Devil himself, you still haven't answered his argument!

Notice I said "generallyirrelevant." I don't want to fall into a logical fallacy myself here:Just because there's no necessary connection, in a particular case, between a person'scharacter and his position doesn't mean that his character is always irrelevant. In somecases your opponent's character may be a legitimate issue (if, for example, a pedophilewere arguing for the legalization of child pornography).

I once talked for six hours with a Presbyterian elder who ended up suggesting, out of theblue and without supportive evidence, that I had become a Catholic because Catholicism

made fewer moral demands on me than Calvinism had. Not only was this anunwarranted ad hominemslur, it also confirmed my sense that this individual didn'thave an accurate notion of Catholicism.

Sometimes the ad hominemarguer asserts that everythinghis opponent says is suspectbecause of his supposed bad character--even his protestations of innocence. Thisparticular form of ad hominemis known as "poisoning the wells."

THE PHRASE comes from a famous religious controversy of the nineteenth century,when Charles Kingsley attacked the character of John Henry Newman, an Anglican whohad converted to Catholicism. Kingsley stated a Catholic priest was trained to have no

regard for telling the truth. When Newman denied this was so, Kingsley in effect replied,"Well, what do you expect a liar to say?"

Newman pointed out this put him in a no-win situation in the mind of anyone who tookKingsley's charge seriously: He couldn't even attempt to argue that he wasn't a liar,without seeming to be one. Kingsley had "poisoned the well" at the outset to disqualifyNewman as a reliable source of truth on any matter, even on the matter of truth.


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A feminist friend once committed this fallacy in my hearing when arguing with anotherfriend about women priests. When she couldn't make any apparent dent in his defenseof an all-male priesthood, she said in exasperation, "Well, you just can't see it becauseyou're a man!" Whatever the merits of her own arguments, at that point she resorted to"poisoning the well"--disqualifying her opponent, in this case on the basis of gender,

from having any objectivity on the subject.

Ad hominemargumentation sometimes takes the form of "guilt by association."Occasionally we hear someone say something like, "Adolf Hitler was a Catholic. Youdon't expect me to have any respect for the views of a person who belongs to the sameChurch as Hitler did, do you?"

SOON I WILL be debating an Assemblies of God minister in Philadelphia on solascriptura, the Protestant theory that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith andpractice. As he argues for his view, should I seek to refute him by loudly stating, "JimmySwaggart, who was found guilty of visiting a prostitute, was an Assemblies of God

minister! You don't expect me to have any respect for the views of a person who belongsto the same Church as Jimmy Swaggart did, do you?" Of course not. The moralcharacter of Jimmy Swaggart is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the notion ofsolascriptura.

Catholics expect to be granted the same consideration. The truth of any Catholicdoctrine is not undermined by the moral lapses of individual Catholics. This is even truewhen the doctrine in question is papal infallibility and the moral lapses in question arethose of certain Renaissance popes, since infallibility (the inability to teach errorofficially) is not the same as impeccability (the inability to sin).

When someone who knows the difference, and understands that Catholics don't assertpapal impeccability, insists on bringing up the "bad popes" anyway (as an ex-CatholicPresbyterian minister did who debated me recently), he is engaging inad hominemargument.

AD IGNORANTIAMWHEN SOMEONE seeks to take advantage of an audience's ignorance (or what hehopes is the audience's ignorance) of a field of knowledge by supposedly basing hisconclusions on data from that field, that person is arguing ad ignorantiam(appealing"to the ignorance" of the opponent or audience).

I still remember the first time a Jehovah's Witness looked me in my teenage eye and toldme that if only I knew Greek, I'd see that the New Testament (John 1:1, for example)really doesn't teach that Christ is God.

When I invited him in and got out my Greek New Testament, Greek grammar books,Greek lexicon, and Greek concordance, told him I was majoring in classical, NewTestament, and patristic Greek at college, and proceeded to demonstrate that the Greek


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did not support his Arian Christology, his argumentum ad ignorantiam faded as rapidlyas the smile from his face.

I also remember one of the first Masses my wife and I went to, shortly after we'd joinedthe Catholic Church. We were in a small New England town on summer vacation and

went to a Mass where the priest felt a divine mandate to rewrite the liturgy from head totoe. He not only insisted on saying "The Lord is with you" every time the rubric calledfor "The Lord be with you," he devoted the homily to telling us why.

