Justified True Belief

(●) The genetic fallacy judges a claim by where it came from instead of by whether it is true. + "Genetic" here has nothing to do with genes. The word comes from genesis, a beginning, and the fallacy answers a claim with the story of its birth. (1) The move offers a history in place of a reason. - A mother stands up at the school board with the sleep studies in her hand and proposes starting the school day an hour later. The reply is that the idea began as a mattress company's advertising campaign, so the day should stay put. Suppose it did begin there. Teenagers' brains did not read the advertisement before deciding when to get sleepy. - Two words help here. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they are meant to support is the conclusion. The school board got a history instead, and a history is silent about a conclusion. Logicians file the move among the fallacies of relevance: support that could be granted in full and still have no bearing on whether the claim is true. Its near neighbour is the ad hominem, which tells the story of the person instead. (2) It tempts because origins really are evidence, sometimes. - We check origins all day, and rightly. A rumour from a man who has lied to us before deserves less credit than the same story from an eyewitness. An origin tells us how reliable the process was that produced a belief, and reliability does bear on truth. - "It came from a dream" has the ring of "it came from a liar", but the liar has a record behind him and the dream has only been sneered at. Naming a source is not the same as showing it unreliable. (3) The name is recent, and three cousins judge an idea by its date. - The name is usually credited to Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel, in An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934). The mistake was old long before the label. - Chronological snobbery runs the fallacy through a calendar: an idea is false because it is old. C. S. Lewis named it in Surprised by Joy, and he named it as a confession. He had assumed that anything out of date was discredited by that fact, until Owen Barfield asked whether the idea had ever been refuted or had merely gone out of fashion. - The appeal to novelty reads the calendar the other way: an idea is true because it is new, the way this year's phone is better for being this year's. - The appeal to tradition finishes the set: an idea is true because it is old. "The church has always taught it" is a fact about the church, and of the three, Christians reach for this one most. Asking who has believed a thing, and for how long, can open a good argument. On its own it is a birth certificate. Therefore, the genetic fallacy is a history told where a reason should have been. The history can be perfectly accurate, and the claim is exactly as true, or as false, as before.

(●) Simple example: "The idea for that vaccine came to him in a dream. It can't possibly work." + Your brother-in-law has read about a researcher who woke at three in the morning with a new vaccine designed in his head, and he has decided that settles it. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that the vaccine does not work. The support is that the idea arrived in a dream. Both may be perfectly true. (2) Why the support does no work. - Nothing about where an idea arrives bears on whether it is right. Try the swap: give the same researcher the same idea at his desk after lunch. The vaccine works exactly as well, because vaccines are tested in trials, not in bed. - History is unkind to the brother-in-law here. Otto Loewi dreamt the experiment that showed nerves signal chemically, ran it on two frog hearts that same night, and shared a Nobel Prize for it in 1936. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It was declining to look at the trial data by finding something odd about the idea's birth. A story about origins feels like an explanation, and an explanation feels like the end of a discussion that has not begun.

(●) A critic says: "If you had been born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim." + The sentence usually arrives with a shrug, as though it were unanswerable, and most Christians feel its force before they can say what is wrong with it. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that Christian belief is not to be trusted, or not much. The support is its origin: parents and country handed it to you, and different ones would have handed you something else. - The careful version is John Hick's. In An Interpretation of Religion (1989) he observed that in the overwhelming majority of cases a person's religion depends on the accident of birth: born to Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia, you would very probably be a Muslim. - Sigmund Freud supplied the origin story sixty years earlier. Religious doctrines, he wrote in The Future of an Illusion (1927), are "illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind", a longing for a protecting father projected onto the sky. He granted that an illusion need not be false. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "here is where your belief came from" to "so it is not to be trusted", and the second does not follow. Born in Saudi Arabia you would also believe that the earth goes round the sun, by exactly the same route, and the route is not what makes it true. - Run the mirror. Born in Riyadh, the critic would very probably not be an atheist either. If geography discredits the beliefs it delivers, it discredits his as thoroughly as yours, and an argument that proves too much has proved nothing. - Freud has a mirror too. Paul Vitz, in Faith of the Fatherless (1999), noticed how many famous atheists (Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre) lost their fathers early or had fathers who failed them, and suggested that unbelief can be a wish-fulfilment as well: the wish that there be no Father. That refutes nothing, and a Christian who leans on it has committed the fallacy himself. It shows only that a story about origins can be told about anybody. (3) The sound version. - Grant the fact: beliefs track upbringing, and that ought to make anyone a little more humble. Philosophers call this the problem of religious diversity, and Hick built on it the case that the world's faiths are culturally shaped responses to one ultimate reality. It deserves an answer rather than a label. - A real genetic argument is available here, and it takes two steps. Step one: the process that hands religion down, parents and community and early instruction, produces false beliefs as readily as true ones. Step two: this belief has nothing else going for it. Step two is where the work is, because reasons that do not depend on the Christian's upbringing make her upbringing beside the point. (4) How to answer it. - "You're right that I'd probably be a Muslim, and you'd probably not be an atheist, so where we were born can't decide this for either of us. Tell me why you think you're right, and I'll tell you why I think I am." See also: Common Objections: How Can Jesus Be the Only Way? Philosophy: Ad Hominem

