Justified True Belief

(●) An appeal to consequences judges a claim true or false by whether its consequences are welcome. + The roofer has just said the word "leak", and the homeowner answers before he finishes: "It can't be. We can't afford a roof this year." The Latin name is argumentum ad consequentiam, "argument to the consequence", and that is the move: how much we would like what follows becomes the verdict on the claim. (1) The move offers a reason about us rather than about the world. - The roofer's claim is that water is coming in. The homeowner's reason against it is a fact about his bank balance, and so, he concludes, the roof is fine. Every word about the money may be true, and the water is coming in all the same. - Two words help here. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they are meant to support is the conclusion. The premise here is about money, the conclusion is about a roof, and nothing carries one to the other. Logicians file it among the fallacies of relevance, which Patrick Hurley's textbook defines as arguments whose premises, even granted, have no bearing on the conclusion. - It runs both ways: "it would be lovely, so it is true" buys the lottery ticket in the kitchen drawer every week. (2) It tempts because consequences are what we weigh when deciding what to do. - The cost of a new roof is a good reason to get a second opinion, since that is a question about what to do. The fallacy borrows that respectability and spends it on a question of fact, where consequences buy nothing. - From the inside the two blur. The mind flinches from a fact it cannot afford, and the flinch feels like doubt. A man who finds a lump and decides it is nothing has not examined the lump. He has examined his diary and found no room in it for cancer. (3) The name is modern, and the family has three cousins. - Douglas Walton traced the label in 1999 and found Aristotle treating argument from consequences as reasonable rather than fallacious; its career as a named fallacy begins with the modern textbooks, James McCosh's of 1879. Walton drew the line that matters: consequences are good reasons when the question is what to do, and a fallacy only when the question is what is true. - Wishful thinking is the same move done privately: the belief settles where it is comfortable, the way a gambler knows his numbers are due. - Appeal to emotion offers a feeling where the reason should be. Walton's study of emotion in argument grants that pity or fear can show that something matters. "Think of the children" is a reason to care about a policy, never a reason to believe a claim. - Appeal to force (argumentum ad baculum, "argument to the stick") makes the consequence a threat: "Agree, or you will regret it." The stick may be real. It changes nothing about the claim. Therefore, an appeal to consequences puts a true fact about what we want where a fact about the world should have been.

(●) Simple example: "The exam can't be tomorrow. I haven't studied." + Her flatmate has just read the timetable aloud, and the reply is about the state of her notes. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that the exam is tomorrow. The support offered against it is that the speaker is not ready, which is probably true, and is why she said it. (2) Why the support does no work. - The exam office did not consult her revision schedule. Try the swap test, the quickest check for a fallacy of relevance: attach "I haven't studied" to any other claim about the timetable ("the exam is in the sports hall") and it counts against that one exactly as much, which is to say not at all. - What would bear on the claim is the printed timetable, or a phone call to the department, which settles it in a minute. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It was buying an evening. The unwelcome fact got pushed off with a sentence that sounded like a reason. That is what the fallacy is for, and the exam comes tomorrow regardless.

(●) A critic says: "There can't be a hell, because a loving God wouldn't do that." + This is the fallacy at its most sympathetic, usually said by someone grieving rather than scoring a point. There is a real argument buried inside it, and the careless reply ("that's just wishful thinking") misses the argument and wounds the person. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that there is no hell: no final, everlasting separation from God for anyone. The support, as the sentence stands, is that hell would be dreadful, and a loving God would not want anything dreadful. - The strongest form has published defenders. Thomas Talbott's The Inescapable Love of God (1999) argues that perfect love and everlasting punishment cannot both be true of the same God; Marilyn McCord Adams's "Hell and the God of Justice" (1975) argues that no sound principle of justice could make a man deserve it. Both argue from logic rather than taste. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "hell would be unbearable" to "so there is no hell", and nothing bridges it. Hospitals are full of unbearable things that are also true, and a doctor who reasoned from a patient's dread to a clean scan would lose his licence. - Try the mirror. "There must be a heaven, because a loving God would want us happy." Every critic hears the wish in that at once, and it is the same wish pointed the other way. - The weight of it is real, and it has to be honoured rather than diagnosed. William Lane Craig distinguishes two problems of evil (On Guard, ch. 7): the emotional problem is a person's suffering and needs a friend, while the intellectual problem is an argument and needs an answer. The kitchen-table "a loving God wouldn't" is usually the first, and the first is no fallacy, because it is not an argument. It becomes one only when it is offered as a reason. (3) The sound version. - The critic could have argued this: God is perfect love; perfect love wills the good of everyone it loves and never stops; everlasting punishment is the final abandonment of that good; so a perfectly loving God cannot inflict it. That is Talbott's argument in miniature, and no appeal to consequences at all. Its premises are claims about love and about hell, and if they are true the conclusion follows. - Christians have answered it. C. S. Lewis's reply in The Problem of Pain is that the doors of hell are locked on the inside: hell is the creature's freedom respected to the end rather than love withdrawn. That meets an argument on its premises. The wish version offers no premises to meet, and naming a fallacy at a grieving person answers nothing. (4) How to answer it. - "I don't want it to be true either, and I feel the weight of it. But wanting can't settle it either way. If you can show me that perfect love and hell can't both be true, that's an argument, and I owe it an answer." See also: Common Objections: Emotional PoE Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Logical