"You see," quoth he, "what many people don't realize is that archaic English didn't havean indicative mood [he actually said "tense"]. The only way they had of saying 'The Lordis with you' was to say 'The Lord be with you.' Now we have the indicative mood, so it'smore accurate to say 'The Lord is with you.' Because, let's face it, the Lord alreadyiswith you!"

EDIFIED BY this uplifting meditation on grammar, we proceeded to worship the Lord

who already waswith us. After the Mass I thanked the priest for his ministrations andconfessed that, as a senior English teacher at a Jesuit preparatory school, I had alwaysthought English possessed both an indicative as well as a subjunctive mood, both inElizabethan days and in our own, and that the difference between the two statementshad nothing to do with the passage of time.

"Well," he said, shifting his feet and his ground, "it's really not a question of English. Ionly said that because the people would understand a reference to English. Actually, it'sa question of the original Greek."

"Well, Father," I said, "I majored in Greek and I teach Greek, and I seem to recall that

the Greek language has both a subjunctive and an indicative mood, no less than English,and the two are translated quite differently."

"Well, young man," he said, nervously licking his lips, "it's not so clear in the Greek. Yousee, you have to get back of the Greek to the original Hebrew. If you only knew Hebrew,you'd see my point."

"Well, Father," I said embarrasedly, "the school where I teach Greek is a seminary,where I'm getting a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and I have to know Hebrew fluently. And,with all due respect, Hebrew doesn't help you out here any more than the Greek orEnglish."

"Well," he said, sponging his brow with his sleeve (it was a warm day), "what I reallyknow wellis Chinese (you don't by any chance know Chinese, do you?), because I usedto be a missionary in China, and in old Chinese, the only way you could say 'the Lord iswith you' is by saying 'The Lord be with you.'"

"But, Father," I asked, "even if that were true, what relevance would it have for changingthe wording of the English liturgy? Isn't the issue ultimately one of theology, not


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language? If a priest believed he had from Christ the ability to impart a blessing, adeepening of grace and therefore of God's presence to his people, couldn't he properlysay, 'The Lord be with you'?

"If instead his theology told him Christ was homogeneously present everywhere, in one

undifferentiated sense, and that no one could augment or diminish that presence,wouldn't he prefer to say simply, 'The Lord is with you'?"

"Well, yes," the good father replied, smiling again, "that's exactly the point. I didn'tsaythat because I don't like to go too deep into theology, you know, in the homily; a pointlike that would be way over the people's heads. But you're right: The issue is really amore correct theological understanding of the Lord's presence. This was one of thethings changed at Vatican II."

"Really, Father? Hmm. I carefully studied all the documents of Vatican II. You see, Iused to be a Protestant minister and theologian and only recently converted to

Catholicism as a result of years of study. I don't recall the Second Vatican Councilanywhere revoking the teaching that there are different degrees or senses in which theLord is present to his people."

HIS UPPER LIP beading with sweat again, he said, "Well, it wouldn't come out in thedocuments. You'd have to have been there. I was at the Council."

"Wow, Father, you were aperitusat the Council?"

"No, I didn't mean I was a theological advisor. I just observed."

"You were an invited observer? Were you there for all the sessions?"

"No, I didn't exactly say I was an invited observer. I . . . I was a tourist in Rome at thetime, and the guide took a group of us in, and we got to stand in the back for about tenminutes."

"What were they talking about during the ten minutes you got to be there, Father?"

"I don't remember."

The moral of the story is never to argue ad ignorantiam --especially if you are also

arguingex ignorantiaat the same time.

AD POPULUMSOMETIMES a debater descends to the level of demagoguery, whether or not helaunches intoad hominemattacks upon his opponent, by rhetorically seeking to swaythe audience to his side without actually demonstrating the truth of his position. This isknown as argumentum ad populum("appeal to the people")--telling the people whatthey want to hear, whether or not it's true.


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When it is a case of playing to the passions of the audience, whether by pumping uptheir patriotism or partisanship, or by feeding their fears and confirming their worstsuspicions (easily done), it is known asargumentum ad captandum vulgas("appeal tothe emotions of the crowd").

When it's a matter of fanning the flames of their prejudices, it's known asargumentumad individium("appeal to prejudice").

When the speaker seeks to align the audience's affections with himself by playing ontheir heartstrings and appealing to their pity, he is arguingad misericordiam("appealto sympathy").

