Justified True Belief

(●) Begging the question assumes in a premise the very thing the argument set out to prove. + From the outside the move looks like an argument: reasons on one side, a conclusion on the other. From the inside, one of the reasons is the conclusion in different clothes. (1) The shape of the move is a reason you cannot accept until you accept the conclusion. - A councillor stands up to say the town needs the new bypass, and her reason is that the town cannot manage without one. Heads nod around the room. But the same thing has now been said twice, and anyone who doubted the bypass a minute ago has nothing new to think about. - Two words help here. The reasons an argument offers are its premises, and what they are meant to support is its conclusion. In a good argument the premises are easier to accept than the conclusion, and they carry you across to it. Here the premise is exactly as hard to accept, because it is the conclusion. - Logicians file the move among the fallacies of presumption, arguments whose premises quietly take for granted what they were meant to establish. Douglas Walton, in the standard modern study, works with the two kinds of circle the literature distinguishes. In an equivalence circle the premise is the conclusion reworded ("the medicine works because it is effective"). In a dependency circle the premise is a different claim whose only support is the conclusion ("the paper is reliable; it says so on its editorial page"). (2) It tempts because a true premise feels like support. - A man sets the kitchen clock by his watch. An hour later he checks the watch against the kitchen clock, sees that the two agree, and feels reassured. Both readings were true, and the agreement told him nothing, because one had been set from the other. The check was honest. It just was not a check. - Big circles are the hardest to catch. A premise that restates the conclusion in the next clause gets spotted at once. One that comes round to it after a chapter feels like a journey, and by then the reader has forgotten where it began. (3) The name is Aristotle's, and the family has two cousins. - Aristotle described the move in the Prior Analytics and the Topics as "asking for the thing at the start", that is, asking your opponent to grant the very point in dispute. Latin made that petitio principii, a request for the starting point, and English turned the request into begging. The newspaper's "begs the question", meaning raises it, is a different phrase, and the logician's sense is the older one. - Circular reasoning is the same fallacy under its everyday name, usually with the loop drawn longer: A because B, B because C, and C, when you finally ask, because A. - The loaded question (textbooks call it the complex question) begs the question in the form of a question, so that any answer concedes the disputed claim. "Why is the council so careless with money?" has convicted the council before anyone replies. Therefore, begging the question is not saying something false. It is saying the same thing twice and calling the second time a reason.

(●) Simple example: "He's trustworthy. He told me so himself." + A neighbour is about to hand a builder the deposit for a new kitchen, and that is why he feels easy about it. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that the builder can be trusted with the money. The support is that the builder says he can. Both may be true; honest builders say so too. (2) Why the support does no work. - The builder's word is the thing in question, so it cannot also be the support. Try the swap test: a crook would have said exactly the same sentence, so the premise cannot tell the two men apart. - What would bear on the claim stands on its own feet: a trade licence you can look up, the family down the road whose kitchen he finished, a written contract. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It let the builder settle the question about the builder. The same move packs neatly into a question. "When did you stop cheating on your taxes?" leaves no honest date to give, because every answer concedes the cheating. The reply is to refuse what the question assumes: "I never started."

(●) A critic says: "Miracles violate the laws of nature, and the whole of human experience stands against them. No testimony could ever establish one." + This is David Hume's argument, the skeptic's standing objection to the resurrection since 1748. A sound argument stands right beside it, and the two are easy to confuse. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that no report of a miracle should ever be believed. The support is that the laws of nature rest on "a firm and unalterable experience", so that there is "a uniform experience against every miraculous event". A report of one is therefore always likelier to be mistaken than true. - The source is Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section X, "Of Miracles". At its strongest the point is real: that dead men stay dead is as well founded as any belief we have, so a claim that one did not needs evidence in proportion. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is in the word "uniform". How do we know experience is uniform against miracles? Only if every report of one is false. And how do we know that? Only if miracles never happen, which was the question we started with. C. S. Lewis put it in a sentence in Miracles: we are arguing in a circle. The resurrection reports belong to human experience too, and they were struck off the list before anyone weighed them. - John Earman, a philosopher of science with no brief for Christianity, raises the same complaint in Hume's Abject Failure, and holds that the case has to be run as a probability calculation instead, since taken as a proof it leans on the very experience in dispute. Run as a calculation, it could go either way. - Bart Ehrman put the modern version to William Lane Craig in their 2006 debate: historians establish only what probably happened, and a miracle is by definition the least probable thing. Michael Licona's reply in The Resurrection of Jesus is that a method which rules the conclusion out before it looks has not stayed neutral. It has already decided. (3) The sound version. - Hume had a better argument in the same section, and it stands. An event with a very low prior probability (how likely you judge it before any evidence comes in) needs correspondingly strong testimony. That is Bayes's rule, the arithmetic of how evidence shifts a probability, and nothing in it is circular. If a neighbour says the accountant across the road has won the lottery, the long odds do not make her a liar. They set the bar her evidence has to clear. - That bar can be cleared. Timothy and Lydia McGrew start from that second, evidential form and put the likelihood ratio for the combined testimony to the resurrection (how much more probable that testimony is if Jesus rose than if he did not) at around ten to the forty-fourth power, enough to swamp a very low prior. Whether they are right is a question about the evidence, which is where it belongs. (4) How to answer it. - "Take out the word 'uniform' and I agree with you: a resurrection needs far better evidence than a healed cold. So let's look at the evidence. Ruling it out first is the one thing Hume can't have." See also: CE / Resurrection: Maximal Data Method (McGrew) CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas)

