Justified True Belief

(●) A straw man answers a version of the argument that the other side never made. + A scarecrow is easy to knock down because nobody built it to fight back. A straw man works the same way: the reply wins against a figure the speaker stuffed himself. (1) The shape of the move is a refutation aimed at the wrong target. - Mrs. Alvarez tells the school board that the new maths textbook moves too fast for the weaker half of the class, and asks for a slower one to run alongside it. The next speaker says she wants to hold the bright children back, that ambition should not be punished, and sits down to applause. He has won. Not against her. - Two words help here. The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what the reasons are meant to support is the conclusion. A straw man answers neither. It swaps in a conclusion she never drew ("punish the bright children") and answers that. Hurley files the move among the fallacies of relevance: replies which, even if you granted every word of them, would bear on nothing the speaker actually said. (2) It tempts because a simpler version is easier to hold and easier to hate. - Retell a friend's argument twenty minutes later and you keep the part you disliked and drop the qualifications, because the qualifications were the hard part to remember. By the third retelling it is a cartoon, and cartoons are easy to beat. - And the applause is real. It cost nothing. Scripture has the diagnosis: "If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame." (Proverbs 18:13) - The cure is older than the name. Aquinas opened every article of the Summa Theologiae with objections to his own position, stated at their strongest, before he answered one. John Stuart Mill put the rule in a sentence, "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that", and the modern nickname for the discipline is steelmanning: building the other side's argument at its strongest before answering it. (3) A modern name for an old move, with two cousins. - A "man of straw" has meant a sham figure in English for centuries, and twentieth-century logic textbooks borrowed the phrase for the sham argument. Douglas Walton gave it formal treatment in 1996: the fallacy misrepresents what the other person has actually committed himself to. - The weak man, named by Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin in 2006, misstates nothing at all. You simply pick a view's feeblest defender and answer him as if he were its best. A parent who answers the loudest crank at the meeting and calls the case for a slower textbook finished has weak-manned it. - The hollow man, named by Aikin and John Casey in 2011, answers a position nobody holds at all. "Some people say we should just let the struggling children fail." Nobody at the meeting said it, and "some people" never have to show up. Therefore, a straw man is not a lie about the facts. It is a victory over a figure the speaker built himself, while the real argument stands where it was.

(●) Simple example: "Dad wants to trim the vacation budget, so Dad doesn't want us to have any fun." + Dad has just said that the beach week should be five nights this year instead of seven, because the roof needs work before winter. The reply is about fun. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - Dad's claim is that five nights will do, and his reason is the roof. The reply answers a claim nobody made, that fun is a bad thing. (2) Why the reply does no work. - Would Dad sign the reply as a summary of what he said? Never. His argument had "five nights" and "the roof" in it, and the reply has neither. Win the fight about fun as thoroughly as you like, and the roof still leaks. - What would bear on the claim is the roofer's estimate, or the same seven nights in October when the rates drop. (3) What the reply was really doing. - Recruiting. A fourteen-year-old cannot argue with a roofer's estimate, but she can beat "Dad is against fun" in front of the whole family. The fight was moved to ground where winning is easy and losing is invisible.

(●) A critic says: "Everything has a cause, so what caused God?" + The sentence has a distinguished pedigree, and it answers a premise no serious defender ever put on the table. A real objection is standing behind it. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the cosmological argument (the family of arguments that reason from the world's existence to a cause of it) defeats itself. The support is that its own premise, "everything has a cause", applies to God too. So either God needs a cause, or the premise is false. - The published ancestor is Bertrand Russell's 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian": "If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause." Richard Dawkins repeats it in The God Delusion, where Aquinas's first three Ways are said to assume, without warrant, that God is exempt from the regress (a chain of causes with no first link). - The strongest form of the point is a guard against special pleading, asking for an exemption you would refuse to anyone else. If the chain stops at God, the theist owes a reason why it stops there. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - No major form of the argument has "everything has a cause" as a premise. Aquinas reasoned from things that change to something that does not. Leibniz reasoned from things that could have failed to exist to something that could not. The Kalam, the medieval form William Lane Craig revived in Reasonable Faith, starts from "whatever begins to exist has a cause". On the argument's own terms God never began, so asking what caused him misfires the way "What is north of the North Pole?" does. - Try the mirror. "Atheists think the universe popped out of nothing" answers a claim no serious naturalist makes, and deserves the same correction. - One concession belongs here. Russell was answering the argument as it reached him in popular form, and careless Christians do say "everything has a cause". When one does, his reply lands. (3) The sound version. - It sits inside Russell's own paragraph: "If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God." That is no straw man. It challenges the restriction itself, with two hard questions. Is "begins to exist" a principled line, or one drawn to let God through? And can a causal principle we learned inside the universe be carried to the universe as a whole? - Wes Morriston presses both in Faith and Philosophy (2000), arguing that the beginning of time itself is unlike any beginning we have observed. Graham Oppy adds in Arguing about Gods (2006) that whatever uncaused stopping point the theist allows himself, the naturalist may take too. (4) How to answer it. - "The argument never said everything has a cause. It said whatever begins to exist has one. So the real questions are whether the universe began and whether that restriction is fair, and those are the hard ones." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Natural Theology: Leibniz' Contingency Argument