PROFESSIONAL anti-Catholic Alberto Rivera, whose story is featured in a series ofgarish, full-color comic books published by Jack Chick, is a master of all the abovevarieties of ad populum.

One minute he's marketing mass paranoia by "informing" his Fundamentalist readersthat their names are recorded on a mainframe computer named "the Beast" housed inthe bowels of the Vatican so that, when the Pope takes over the world as the Antichrist,they can all be systematically stabbed in their sleep by the Jesuits (ad captandumvulgas).

The next minute he's heightening their horror of Catholicism by claiming it created alltheir favorite foes--including communism, Islam, and Freemasonry (ad individium).

Then he seeks sympathy (and thereby credibility) by casting himself in the role of the

persecuted faithful witness, fearlessly continuing to expose the evils of Romanismdespite numerous assassination attempts by Vatican agents who want to silence him.Not only that: The night he left the priesthood, knowing the shock waves would sweepthrough the Vatican, galvanizing its army of assassins into instant action, he grabbed thelast flight out of Spain "with only 40 cents in my pocket." How much more apostoliccould one's sufferings be (ad misericordiam)?

ARGUMENT OF THE BEARDHOW MANY hairs would a man's chin have to sprout before we could say he sported abeard? One? Clearly not. Two? No, but now we begin to worry: Which hair (thetwentieth? the hundredth?) willconstitute a beard? Once we agree the man has a beard,

if we pluck one hair, wouldn't the fellow still have a beard? Could the loss of one hairmean the loss of a beard?

It would be rather perverse, not to mention radically skeptical, to argue that if you can'ttellexactlyhow many hairs it takes to make a beard, then you can never say a man isbearded or clean-shaven. Yet that is what "arguments of the beard" assert: If one canconceive a gradual continuum between two extremes, there is no real difference betweenthe extremes.


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When I was a college professor, students were always seeking to employ the argument ofthe beard with reference to their grades. If I gave Ernest Erudite an A for getting a 93 ona paper, why not give Greta Goodheart one for her 92? But if her, then why not BerthaBorderline for her 91, or Harry Hopeful for his 90? Eventually I'd have to conclude

there's no difference between a 93 and a 33, simply because each increment is such aslight degree. If I gave Ernest an A, I'd have to give everybody an A.

A Presbyterian minister who debated me on salvation attacked the Catholicclassification of sin into "venial" and "mortal" on just these grounds. He had askedanother Catholic apologist if stealing five hundred dollars were a mortal sin. Certainly,the Catholic replied. What about two dollars? No, that would be a venial sin. Well, heconcluded triumphantly, where was the dividing line? What about two hundred andforty-nine dollars and fifty cents?

Just because there is a constructible continuum between mortal sin and venial sin, and

just because we may not know where to fix the dividing line, does not mean that there isno difference between a mortal sin and a venial sin, any more than it means there is nodifference between a bearded man and a clean-shaven one.

[To be continued next month.]


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HOW TO SPOT FUZZY THINKING (This Rock: September 1990)

F e a t u r e A r t i c l e

HOW TO SPOT FUZZY THINKING

(SECOND OF TWO PARTS)

By GERRY MATATICS

IF A THING'S worth doing," G.K. Chesterton once wrote, "it's worth doing badly." That'sexactly how I feel about this little guide to logical fallacies, which began in last month's

cover story.

I can't claim that it is either excellent or exhaustive, only that it was "worth doing" (evenif only badly) because I knew of nothing in print which blew the whistle on the wayspeople are bamboozled into accepting illegitimate inferences.

Nor can I claim never to have slipped on these intellectual banana peels myself. I wroteas much for my own benefit as for anybody else's. I was summoning us all to a standardI too fall short of from time to time.

But I felt it better to set the standard high, even if that meant reminding myself of my

own lapses in logic, than to cheat the reader by only mentioning those fallacies I wassure I'd never committed. Samuel Butler once said, "Logic is like the sword--those whoappeal to it shall perish by it." So be it: And if in fact what perishes is our presumptionthat we are perfect logicians, so much the better.

Last month, after some opening remarks on the importance of clear thinking and carefulargumentation in matters of religion, I discussed arguments that err by being either adhominem , ad populum , ad ignorantiam , or "by the beard." The present essay picks upwhere the previous one left off.

BAD ANALOGY

REASONING BY ANALOGY is one of the oldest and most effective ways to reason, butwe need to be sure the analogy is an actual and not only an apparent one. To equate twothings when there exists only a superficial similarity between them is to reason by badanalogy.