(●) A Christian says: "The Bible is God's word because the Bible says so. 2 Timothy 3:16 settles it." + The same move from our side of the table, and the one a thoughtful skeptic catches fastest. He asked why he should trust the book, and he was handed the book. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that Scripture carries God's authority. The support is that Scripture says it does: "All Scripture is breathed out by God" (2 Timothy 3:16), with 2 Peter 1:21 usually beside it. - At its strongest the point is not silly. Someone who already trusts the Bible is right to take its account of itself seriously, and every final authority has to vouch for itself somewhere. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - This is a dependency circle. That Paul's letter says Scripture is God-breathed is not in dispute; what does the work is that the letter's word settles the matter, and that is the conclusion over again. The skeptic can grant the first and stand exactly where he was. The verse is true; the use has gone wrong. - Try the mirror. The Qur'an says it is from God, and no Christian takes that as proof that it is. A Muslim quoting it at us would be handing us back the very question we had put to him. - A smaller circle sits inside the big one. Paul is speaking of "the sacred writings" Timothy had known from childhood (2 Timothy 3:15), which commentators standardly take to be the Old Testament. Asked to warrant the whole canon (the list of books the church receives as Scripture), Paul's own letter included, the verse ends up vouching for the letter it sits in, which is more than it says. (3) The sound version. - The argument runs the other way round. The Gospels are tested first the way historians test any ancient document, not as Scripture. On that evidence Jesus rose, which vindicates what he claimed about himself. And Jesus treated Scripture as God's word (Matthew 5:18; John 10:35) and commissioned the apostles to teach in his name. Scripture's authority then rests on Christ's, and Christ's on public evidence a skeptic can examine without granting anything in advance. Sproul, Gerstner and Lindsley set out that order in Classical Apologetics. - Some Christians argue differently, and it is fair to say so. The presuppositional school (Cornelius Van Til, then Greg Bahnsen and John Frame) holds that every ultimate standard, reason included, must in the end attest itself. Frame's Apologetics to the Glory of God calls the bare "because it says so" a narrow circle and rejects it as firmly as any skeptic would, arguing in a broad one instead: the Christian starting point tested against the whole of experience. The classical school answers that the case has to be made on ground the unbeliever already stands on. Both are orthodox, and their quarrel is about method, not about what Scripture is. (4) How to answer it when a fellow Christian says it. - "He doesn't believe the Bible yet, so quoting it asks him to start where we finished. Start where he is: were these written by people in a position to know, and did Jesus rise? If he did, what he said about Scripture follows." See also: CE / New Testament Criticism: The Gospels: Real History Philosophical Theology: New Testament Canon

(●) A charge that misses: "Using the Gospels as evidence for the resurrection begs the question. They are Christian documents, written to make Christians." + The charge sounds decisive: if the evidence comes from believers, the believing went in before the evidence came out. It misses all the same, because using a source is not the same as assuming its conclusion. (1) What the charge claims. - The resurrection case cites Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul, every one a believer writing for believers. So, the charge says, the case takes its conclusion from documents that already assume it. - The strongest form is fair: testimony from an interested party needs more care than testimony from a bystander, and historians give it that care. (2) Why the charge misses. - Begging the question is about where a premise gets its support. The premises here are that Jesus was crucified, that his tomb was found empty, and that his followers claimed to have seen him alive. Each rests on tests that have nothing to do with whether he rose: how early the documents are, how many independent lines agree, whether an account keeps details an inventor would have dropped (women as the first witnesses), and what the movement's opponents conceded. Historians run those same tests on Josephus, a Jew writing about Jews, and on Caesar, who wrote up his own war. - The minimal facts approach builds only on what most skeptical scholars already grant, which is the opposite of assuming the conclusion. A skeptic who agrees that Paul really believed he had seen the risen Jesus has accepted a premise without accepting the conclusion, and that is the whole test in a sentence. - Walton draws the line this way: a circle is fallacious when it is used to dodge the burden of proof, the duty of whoever makes a claim to support it. Premises that were supposed to stand on their own are leaning on the conclusion instead. So ask of any premise, could someone believe this without already believing the conclusion? "The tomb was found empty" passes, and plenty of skeptics do believe it. "He's honest, he told me so" fails. The test also clears some things that merely look circular: a definition explains a word with other words without trying to prove anything, and a worldview that hangs together is answering to experience rather than to itself. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need to show that the facts are believed only because the resurrection is assumed, and that the historical tests are ones nobody would apply to any other ancient text. Neither is so. - Where the charge partly lands, it should be granted. A Christian who says "the Gospel reports the empty tomb, and the Gospel is inspired, so the tomb was empty" has begged the question exactly as charged. The case has to be built without that step, and a skeptic is entitled to watch it being built. (4) How to answer it. - "They are Christian documents, and Caesar wrote his own war. Historians don't throw either out; they test them. Date them, cross-check them, see what their enemies conceded, then tell me which fact you don't grant and why." See also: CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas) CE / New Testament Criticism: The Gospels: Real History