Ray Nearhood of the Sanctified Forum pointed my nose in this direction (pdf). Here’s a follow up post by one of the authors. Interesting and I have to think about it some more.
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Tag: logic
I’ve been arguing online with folk who don’t hold to inerrancy on, what I think, is faulty grounds.
For example, some folk deny inerrancy because the “distinctly evangelical doctrine causes too many problems.” Okay, but how is that a reason to chuck a doctrine? Then there’s another common (silly) argument that “holding to inerrancy is a distinctly docetic view of Scripture that gets rid of the messiness of human frailty” or, in other words, since humans make mistakes we should expect Scripture to make mistakes. I’ve off-handedly argued that error isn’t necessarily human and that humans actually do speak inerrantly all the time. If it’s possible once, its surely possible twice—and so on.
In all my discussions, I might have given off the impression that the doctrine of inerrancy is central to Christianity—lose inerrancy and lose Christianity. Surely I’ve left people in an epistemological quagmire to force them to think, but surely I don’t want to give the impression that they’ve lost their Christianity.
Every now and then, on a Friday, I’ll step into the deep waters of Philosophy, ramble on about some idea and maybe even interact with something I might be reading. Most of the time, a real philosopher could probably read my drivel and speak into it offering a corrective—but for now I’ll speak from ignorance. After all, it is Friday; what better way to have fun than with philosophy. In this post I’ll answer the question “Is the Impossible Possible?” in under 700 words. Heh.
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It’s A Trap!
Admiral Ackbar knew the battlefield, always wise to look out for his opponents tactics. The arsenal at the Empire’s disposal was wide, and sometimes includes indirect thrusts in the form of a trap—things he knew well. Not a lot of thought has to go into setting up a booby trap since the tactic is fairly static. You set it up, you leave it there, and you let the rebel scum do all the work. The same thing applies in argumentation (in the classical sense).
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You Believe That ‘Cause…
Fallacies come so easily to our lips and fingertips as we try to push our opponent’s position into the dim light of the Illogical, or the outer darkness of the Wrong. Even if the position doesn’t directly impact us, we still like to summon a handy fallacy and maybe repeat it a few times. I’ve already written several posts on a list of fallacies (including the Scriptural kind) that I’ve seen pop up, but I wanted to devote a post to this one which I often see pop up: The Genetic Fallacy.