(●) A Christian says: "Without God, life has no meaning, so God must exist." + The same move from our side of the table, one of the commonest sentences in popular apologetics, usually said with feeling by someone who has seen what despair does. It is still a fallacy. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that God exists. The support is that without him human life would have no meaning, value or purpose, which is too terrible to accept. - The published ancestor is William Lane Craig's chapter on the absurdity of life without God (Reasonable Faith, ch. 2), and Craig is explicit that he never argues for God's existence from that absurdity. The chapter shows that the question matters, so the arguments that follow get a hearing. The fallacy is that opening chapter mistaken for the case it introduces. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "atheism would be unbearable" to "so atheism is false". A universe with no God in it would not acquire one because we found it bleak; the universe is under no obligation to be kind. - Try the mirror. When a critic says "religion comforts people, so it's false", every Christian hears the wish in it at once. "Believing in God gives people hope, so it's true" is the same sentence pointed the other way. - Paul refused the move. He named the stakes without flinching: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). But he had put the evidence first, the list of witnesses who saw the risen Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). The stakes came after the evidence, as a reason to care rather than a reason to believe. (3) The sound version. - Craig's own order is the sound version: the stakes first, then the arguments that do the work. Whether the universe began and whether the tomb was empty are claims about the world, and each has its own case to make. - The longing for meaning can be evidence, if it is treated as evidence. C. S. Lewis's argument from desire (Mere Christianity, bk 3 ch. 10) starts from a fact about people, that we carry a desire nothing in this world satisfies, and reasons that we were probably made for another world, as ducklings want to swim and there is water. That is an inference from a fact, not a wish, and it stands or falls on the fact and its rival explanations. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "You're right that the stakes are enormous, and Craig would say so too. But the stakes are why he should look, not what he'll find. Give him the Kalam or the moral argument, and let the meaning question be the reason he listens." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Natural Theology: The Moral Argument

(●) A charge that misses: "The moral argument is just an appeal to consequences. You don't like where atheism leads, so you reject it." + The charge sounds fair. If rejecting atheism for being bleak is a fallacy, why not rejecting it for leaving morality with no footing? The difference is between an unwanted consequence and a false one. (1) What the charge claims. - The moral argument runs: if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist; they do exist; therefore God exists. The charge says the second premise is a preference in disguise: the apologist cannot stomach a world in which the Holocaust was not really wrong, so he declares that it was, and declares God. (2) Why the charge misses. - The inference is modus tollens, Latin for "the mode that denies": if P then Q; not Q; therefore not P. If it rained overnight the path is wet; the path is dry; so it did not rain. That reasons from a consequence, and nobody calls it a fallacy, because the consequence is rejected as false rather than unwelcome. - Craig's defense of the second premise (Reasonable Faith, ch. 4) is that we apprehend moral values in moral experience much as we apprehend the physical world in sense experience, and that our conviction that torturing a child for fun is wrong is more secure than any premise offered against it. That premise is disputed, but disputed as evidence, the way a witness is disputed, and that is the ground the charge would have to meet. - The test to carry away: is the consequence a reason the claim is false, or a reason it is unwanted? "Atheism would be miserable, so it is false" fails. "Atheism entails that nothing is really wrong, and some things are really wrong, so atheism is false" passes, whatever anyone makes of its premises. - The same test rescues the legitimate cousin. Pascal's wager (Pensées, fr. 418) does not argue that God exists because believing would pay. It argues that someone who must decide how to live, while reason cannot settle the question, should weigh what is at stake, which is the question Walton says consequences are for. William James's "The Will to Believe" (1896) named the category: a genuine option, one the evidence cannot settle and that must be decided anyway. The wager has real objections (which God, for a start), though not this one. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need the second premise to read "we would prefer objective moral values to exist", and nobody argues that. - The charge does land on one thing. Popular versions sometimes slide from "we cannot live as if nothing were wrong" to "so something is wrong", which is the fallacy. The strength of a conviction counts as evidence only if convictions of that kind are generally reliable, which the careful version claims and defends, and the careless version skips. (4) How to answer it. - "If I were saying atheism is false because I'd hate it to be true, you'd be right. I'm saying some things are really wrong and atheism can't account for it. Tell me which premise you reject, and we'll argue about that one." See also: Natural Theology: The Moral Argument