Answering Fools

There is something different about discussing religion and ideology in real life as opposed to online. In real life, people seem rather open to arguments and tend to ask thoughtful questions. On the Internet, that all changes. People seem extremely entrenched in their positions. There is a selection bias, as the only kinds of people who will engage in such "discussions" (a term I use loosely) are people who are looking to lecture, not those who are willing to discuss anything. The Internet also tends to be the shallow end of the intellectual pool. These two article should get you up to speed on this issue:

http://www.apologetics315.com/2013/08/apologetics-toolkit-advice-for.html
http://www.christianapologeticsalliance.com/2012/12/07/achilles-heel-internet-arguments/

(1) Online arguments are not a good training ground for someone who does not have experience. Stay away from them completely until you have studied deeply, and even then, don't just dive into every argument headlong.

This is the hardest piece of advice for most young people to accept, but it is one of the most important. I know how it feels to want to save the world, to stand up to the intellectual bully on Twitter or YouTube or some chat board. But if that is all you do, you will fritter away years in the intellectual shallow end; you'll be at best a playground hero, and sometimes, you'll get your nose bloodied and look like a fool. Take the long view instead. Begin training now for the serious battles, and when they come, in the mercy of God, you will be ready for them.

I can confirm this from personal experience. the people at professional conventions are much more educated and much more open to argumentation. On the Internet, you find a great deal more in the realm of invincible ignorance: i.e. people who are ignorant and immune to correction. There are also several common fallacies that I constantly see creep up.

Ad Hominem
Red Herring
Circular Reasoning
Straw Man

 Let's go through some examples of my Internet critics committing textbook fallacies. The first is from an anti-missionary forum, responding to a post I made about Matthew's statement: "And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene." My original post:
http://messianicdrew.blogspot.com/2010/10/consistency.html

Firstly, as Notz'rat is a Second Commonwealth settlement that didn’t even exist in the time of the Prophets, it is clearly impossible for any Prophet to have used the word “Nazarene” (a toponym relating to a native or inhabitant of Notz'rat). Indeed, the supposed “prophecy” quoted in Mattai 2:23 does not occur anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Many christian writers shrug this off and brush it aside by claiming it is a “lost prophecy”—but, if that is so, how did the author of “Mattai” know about it? We have ample evidence that the text of the Hebrew Scriptures we have today is unchanged since well before the 1st century CE, so that writer would have had the same text as we use today.

Others claim that Mattai 2:23 is an oblique reference to Y'shayahu 11:1,

וְיָצָ֥א חֹ֖טֶר מִגֶּ֣זַע יִשָׁ֑י
וְנֵ֖צֶר מִשָּֽׁרָשָׁ֥יו יִפְרֶה׃

“A stick will emerge from Yishai’s trunk,
and a nétzĕr [a poetic metaphor found only three other places, where it is variously translated as ‘a scion’, ‘a twig’, and ‘a sapling’] from his roots will sprout”

but this really doesn't work either because that Prophet’s words bear no resemblance to those “quoted” in Mattai 2:23.

My late Uncle R' Yoséf Barzillai therefore postulated a quite different answer to this question: he suggested that it is much more likely that the “quotation” in Mattai 2:23 was intended to refer to Shoftim 13:5....

כִּי֩ הִנָּ֨ךְ הָרָ֜ה וְיֹלַ֣דְתְּ בֵּ֗ן וּמוֹרָה֙ לֹא־יַֽעֲלֶ֣ה עַל־רֹאשׁ֔וֹ כִּֽי־נְזִ֧יר אֱלֹהִ֛ים יִֽהְיֶ֥ה הַנַּ֖עַר מִן־הַבָּ֑טֶן וְה֗וּא יָחֵ֛ל לְהוֹשִׁ֥יע אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מִיַּ֥ד פְּלִשְׁטִֽים׃

“....for see, you [will soon be] pregnant and are going to give birth to a son; no razor will ever come onto his hair [literally ‘head’] because the youth will be a Nazir to God from the womb—he is going to begin to rescue [literally ‘save’] Yisraél from the power of the P'lishtim!”

(Notice that verse’s reference to “saving”—irresistable to any christian writer!).