(●) A Christian says: "Source criticism was cooked up by nineteenth-century German philosophers. The documentary hypothesis is worthless." + The same move from our side, said in seminaries as well as kitchens. It sounds like scholarship, because it knows some history. It is not, because it stops there. (1) What is being argued. - Two terms first. Source criticism asks what earlier written sources a biblical book was assembled from, the way a historian asks what a medieval chronicle was compiled out of. - The documentary hypothesis is its best-known result. Julius Wellhausen argued, in his Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1878), that the first five books of the Bible were woven together from four documents written centuries after Moses. - The claim is that the hypothesis is false. The support is its pedigree: it was born in the German universities of the 1800s, among men steeped in Hegel, whose philosophy read history as a spirit unfolding through stages. Wellhausen's picture of Israel's religion rising from feeling to law fits that philosophy suspiciously well, and he said himself that he had learned most from Wilhelm Vatke, a Hegelian. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The slide is from "here is the philosophy that shaped the man" to "so what he proposed is false". A hypothesis about how Genesis was put together stands or falls on Genesis: on the doublets (the same story told twice, as the creation is), the shifts between the divine names, and whether it explains them better than the alternatives. Hegel is not in the text. - Run the mirror. A skeptic says, "Your case for the Gospels came out of nineteenth-century English evangelicalism, so it is worthless." Every Christian knows the answer: the evidence is what it is, whoever gathered it. Wellhausen is owed the same sentence. - A cousin turns up here often: "Darwin lost his faith, and his theory fed eugenics, so evolution is false." That is the genetic fallacy and the appeal to consequences (judging a claim by whether its results are welcome) in one breath. A theory about finches is settled by finches. (3) The sound version. - The argument the Christian should have made is from the text and the ground. Kenneth Kitchen's On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003) sets Deuteronomy beside the treaties of the Hittite kings and argues that its shape belongs to the second millennium, not the seventh century where the hypothesis puts it. - R. N. Whybray, no conservative, argued in The Making of the Pentateuch (1987) that the criteria for dividing the sources contradict one another. Both men went to the evidence. The pedigree is only a reason to check. - Noticing the assumption is fair. "Is Hegel doing work the evidence should do?" is a good question. Answering it with "so ignore him" is the fallacy. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "Maybe Hegel was in the room when Wellhausen wrote. But the doublets in Genesis are still there, and we owe an account of them. Let's give the better one, and his philosophy won't matter." See also: Christian Evidences: Early Dating and Eyewitness Proximity of the New Testament Christian Evidences: Undesigned Coincidences as Evidence of Gospel Reliability

(●) A charge that misses: "Saying evolution wired our brains to believe in God is just the genetic fallacy in a lab coat." + The charge comes from our side, and it is thrown at the most serious genetic argument now in print. It misses, because that argument is what a legitimate genetic argument looks like. Whether it succeeds is another question, and a live one. (1) What the charge claims. - The cognitive science of religion studies the mental equipment that makes religious belief come easily. One strand of it is a hair-trigger tendency to see an agent behind an event: a rustle in the grass is a something, not a nothing. Justin Barrett named that tendency hypersensitive agency detection, and his Born Believers (2012) gathers the evidence from children. - The critic argues that such habits would produce belief in God whether or not any God existed, so the belief is debunked. The Christian's charge is that this is the origin story with equipment. (2) Why the charge misses. - The genetic fallacy is a fallacy because naming an origin is not the same as showing it unreliable. A debunking argument is a genetic argument that tries to do the showing. - Guy Kahane's "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments" (2011) sets out its shape: a causal premise (this belief is produced by process X) and an epistemic premise (process X is insensitive to whether the belief is true). That second premise is the whole difference between an argument and a sneer. - The test to carry away: does the argument show the process unreliable, or only name it? "You believe because you were raised to" names one. "You believe because of a habit that fires whether or not anything is there, and here is the evidence" tries to show one. The first is the fallacy; the second is an argument. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need the debunker to have skipped the epistemic premise. Some popular versions do, and against those the charge lands. Against Kahane's schema it does not, and the Christian has to answer the second premise. - The answer exists. Barrett and Kelly James Clark reply that the same fast, automatic habits give us our belief in other minds and in a world outside our heads. A debunking that takes down belief in God takes the ordinary furniture of thought with it, unless the debunker can say why this one habit is off-track and the others are not. - Alvin Plantinga turns the tool round. His evolutionary argument against naturalism (the view that nature is all there is), in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), runs that a process selected for survival rather than truth produced the naturalist's belief in naturalism too. The debunker can reply, and does. (4) How to answer it. - "That isn't the genetic fallacy, and we should stop calling it that. It argues that the process is unreliable, and it needs an answer. Here's mine: the same process gives you your belief in other people's minds. Why trust it there and not here?" See also: Natural Theology: Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) Philosophy: Warrant