Justified True Belief

(●) A red herring answers an argument by changing the subject to something that does not bear on it. + The name comes from a fish. Drag a strong-smelling one across a trail and the hounds follow the smell while the hare walks away. (1) The shape of the move is a true reply to a question nobody asked. - A school board is deciding whether to close the small primary school. A parent stands up: forty children on the roll, and the roof needs replacing. The chair answers that the town's teachers are the finest in the county, and everybody applauds. The roll is still forty, and the roof still leaks. - Nothing the chair said was false, and that is what makes the move work. A lie gets caught; a true sentence about something else has to be noticed. - Two words help here. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they support is the conclusion. In a red herring the premises may be sound; they just support a conclusion nobody disputed. Logicians file that among the fallacies of relevance: reasons that, even if granted, say nothing about the question asked. (2) It tempts because the new subject is one the speaker would rather be on. - The subject changes when the old one gets uncomfortable, and the new one is picked because the speaker has an answer there. From the inside it feels like a strong point, which it is, only aimed at the wrong target. - At a well in Samaria, Jesus tells a stranger that she has had five husbands, and she replies, "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship." (John 4:19-20). Commentators differ over whether she was dodging or asking in earnest, but the subject moved as it got close to the bone. (3) Where the name came from, and the two cousins. - The idea is Aristotle's. Sophistical Refutations lists the move under a name that came into Latin as ignoratio elenchi, "ignorance of the refutation": the arguer refutes something, just not what he was meant to refute. The fish came later. In 1807 the journalist William Cobbett told of pulling hounds off a hare with a smoked herring, and used it against a London press chasing a false report of Napoleon's defeat. - Missing the point is the nearest cousin. Copi, Cohen and Rodych, and Hurley too, keep the Latin name for reasons that do support a conclusion, just not the one drawn: "this drug has serious side effects, so it should be banned" argues fairly for restricting the drug, then leaps to a ban. The subject never changed; only the conclusion overshot. - Whataboutism is the red herring in political dress. "You say my country jails journalists? What about yours?" Perhaps both do, and the first one still does, so the charge stands unanswered. Logicians call it tu quoque, Latin for "you too", turned on a whole side rather than a person. Therefore, a red herring is not a lie, and often not even a bad argument. It is a good argument for something else, laid down where the answer should have been.

(●) Simple example: "You say my room is a mess? Well, your cooking is terrible." + A mother has asked her son to tidy his room, and given her reason: plates under the bed. The reply is about dinner. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that the room is a mess. The support offered against it is that the cooking is bad. Both may be entirely true. (2) Why the support does no work. - Nothing about a casserole bears on plates under a bed. Try the swap: put any other sentence of hers in its place ("your bus leaves at eight"), and the cooking counts against that one exactly as much, which is to say not at all. - What would bear on the claim is a look at the floor. Notice that the son has not denied the room is a mess; he has arranged not to talk about it. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It was buying time by handing his mother a subject of her own to defend. If she takes the bait, the next five minutes are about the casserole, and the plates stay where they are.

(●) A critic says: "Even if the universe had a cause, look at all the suffering in the world." + The critic has just heard the Kalam argument: whatever begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, and so the universe has a cause. He has found no premise he can reject, so he reaches for the strongest thing on his shelf. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the Kalam fails, or at least that its conclusion should not be accepted. The support is the problem of evil: the suffering in the world, in its existence and its sheer amount, is hard to square with a good and all-powerful God. - Taken on its own terms this is one of the strongest arguments against theism. Its classic modern statement is J. L. Mackie's 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence", which argued that a wholly good God, an all-powerful God, and a world with evil in it cannot all be real together. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The Kalam concludes that the universe has a cause that is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful and plausibly personal. Goodness is not on that list. Suffering, however great, is no evidence against a powerful timeless cause, any more than a cruel king is evidence that the kingdom has no king. So the reply is true, and aimed at a conclusion the argument never drew. - The mirror makes it plain. Suppose a Christian answered the problem of evil with "even if there is suffering, the universe still had a beginning." Everyone would see the subject had changed. - Widening the question is not changing it, though. Against the further claim that this cause is God in the full sense, suffering is relevant, since goodness is part of what the word means. A critic who grants the cause and then asks whether it is good has stopped committing the fallacy and started the next conversation. (3) The sound version. - The true thing buried in the reply is that the Kalam alone gets nobody to Christianity, and its defenders say so. William Lane Craig's On Guard presents it as one of several independent arguments, each carrying part of the load, the form logicians call a cumulative case. The Kalam delivers a personal Creator; whether that Creator is good is the moral argument's job, and who he is comes from the evidence about Jesus. - The stronger version is to grant the cause and press the problem of evil where it belongs, against the claim that the cause is good. That is the argument Mackie actually made. (4) How to answer it. - "You're right that the suffering in the world is a real problem, and I want to talk about it. But it's a problem for the goodness of God, and this argument hasn't said anything about goodness yet. Can we settle whether the universe has a cause, and then take up what kind of cause it is?" See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Logical Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Probabilistic