This constitutes a double deception, because not only (1) were those words addressed directly to Hatz'lelponi (Shimshon’s mother) and referred specifically and explicitly to her future son and nobody else, but, more importantly, (2) the word used in that verse is נָזִיר nazir (anyone who has adopted the ascetic “Nazirite” vow of abstinence specified in B'midbar 6:2-21)—which is completely unrelated to נֹצְרִי notz'ri (originally “a native or inhabitant of Notz'rat” but now used to mean “a christian”).

The two words aren’t even spelt the same way in Hebrew (the second letter of נָזִיר nazir is ז zayyin while the corresponding letter of נֹצְרִי notz'ri is צ tzaddi), although it’s easy to mislead readers who don’t know any Hebrew and make them think that the meaning of “Nazirite” is somehow connected to “Nazareth”; many christian “bible” translators even deliberately try to mislead their readers into making this mistake by writing the word “Nazirite” with a second a in place of the first i and spell it “Nazarite” to make it look more like “Nazareth”. Is there no limit to the depths christians will plumb in their efforts to fool others into accepting their disgusting, idolatrous, pagan beliefs?

 Aside from being loaded with personal (Ad Hominem) attacks, almost everything in the post is a Straw Man attack. The main Christian position on Matthew 2:23 is that it is an allusion to the Branch of Isaiah 11, which is a prophecy about the Messianic Age at the end of the world. Remember that Greek did not have quotation marks. Instead of understanding and addressing such an arugment, it begs the question by simply dismissing the idea that it can be a reference to Isaiah 11 out of hand. Everything else is an attack on a position that most apologists dealing with Jewish objections do not hold, and one that I certainly do not hold. It's quite a fallacy cocktail.

Secondly, there is an objection that there is no such thing as a midrashic fulfillment of a prophecy. That depends on what you mean by midrashic. Jewish interpreters believe that the Scriptures have layers of meaning beyond the literal or pashat interpretation.

For those reading this who do not know the terms pashat, drash and sod, these terms relate to the various levels the Jewish bible is read, PaRDeS:

* Pashat (פְּשָׁט) - the "plain" ("simple") meaning of a passage

* Remez (רֶמֶז) - "hints" implied in the text but not explicit

* Drash (דְּרַשׁ) - which is a deeper or even midrashic meaning -- often inferred from other scripture

* Sod (סוֹד) - "secret" ("mystery") meanings

Prophecies have these layers as well, which means that a given prophecy may have non-literal fulfillments in addition to a literal fulfillment. An example of a non-pashat fulfillment is the fulfillment of Isaiah. From the Jewish virtual library:

Maimonides believes that Isaiah's language is metaphorical (for example, only that enemies of the Jews, likened to the wolf, will no longer oppress them). A century later, Nachmanides rejected Maimonides's rationalism and asserted that Isaiah meant precisely what he said: that in the messianic age even wild animals will become domesticated and sweet ­tempered.

There are two other posts to which I would like to draw attention. It is a response to my post on Calvinism's Achilles Heel
http://messianicdrew.blogspot.com/2013/06/calvinisms-achilles-heel.html

The thrust of my argument is simply that Calvinism's doctrine of Irresistible Grace pretty much forces Calvinists to take the route of compatibilism, i.e. the doctrine that an action can be both causally determined and also a free act for which one bears moral accountability. My argument is that if God can compel a person to act in a certain way, and yet the person is still responsible for the choices for which they are compelled to make, then what about an act compelled by another human? Remember that the argument has nothing to do with whether God is uniquely justified in doing so. Divine responsibility is not in question here. The question is whether a human (let's call him Jack) can be considered responsible for an an act if the act is causally determined.

In your kleptomania drug example, (i) we are inclined to think that Jack would not have stolen the car had Jill not drugged him, (ii) I think we are less inclined to think Jack is not responsible and Jill has violated Jack's freedom if we change the moral value of the analogy, and (iii) we are inclined to think that Jill had no right to drug Jack. Neither of these necessarily holds in the case of God and Jack.