(●) A Christian says: "Evolution says monkeys turned into humans by random chance." + The sentence is said from pulpits and across kitchen tables, and every listener who took a biology course hears the case for God get weaker as it is said. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that evolutionary theory is absurd, or at least no rival to design. The support is a two-part description of the theory: one species turned into another, and it did so by chance. - There is something real underneath it. The theory leaves a family of questions unanswered, and a Christian is right to press every one of them. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - Neither half of the description would be signed by anyone who holds the theory. Common descent says that humans and modern apes share ancestors several million years back, not that a monkey became a man; a cousin is not a grandparent. And natural selection is the non-random part of the theory. Chance supplies the variation, selection keeps whatever helps a creature survive and breed, and Dawkins spends a chapter of The Blind Watchmaker insisting on it. Refuting "random chance" refutes a theory Darwin never held. - Augustine saw the cost sixteen centuries ago. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis he called it a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about the natural world while claiming Scripture as his authority. The listener then doubts Scripture where it matters most. - Try the mirror. "Christians think a magic man in the sky made everything in six days." Every Christian knows how much that sentence leaves out, and how little answering it would accomplish. (3) The sound version. - Start with the questions the theory does not claim to answer. Where did the first self-replicating life come from? Selection cannot begin until there is something to select. Why do the laws and constants of physics allow chemistry, stars and planets at all? Evolution presupposes that and never explains it. And can an unguided process aimed at survival be trusted to produce minds that track truth? That last one is Alvin Plantinga's argument in Where the Conflict Really Lies. All three survive full acceptance of common descent, which is why Francis Collins, who accepts it, and Christians who do not can press them side by side. - Christians disagree about the age of the earth and the reach of common descent, and both positions are held in good faith. The fallacy is not in rejecting the theory. It is in rejecting a theory nobody holds. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "Nobody who holds the theory would sign that sentence, and the biologist at the table just stopped listening. Let's argue against what Darwin actually said, and then ask the questions his theory can't answer." See also: Natural Theology: Cosmic Fine-Tuning Natural Theology: Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN)

(●) A charge that misses: "Apologists write both the objection and the reply, so of course the reply wins. Every defeater on an apologetics site is a straw man." + The charge has teeth. Anyone who writes both the objection and the answer has every incentive to write a soft objection, and the question is whether there is any check on it. (1) What the charge claims. - That an objection stated by the person who intends to answer it is a straw man by construction. The writer chose the words, so the words were chosen to lose. (2) Why the charge misses. - Stating an objection is not the fallacy. Misstating it is. Aquinas wrote both the objection and the reply in every article of the Summa, and seven and a half centuries of readers, his opponents included, have found the objections fair. His method is the defense against the charge, not an instance of it. - On an apologetics site the answered objection is called a defeater, and one written to Aquinas's standard names the critic and lists his work among its sources, so the check is open. Read Mackie on evil, or Morriston on the Kalam, and ask whether he would recognise his own argument. Where he would not, the charge lands. Where he would, the charge is aimed at the format rather than the content. - Here is the line. A summary the other side dislikes is not a straw man if it is accurate, and simplifying for a lay reader is not misrepresenting, provided the simplification keeps what the argument depends on. - Walton's rule gives a test to carry away. Could the original speaker add a sentence to the summary and still be describing his own argument? If so, it is a summary; if he would first have to strike one out, it is a straw man. "Whatever begins to exist has a cause" compresses pages of Craig into seven words, and Craig would sign it as it stands. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need a named critic, a specific defeater, and the sentence in it he would refuse to sign. A general suspicion of the format is not evidence. The likelier failure in practice is Talisse and Aikin's weak man: answering the popular form of an objection while the best published form goes unmentioned. So the rule is the strongest published version, with the critic named. - The charge does land on one thing. The incentive is real and writers drift, so the reader is the check: anyone who finds a named critic misrepresented should say so, and the fix is a stronger defeater rather than the end of the form. An objection answered to the apologist's satisfaction is not thereby refuted, and the critic's next paper decides that. (4) How to answer it. - "Pick one. Name the critic, read what he wrote, and show me the sentence he'd refuse to sign. If you find it, I'll fix it. If you can't, the objection was fair, and the reply has to be answered on its merits." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Common Objections: Intellectual PoE: Logical