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Fundamentalists frequently accuse Catholics of borrowing their practices frompaganism, on the ground of some perceived parallel. They see Catholics bowing beforestatues, they know pagans bowed before statues, so they conclude that when Catholicsbow before statues they are engaging in a pagan practice.

One could answer the above argument by reductio ad absurdum (refuting an argumentby showing that if one were to extend its line of reasoning, one would arrive at a patentlyabsurd inference).

One could argue that if Catholics engage in pagan worship simply because they bow,then so do people when they bow to kings and queens, butlers when they bow to theirmasters, Orientals when they bow to one another in greeting, and square dancers whenthey bow to their partners.

Another way to use reductio ad absurdumwould be to provide, as a parody of theargument, an anti-Fundamentalist version of it. You could point out that (1)

Fundamentalists often kneel when they pray, (2) pagans often kneel when they pray,and therefore (3) when Fundamentalists kneel in prayer, they are engaging in an act ofpagan worship.

BEGGING THE QUESTION

A FUNDAMENTALIST , in arguing for the truth of Fundamentalism and the falsity ofCatholicism, may claim that "no Fundamentalist would ever become a Catholic." When Iinformed such a Fundamentalist that I have several friends who were Fundamentalistsand became Catholics, he retorted, "Well, then they couldn't have been realFundamentalists."

What's going on here? The person is really arguing in a circle. He is saying "AFundamentalist (and by `Fundamentalist' I mean someone who would never become aCatholic) would never become a Catholic." This tautological statement is true bydefinition and therefore offers no argument at all.

An argument, strictly speaking, proceeds from one truth to another by inference. Whena conclusion isn't arrived at but is already present in the opening premises (perhaps indisguised form), you have that particular form of circular reasoning known aspetitioprincipii, "begging the question."

I encounter question begging with disconcerting regularity when I debate Protestants onsola scriptura . Protestants mean by this slogan that the Bible is the only infallible rule offaith and practice; Catholics also accept the Bible as God's inspired, inerrant Word butsay that Scripture, far from claiming to be the only depository of the Word of God,encourages us to hear that Word as well in Sacred Tradition and the magisterium of theChurch.


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The Protestant generally seeks to prove his point with biblical prooftexts which assertthat "the Word of God" is to be our only authority. This is question begging, pure andsimple: The Protestant reads into those verses his "conclusion" that Scripture could bethe only "Word of God" being talked about. But that's what the argument is all about! Ifthe Catholic is correct that in Scripture the phrase "the Word of God" isn't always

reducible to Scripture alone, then verses which say "the Word of God" do not prove theProtestant notion of sola scriptura at all.

BURDEN-OF-PROOF SHIFTING

IN ARGUMENTATION and debate, the burden of proof is always on the one whoasserts. It's up to him to prove his assertion, and he doesn't win by default if hisopponent can't disprove it or can't prove the contrary.

Debates on sola scriptura often provide good examples not only of question-begging, butof burden-of-proof shifting as well. When I debated a well-known Evangelical scholar on

the question "Does Scripture teach sola scriptura ?" the burden of proof was on him,since he took the affirmative, to prove Scripture in fact taught such a thing.

When I pointed out he was repeatedly failing to do so, he turned around and said theburden of proof was on me to show, if sola scriptura were not what Scripture taught,what in fact it did teach. Though I was glad to show the audience what Scripture didteach on the matter, I was not strictly obliged to do so. Don't let someone shift theburden of proof onto you if it's on him; he may try to do so, particularly if it's crushinghim.

CHRONOLOGICAL SNOBBERY

THIS PHRASE WAS coined by C.S. Lewis to describe the shabby reasoning by whichsomeone discounts or discredits an idea simply because it's an old idea. Such a personmay use temporal terms such as "Victorian," "medieval," "primitive," "antediluvian," or"Neanderthal" to characterize the concept he is attacking.

Some "progressive" Catholics arch their eyebrows if you confess a belief in the RealPresence and transubstantiation. They'll accuse you of holding to a "medieval" view ofthe Eucharist and argue that "transsignification" is a more up-to-date concept. But ithardly follows that because people believed something in the Middle Ages (if in factthat's as far back as the concept of transubstantiation goes, which isn't the case) we

should therefore no longer believe it now. Even if one held a radically evolutionistic viewof truth, this wouldn't follow.