(●) A Christian says: "You say evil disproves God, but without God you can't even call anything evil." + This is the same fish thrown from our side of the table, and a popular one, because the argument behind it is real and the reply feels like a knockout. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the problem of evil fails. The support is the moral argument: objective evil, evil that would be evil whether or not anyone minded, needs a standard beyond human preference, and the only adequate ground for such a standard is God. So the critic who calls anything evil has borrowed what he is arguing against. - The point is real, and the moral argument stands on its own feet. If there is no God, it is hard to say what makes the Holocaust wrong rather than merely hated, and the other side admits the difficulty: Mackie opened the first chapter of his Ethics with the sentence "There are no objective values." (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The problem of evil does not need the critic to have an account of goodness, because it can be run as an internal critique, an argument that takes the other side's own beliefs and shows they do not fit together. That is what Mackie's 1955 paper does. His point, he wrote, was not that religious belief lacks rational support but that it is "positively irrational": a wholly good God, an all-powerful God, and evil cannot all be held at once. Every term there is the Christian's. - So when the Christian says "you can't call anything evil", the critic can fairly reply, "I don't need to. You call it evil. I'm asking how your God and your evil fit together." The question was about consistency; the answer was about the critic. The line runs both ways: a critic who claims evil is really objective, not merely granted for argument, does owe an account of what grounds it. - Try the mirror. A critic who answered the moral argument with "you can't even explain where the universe came from" would be laughed at, and rightly. (3) The sound version. - The internal critique has to be answered internally first. Alvin Plantinga's God, Freedom, and Evil did that for Mackie's version by showing that a good and all-powerful God could have reasons, the worth of free creatures among them, for permitting evil he does not cause. Mackie's is the logical version, the claim that God and evil cannot both exist; the probabilistic version claims less, that the evil we see makes God unlikely. - Only then does the moral argument come in, not as a reply to the problem of evil but as the question the critic now owes: granted that you can run your argument on my terms, what grounds the word "evil" on yours? (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "That's a real argument and we should make it. But he hasn't claimed evil is objective here; he's asked how our God and our evil fit together. Let's answer that first, then ask him where his standard comes from." See also: Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Logical Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Probabilistic Natural Theology: The Moral Argument

(●) A charge that misses: "The cumulative case is just a red herring parade. Every time one argument fails, you change the subject to the next one." + The charge has a point behind it, and every apologist has watched someone earn it. But the reasoning it attacks is the one every jury uses. (1) What the charge claims. - The Christian case is usually presented as a cumulative case: several independent arguments, none decisive alone, each raising the probability of the conclusion. The charge says this is fish-dragging by design. When the Kalam is in trouble the apologist reaches for fine-tuning, the argument from the universe's physical constants sitting in the narrow range that allows life; when fine-tuning is in trouble he reaches for the resurrection; and the trail never leads anywhere. (2) Why the charge misses. - Several lines converging on one conclusion is a recognised form of reasoning, not a fallacy. No single fact convicts a defendant: the fingerprint could be innocent, the motive could be coincidence, the lie to the police could be panic. Together they convict, and the prosecutor who moves from the fingerprint to the motive has not changed the subject, because the subject was never the fingerprint. It was whether he did it. Basil Mitchell's The Justification of Religious Belief (1973) takes the lawyer's brief, not the formal proof, as the model for the case for God. - The test to carry away: does the new point bear on the claim under discussion, or only on the person making it, or on nothing that was asked? Fine-tuning bears on whether God exists, which was the claim. The son's casserole does not bear on whether his room is a mess. - Douglas Walton's Relevance in Argumentation draws the line in the same place, by asking what the conversation is for rather than inspecting sentences on their own. A move is relevant when it helps the two parties settle the question they set out to settle, and a red herring when it carries them away from it. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need to show that the apologist moves on without conceding the strand that failed. That is the honest line, and the charge lands wherever it is crossed. If the Kalam's second premise has just been shown doubtful and the reply is "well, look at fine-tuning" with no admission, the subject has been changed. - So the concession should be made in terms. Cumulative reasoning is legitimate only when each strand is honestly priced, the way a jury weighs a smudged print before adding the motive. "Granted, that one does not work as I stated it" is the sentence that separates a cumulative case from a parade. (4) How to answer it. - "Fair, if I've been doing that. So let me price the last one honestly: here's what I think it showed and what it didn't. Now, does the next argument bear on whether God exists? If it does, moving to it isn't changing the subject." See also: Philosophy: Cumulative Case Arguments