All three commit fallacies on some level. (i) commits a Red Herring fallacy, as it is not relevant what Jack would have done outside of being drugged.(ii) is question begging in one part, since the question "can we act in a way that is not determined by God?" is the very question my argument is addressing. The objection is also a red herring in another, since it proposes an Arminian alternative solution. (iii) is a red herring, as Jill's responsibility is not relevant to this argument.

The first objection is open to the counterexample of objective entrapment. Unlike subjective entrapment, the objective test for entrapment only tests whether the government's actions would have compelled an ordinary citizen to commit the offense. It does not matter, as far as the objective test is concerned, whether the subject would have committed the crime anyway. If the government compelled someone to commit a violation of the law, that person is considered not responsible even if he or she would have committed the crime anyway. To say otherwise is to confuse the subjective test with the objective test.

Another objection is called the Macbeth example. One can ask a question: "Who killed King Duncan?" In one sense, it was Macbeth. In another, it was Shakespeare, the author of the play. The Macbeth argument, though, ignores the suspension of disbelief ingrained in all fiction. In reality, nobody killed King Duncan, since there was no King Duncan as portrayed in the play Macbeth. When we, as the audience, assign responsibility to Macbeth, we are only doing it within a context where we pretend that the characters are real, the places are real, the events are real, and that the play was not fabricated by anyone.

For a more detailed examination, Alvin Plantinga argued in The Nature of Necessity that fictions do not literally have truth values. This is because we are not asserting propositions but exploring them. Because of this, questions like "what size are Macbeth's shoes" are malformed questions, and hence do not have answers.

The second argument asks us to suppose the Jack is a kleptomaniac. Suppose Jill slips an antidote for Jack's kleptomania into Jack's coffee without his knowledge or consent. Suppose from that drug, Jack becomes a good person. Is Jack praiseworthy? It seems so. The problem with this proposed counterexample is that it is irrelevant to my original argument.

Remember that the original question is: "Can a compelled action be a free action?" There is no compulsion regarding Jack's actions once he has been cured of his kleptomania. It seems that he is not responsible for his prior actions as a kleptomaniac. Once he is cured, he is free to steal or not to steal. He is not compelled to be a good person. He is free to decide for himself, and is therefore now responsible for his actions. This view is common in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Arminian theology, but not with Calvinist theology. Under Irresistible Grace, humans are compelled to repent and believe, and not merely free to repent and believe. That is why the second objection is a red herring.

The third objection argues that a human might be under a moral obligation not to compel people to bad actions, but God is under no obligation. That argument is irrelevant, and hence a red herring. This argument does not care about Jill's moral responsibilities. Jill could be under no moral obligations, as far as this argument is concerned. The only person whose moral obligations are in focus is Jack, and Jack alone.

The last article deals with my argument that presuppositionalism is guilty of circular argumentation, and hence begs the question. Advocates of presuppositionalism will state that circular arguments are not necessarily fallacious. That is fine if they want to believe them, so long as they can come up with some set of criteria to differentiate fallacious circular reasoning from non-fallacious circular reasoning. Without that set of criteria, and without showing how Frame, Bahnsen, and Van Til have met it, the argument that presuppositionalism is circular but not viciously circular is nothing more than a question-begging assertion.

Attempts to state that all knowledge is circular generally show the person's ignorance of Agrippa's trilemma. Specifically, it confuses circularity with being axiomatic

If we ask of any knowledge: "How do I know that it's true?", we may provide proof; yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Agrippa trilemma is that we have only three options when providing proof in this situation:

• The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)
• The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
• The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)

The first two methods of reasoning are fundamentally weak, and because the Greek skeptics advocated deep questioning of all accepted values they refused to accept proofs of the third sort. The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options.

All systems of logic and mathematics are ultimately axiomatic, as any regressive or circular system would be worthless.

Worse, Presuppositionalists ignore the rules of formal debate, where both sides will work from commonly accepted beliefs and try to prove their respective sides. To beg the question is to ignore this rule, and instead ask that the very point at issue be conceded, which is illegitimate. Perhaps that is the most damning thing about presuppositionalism. It is basically to ignore the idea that one's worldview can be debated from commonly held beliefs which can function as bedrock. Without bedrock, rational dialogue is impossible. Since presuppositionalism denies this, it basically concedes that matters of faith can be debated rationally. Such a view is poison to all apologetics.