Justified True Belief

(●) An ad hominem attacks the person making an argument instead of the argument. + The Latin means "to the man", and the move is exactly that: the reply goes to the man rather than to what he said. It is the most common bad move in real conversations about God, and it is made in both directions. (1) The shape of the move is a reason that says nothing about the claim. - Smith says the bridge on the county road is unsafe, because the piers are cracked and the load rating is thirty years old. The reply is that Smith is rude, or was fired last year, or wants the repair contract. And so, the reply concludes, the bridge is fine. - Every sentence in that reply can be true, and the bridge is still whatever it is. A rude man can be right about cracked piers. The bridge does not consult anyone's character before it holds or falls. - Two words help here. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what the reasons are meant to support is the conclusion. The reply about Smith's manners touches neither. Logicians file the move among the fallacies of relevance: arguments whose support, even if granted in full, has no bearing on whether the conclusion is true. (2) It tempts because character often does matter, just not here. - We lean on character all day long: the mechanic who has been straight with us before, the salesman on commission. That habit is sound, which is why the fallacy feels like reasoning from the inside. - The habit goes wrong when the person has put an argument on the table. "Trust me, buy the house" is a recommendation, and the recommender's honesty is the whole question. "Buy the house, because the roof is new and the price is under market" is an argument, and you can go and look at the roof. (3) The name is old, and the family has three cousins. - John Locke used the Latin tag in 1690 for pressing a man with consequences drawn from his own principles, which is a fair way to argue; the phrase later narrowed to attacking his character. C. S. Lewis named the commonest modern form Bulverism in 1941, after an imaginary boy who heard his mother tell his father, "Oh you say that because you are a man." Lewis's rule is the whole lesson: you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. - Tu quoque (Latin for "you too") answers a charge by returning it. "You say I drink too much? You drink more than I do." The second drinker may be worse. The first has still not answered the charge. - Poisoning the well gets the attack in before the argument is heard. "Before you read his book, you should know he is paid by a foundation." - Guilt by association convicts a view of its worst company. "Hitler was a vegetarian", said as though that settled something about vegetarianism. Therefore, an ad hominem is not merely an insult. It is an insult standing in the place where a reason should have been.

(●) Simple example: "Don't take driving advice from Dave. Look at the state of his lawn." + Dave has just said that you should leave a longer gap on the motorway in the rain. The reply is about his grass. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is about stopping distances in the wet. The support offered against it is that Dave's lawn is a disgrace. Both may be perfectly true. (2) Why the support does no work. - Nothing about grass bears on braking. Try the swap: replace Dave's claim with any other sentence he has ever uttered ("the shop shuts at six"), and the lawn counts against that sentence exactly as much, which is to say not at all. - What would bear on the claim is a stopping-distance table, a driving instructor, or your own memory of braking hard on a wet road. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It was declining to think about the advice by finding a reason not to think about Dave. That is what the fallacy is for, and it is why it is so restful to commit. Nobody has to look anything up.

(●) A critic says: "You only believe in God because you were raised in a Christian home." + This is Bulverism in its purest form, and one of the two or three sentences every Christian eventually hears across a table. It deserves a careful answer rather than an offended one, because there is a real question buried inside it. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that Christian belief is false, or at least held without any good reason. The support is an account of how the belief came to be held: parents, church, a childhood in which God was simply assumed. - The published ancestor is Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927), which explained religious belief as wish-fulfilment, a longed-for father projected onto the sky. Freud granted that an illusion need not be false, but he never showed the belief false. He explained it, and treated the explanation as enough. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "here is how you came to believe it" to "so it is not true", and nothing bridges the gap. A child who learned from her father that the earth goes round the sun came by the belief exactly this way, and the earth goes round the sun all the same. - The same slide flattens the critic's own beliefs. A person raised in a secular home in Stockholm came by their atheism the same way a person raised in Nashville came by their Christianity. If upbringing discredits a belief, it discredits both. - Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief adds the deeper point. To call belief in God merely wish-fulfilment, you have to assume already that there is no God who made us to want him. If there is, the wanting is an appetite for something real, the way hunger is made for food. Freud had assumed the very thing in dispute. (3) The sound version. - There is a real point here, and it should be granted: beliefs do track geography. Most people hold the religion of their parents, and that ought to make anyone, of any conviction, a little more careful about how confident they are. Philosophers call this the problem of religious disagreement, and John Hick made the strongest case that it should push everyone toward treating the world's religions as equally valid responses to one reality. - That is an argument about how much confidence a belief can carry, and it applies evenly to everyone at the table. It cannot decide which belief is true. For that, the arguments themselves have to be examined, and there is no shortcut through anyone's biography. (4) How to answer it. - "You may be right about how I came to believe it. So how did you come to believe what you believe? Once we have both told our stories, we still have to ask which of us is right, and that will take an argument." See also: Common Objections: How Can Jesus Be the Only Way? Common Objections: What About Those Who've Never Heard of Jesus?