Scripture shows us that truth and error both go back to antiquity (Gen. 3). In theattempt to determine the correctness of a concept, therefore, the concept's age isirrelevant.

CLICHE THINKING


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THERE IS NO expedient," Edison once quipped, "to which a man will not go to avoidthe real labor of thinking."

One such expedient can be called "cliche thinking." Cliches and truisms substitute forsound thinking; they can be the lazy man's guide to truth. Rather than think for himself,

he parrots the platitude and the proverb.

Don't misunderstand: Maxims and aphorisms have their places. They add sparkle to ourspeech and express our thought in a nutshell. But they cannot substantiate our points ofview.

In any discussion of papal infallibility, the incident at Antioch will come up. There Peterdidn't act in accord with his own belief that the Mosaic works of the Law were no longerin force, and he had to be rebuked by Paul for his hypocrisy (Gal. 2:11-14). When theCatholic points out that he doesn't believe in papal impeccability (the inability of a popeto sin) but in papal infallibility (the inability of a pope to teach doctrinal error officially),

the Protestant may respond with the cliche, "Actions speak louder than words."

This may be true, but it hardly helps the discussion here, where a very legitimatedistinction is being made between teaching and behavior.

The Catholic should point out to his Protestant friend that the cliche could backfire byundermining a conviction they both share, namely that the apostles possessed the gift ofinfallibility and could therefore write authoritative Scripture.

Any attempt to use Peter's sin to sabotage his infallibility would apply equally to any ofthe apostles, all of whom were sinners, and ultimately would sabotage the infallibility of

Scripture.

FALSE ANTITHESIS

THE FALLACY OF FALSE antithesis (also known as faulty dilemma or false dichotomy)is almost the opposite of the argument of the beard, which we discussed last month.Whereas the latter argues that the extremes don't exist by virtue of all the in-betweens,the fallacy of the faulty dilemma assumes there are two opposing options, when thatmay not be the case. There may be in-betweens, or the only two options may not reallybe opposites but rather two aspects of a single truth.

In a recent debate on salvation I pointed out that the New Testament teaches baptism isessential to salvation (Mark 16:16; John 3:5; Acts 2:38; 22:16; 1 Pet. 3:21). Myopponent's response was an example of a false antithesis. He read aloud 1 Corinthians12:13, "For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body," which proved, he said, thatthe baptism essential to salvation was baptism by the Spirit, not by water.

This was a purely gratuitous assumption on his part and a self-serving one at that. Evenif my opponent were correct in supposing there were two baptisms to be distinguished


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in Scripture--one (Spirit baptism) necessary for salvation and one (water baptism)not--1 Corinthians 12:13 hardly supports that distinction: It merely states there is abaptism by the Spirit into the body of Christ.

The problem here is the either-or mentality Protestants bring to such texts. A baptism,

they feel, is either baptism by water or a baptism by the Spirit; it couldn't be onebaptism (as Paul teaches in Ephesians 4:5) with two aspects, a material aspect and aspiritual aspect, which is after all what Jesus says in John 3:5.

This foible arises from a philosophical perspective which Protestantism inherited fromWilliam of Occam. Occam saw a radical disjunction between nature and grace, adisjunction Protestant theology still largely operates with, as Louis Bouyer, himself aconvert from Protestantism, so ably demonstrates in his book The Spirit and Forms ofProtestantism .

As a result, Protestants assume that if the essential baptism is Spirit baptism, then it

can't be water baptism. Likewise, if the Holy Spirit is the Vicar of Christ, then the popecan't be. On and on it goes. We're justified by faith (Rom. 5:1) and so not by goodworks--contrary to James 2:24. (When Paul says in Romans 3:28 and Galatians 2:15that we're justified by faith and not by the works of the Law, he is speaking of Mosaicceremonial observances such as circumcision, not good works in the proper sense).

HYPOTHESIS CONTRARY TO FACT

PEOPLE LOVE to speculate. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that (though weneed to keep in mind what Samuel Johnson said: "When speculation has done its worst,two and two still make four").

One of the things people like to speculate about is "what might have been," and there'snothing necessarily wrong with that either. It's all right to give our imagination a stretchonce in a while. But it hardly belongs in an argument as a proof. We may cherish thefancy that "If A had happened, then B would have (or, would never have) happened."But we can hardly include such a "what if" as a premise in a serious argument.

Two days before I became a Catholic, some of my fellow ministers, together with somescholars from a well-known Calvinistic seminary, met with me at the request of thedenomination in which I was an ordained minister. It was to be a last-ditch effort to talkme out of converting. At one point in the discussion, because I was citing Augustine as

an early witness to certain Catholic doctrines, one of the ministers jumped up, poundedthe table with his fist, and loudly declaimed, "If Augustine were alive today, I knowwhich church he'd belong to!"

He meant, of course, that Augustine would have been a minister in that Presbyteriandenomination and not a bishop in the Catholic Church. He would have been a Calvinist,not a Catholic. Augustine was only a Catholic by default because he had the rotten luck


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to be born B.C. (Before Calvin), before the Reformation, which could have given himanother option, had happened.

What struck me was not the superficiality of the minister's understanding of Augustinethat prompted him to assert Augustine would have jumped at the chance to be a modern

Protestant. What struck me was that he proceeded, based upon this speculativehypothesis, to plead with me, since I held Augustine in such high esteem, to "stay in thechurch Augustine would have belonged to."

MISUSE OF AUTHORITY

THE ABOVE ANECDOTE also serves as an example of the misuse of authority (theauthority misused was a hypothetically-reconstructed Augustine). It is valid to citeauthorities in an argument, but they must be used properly. The Romans called amisuse of authority argumentum ad verecundiam , "argument to modesty" or "tobashfulness," apparently because the person was hiding behind some authority rather

than standing forth where the cogency of his own reasoning could be evaluated.

Because the Catholic Church uses in its apologetics a proper appeal to authority (theauthority of the Church, for example--after that has been duly established), Protestantssometimes seek, in debating Catholics, to employ the principle to their own advantage.This usually ends up backfiring, since they more often than not misunderstand how theappeal works.

In a recent debate with me on the papacy, a pastor of my former denomination citedAugustine against the Catholic teaching that the rock upon which Christ said he wouldbuild his Church was Peter. He thought that because Augustine was a major doctor of

the Church he had thereby weakened the case for the Catholic position.

He overlooked the fact that the Church looks to no individual Father as an infallibleauthority on all matters. Even Thomas Aquinas, the "Common Doctor" of the Church,was wrong on a point here and there, and so was Augustine (though my opponent wasactually misrepresenting Augustine in stating he rejected the view that Peter was therock).

Later in the debate my opponent claimed that 68 of the early Church Fathers held thatthe rock in Matthew 16:18 was notPeter, and he claimed only 17 said it wasPeter. Thiswas another misuse of authority. Even if these figures had been accurate (they were

not), they would have betrayed a fatal misunderstanding of the proper use of patristicauthority, which is not a matter of counting noses to arrive at the truth.

POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC

REMEMBER THE OLD JOKE that asks what happens when you submerge a bodyentirely in water? (Answer: The phone rings.) No one really believes that getting into abathtub makes the phone ring, of course: It's just an inconvenient coincidence.


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But if someone were to argue such a thing, he would be guilty of the post hoc ergopropter hoc fallacy (Latin for "after this, therefore because of this"), which says thatbecause B happened after A, B was caused by A.

Shortly after the United States broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican, AbrahamLincoln was assassinated. Sensationalistic anti-Catholic writers such as CharlesChiniquy immediately claimed Lincoln was done in by Jesuit agents. (This view ispromoted today by Jack Chick and Alberto Rivera.) A was followed by B, so A caused B.Simple, isn't it?

You will sometimes hear that countries which became Protestant at the time of theReformation subsequently experienced economic expansion and that Reformationtheology was responsible. Since Protestantism brings prosperity, it would be good for allcountries to become Protestant.

Even if this were so, should economic prosperity be our measure of theological truth?Should I join the church that tells me "God wants me to be rich" and promises that if Itithe to that church I'll soon be a millionaire? More importantly, historians increasinglypoint out that the cause of any one country's prosperity is an extremely complex matterwhich can hardly be attributed to the adoption of a creed.

SPECIAL PLEADING

WHEN WE PRESENT the facts in a matter and shape those facts (including statistics) tomake our side look better, we are guilty of "special pleading." The classic example is thejoke about the international car race that ended up having only two entrants: the United

States and the Soviet Union. The U.S. won the race. The next day the item in the Sovietpaper said, "In the international auto race yesterday, the Soviet car came in second,while the American finished next to last."