(●) A Christian says: "Atheists don't disbelieve for intellectual reasons. They just want to sin." + The same move from our side of the table. Lewis called Bulverism a game that everyone can play, and believers play it as readily as anyone. It is the sentence most likely to end a conversation with a thoughtful skeptic. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the atheist's arguments need not be answered. The support is a diagnosis of his motives: he does not want a God who would tell him what to do, so he has arranged not to believe in one. - The diagnosis is usually backed with Romans 1, which says of humanity that they "by their unrighteousness suppress the truth" (Romans 1:18). The verse is real and the doctrine is real. What has gone wrong is the use. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "here is why he disbelieves" to "so his arguments need no answer". That is Bulverism, letter for letter. The atheist has put an argument on the table, say the problem of evil (the argument that a good and all-powerful God would not permit the suffering we see), and it is exactly as strong or as weak whether the man offering it is a saint or a scoundrel. - The Romans passage is a claim God makes about every human heart, believer and unbeliever alike, and it belongs in a sermon addressed to everyone. Used as a reply to one particular argument, it is a diagnosis standing where an answer should be, and the skeptic can feel the difference. - Try the mirror. "Christians don't believe for intellectual reasons. They just want comfort." Every Christian knows how that lands, and knows it does nothing to the Kalam argument or the evidence for the resurrection. The atheist feels the same about his arguments. (3) The sound version. - The right response to an argument is a better argument. The problem of evil has answers, and once the arguments have been checked on their own, nobody's motives matter. - It is fair to observe that motivated reasoning is real and that everyone is subject to it. Scripture says so of unbelief, and experience says so of belief. But that observation is symmetrical, and a symmetrical point cannot be a reason for either side. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "Maybe so. But he has just given a reason, and if we cannot answer the reason, his motives do not help us. Let's answer the reason." See also: Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Logical Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Probabilistic

(●) A charge that misses: "Arguing that the disciples were sincere and had nothing to gain is character evidence, and character evidence is just ad hominem in reverse." + The charge sounds tidy. If it is a fallacy to attack the arguer, it must be a fallacy to praise the witness. It is not, and the reason is the difference between an argument and a report. (1) What the charge claims. - The resurrection case leans on the early witnesses: they claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, had nothing worldly to gain by saying so, and several were killed rather than take it back. The charge says all of that is talk about people rather than facts, and so commits the fallacy in a flattering key. (2) Why the charge misses. - An ad hominem is a fallacy because character has nothing to do with whether an argument holds up. But the witnesses were not offering an argument. They were offering a report, "we saw him", and when the evidence is a report, the reporter's honesty and interests are part of the evidence, not a distraction from it. - Every courtroom works this way. The jury is told to ignore the defendant's haircut, and in the same trial to weigh whether a witness had a motive to lie. The first instruction is about an argument; the second is about testimony. - Douglas Walton's Ad Hominem Arguments (1998), the standard study, draws this line: no ad hominem is fallacious simply as such. The question is whether the person's character is relevant to the kind of claim being made, and his standing case of a fair one is the courtroom witness. - The test to carry away: would the point about the person still matter if somebody else had made the same claim? Dave's lawn fails the moment you imagine a driving instructor giving the same advice. A witness's motive to lie matters whoever the witness is. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need to show that the resurrection case rests on the disciples' arguments rather than their testimony. It rests on the second, and historians on both sides of the question treat sincerity and self-interest as evidence because that is what they are. - The charge does land on one thing, and it should be granted. Sincerity shows that the witnesses believed what they said, not that they were right. Honest people can be mistaken, so the case has to rule out mistake separately, which is why its defenders spend as much time on the empty tomb and the group appearances as on the disciples' courage. (4) How to answer it. - "If they had argued for the resurrection from philosophy, you would be right that their character was beside the point. They did not argue. They said they saw him. Whether people who say they saw something were honest is exactly the question, not a dodge from it." See also: CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas) CE / Resurrection: Maximal Data Method (McGrew)