We engage in special pleading when we stack the deck in our favor by citing only theevidence favoring our position and ignoring or hiding any troublesome to it. Intellectualhonesty obliges us to discuss all the relevant data--not only the favorable facts, but alsothose that seem contrary to our position--and indicate how they fit into the picture.

The person who uses prooftexts from the Bible is particularly susceptible to this danger.Naturally he is going to memorize and quote those verses which seem to support his

position. Why do Fundamentalists, in their zeal to argue that the early Church taughtone became a member of the Church by faith alone, cite Acts 16:31 but ignore, say, Acts2:38?

The same goes for "prooftexts" from history. Sometimes ardent Catholics feel there'ssomething wrong with quoting non-Catholics or "bad Catholics" and quote only thosethey deem to have been "pillars of the Church." They thereby foster the impression thatCatholicism can only be supported by special pleading.


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I taught theology at a Catholic college where some students seemed to be affected by thisunfortunate obscurantism. They found it suspect that I would cite Protestants to supportcertain Catholic teachings. "Why do we need their testimony," they felt, "when we cancite a good, solid Catholic?" (Note, by the way, the ad hominem implication that if

someone is a Protestant he is totally unreliable as a source of truth.)

What such people fail to see is that a quotation from a non-Catholic, who is hardlybiased in favor of our faith, might be for that very reason far more effective. Sometimesfor the sake of sheer impact we ought to quote, not a "pillar of the Church," but a "flyingbuttress": someone who supports the Church from the outside!

STRAW MEN

STRAW MEN ARE the flip side of special pleading; both involve misrepresentation.When we favorably misrepresent our position, that's special pleading. When we

unfavorably misrepresent our opponent's position, that's known as building andattacking a straw man, so called because he's easy to knock down.

Even intelligent people ask Catholics, "How can you let an old man in Rome do all yourthinking for you?" Is that an accurate description of papal authority? Of course not; it's astraw man.

The idea of letting an old man in Rome do your thinking for you is self-evidently absurdand easy to demolish, but the person trampling on this straw man is mistaken if hethinks he's thereby refuting papal authority. He has attacked something easy to attack,but to what purpose, since he isn't engaging with the view Catholics really hold?

WHAT DO ALL the logical fallacies we've looked at have in common? They are allexamples of non sequitur reasoning. Non sequitur is Latin for "it does not follow." A nonsequitur is any conclusion which does not follow from one's premises. It doesn't followthat if a man is bad his argument is bad (ad hominem ), or that if a belief is old it'stherefore outdated (chronological snobbery), or that if you're saved by faith then you'renot saved by works (false antithesis).

Watch for the non sequiturin the other person's argument. When Jimmy Swaggart saysnone of the "apocryphal" (i.e. deuterocanonical) books should be deemed canonicalbecause none of them claims divine inspiration (Questions and Answers, p. 321), ask

yourself, "Is this a non sequitur?" In this case it is: From the fact that a book doesn'tclaim to be inspired it doesn't follow that it isn't inspired. In fact, many of the books inJimmy Swaggart's canon don't claim to be inspired (e.g. Esther). Why doesn't heconclude they aren't canonical?

There are other examples of illogic we could analyze: ipse dixit , reductive fallacies,sweeping generalizations, to name three. But these are certainly enough for now. As weponder these examples we need to remember that, however adept we become at


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avoiding fuzzy thinking and spotting it in others, communicating our Catholic faithentails more than just being logical.

We need to avoid the logical--and ontological--fallacy of reductionism in thinking thatwe are merely logic machines. There are all sorts of brilliant but coldhearted people who

can sniff out a logical weakness a mile away, mercilessly pounce upon the personperpetrating it, and flay their fallible opponent alive, holding him up to public ridicule.

Such fallacy ferreters, if they lack love, are not men but monstrosities, apologeticalfreaks with overdeveloped heads but underdeveloped hearts. We ought not to emulatethem; God help us if we do.

We need to advance not only in logic, but in love as well. After all, we have it on goodauthority that knowledge, even knowledge of the principles of sound reasoning, can puffup, but love builds up (1 Cor. 8:1). When we learn both to think well and to love well,then perhaps it will be able to be truthfully said of our arguments that they are neither

ad hominemnor ad populum, but ad maiorem Dei gloriam--to the greater glory of God.

Documents

How to Spot Fuzzy Thinking