Hi, I'm David Bercot, and today we're going to be talking again about some common fallacies. Now, this is the seventh lesson on the subject of critical thinking. And the reason we've talked so much about fallacies is that they're a major obstacle to thinking critically. Now, so far, over the last several lessons, we've talked about 14 different fallacies. I'm just going to go ahead and list them, and I'm not going to define each one necessarily.
You may have to go back and listen to some of the messages if you don't remember what each of these are. We began with the appeal to faulty authority. And in our situation, we were talking about just using secondary sources. If you're trying to get back to the Scriptures and what was meant by the apostles when they wrote, then we want to get as close as we can to the time of the apostles and go to the actual writings of the early Christians, not to learned books about them, but to their actual writings.
And that applies to other sources as well. Always try to get to primary sources. Then we talked about the fallacy of quoting out of context, and I think we all know that one. The fallacy of the beard, sometimes known as the continuum fallacy. And this is the argument, for example, " Oh, well, if works are needed are part of salvation, well, then how many works are needed? A thousand good works, a thousand one, a thousand two? Oh, you can't name it. Well, then see, works can't be a part of salvation.
Yeah, because you can't name an exact line somewhere doesn't mean that various realities don't exist. Okay, then we talked about name calling or labeling. We talked about the fallacy of chronological snobbery, also known as presentism. And this is the fallacy of judging other people by the standards of our day, not by the standards that were present at their time. Number six, we talked about the fallacy of ad hominem. This is where you attack your opponent instead of attacking the arguments.
And then the anecdotal fallacy, trying to prove something by just giving an interesting story. Our eighth one was begging the question, sometimes this is circular reasoning, where you don't really prove anything. You just go around in circles and you repeat your proposition over and over as if you've just proved it by repeating it, going around in circles. Number nine was the false dilemma, where you claim that the true thing has to be either this or that, or maybe there's many different alternatives.
We talked about the fallacy of the red herring, where you try to distract your opponent by bringing up irrelevant things that are maybe interesting and get people's attention off the subject. Then we talked about the straw man, where you create a fake version of what your opponent is saying or you know what somebody else is saying. And then you attack that straw man version of their argument instead of attacking what they're really saying. All right, in the last few, we talked about misuse of analogy.
And that's where you use an analogy to try to prove your point. And it's very effective, and yet it's a fallacy. You have to first prove your point by facts, and then once you've proven it, then you want to use analogies or illustrations to help explain it. But analogy in itself doesn't prove anything.
We talked about the fallacy of etymology, which in Bible study is usually going back to the roots of a Greek word and saying, or the original meaning of a Greek word, and saying, " Well, see, this originally meant such and such, so therefore that's what it means. " Now, what a Greek word means in the New Testament is what it meant in the days of the apostles, not what it meant 500 years before the apostles, or not what its roots are that created that word.
And then finally, we talked about shifting the burden of proof. If you're making a claim, then you have the burden of proof of establishing that claim. It's not up to your opponent to disprove it. Now, the irony is that the very persons who write about fallacies, you know, for example, if you go online and read about these fallacies, that the very persons who point them out, they practice enormous bias in their examples when they give examples of fallacies.
And in itself, this is a type of fallacy, because it implies that only people of a particular political view or religious view practice fallacious reasoning. And the truth is, the people who write about fallacies generally come from the academic communities. That's from universities. And most universities professors today embrace viewpoints that are both very liberal and secular. They're definitely at the high end of both of those realms.
So when they give examples of fallacies, they invariably point to something that either socially conservative persons or Christians have said, or supposedly might say. They frequently put words in our mouths that are not representative of what we believe. You know, the simple truth is that people of all persuasions, Christians, Muslims, secular people of the world, atheists, all of us use fallacies in our arguments. Likewise, both liberals and conservatives use them, I think, equally.
Now, sometimes it's deliberate when people use a fallacy, but my guess is most of the time, the people who use fallacies don't realize that they've just committed a fallacy. They don't recognize that their reasoning is invalid. And that's why fallacies continue to be used so much, is because people don't recognize that this is an invalid way of reasoning or arguing. And if you don't understand fallacies and recognize them that when they're used, aha, that's ad hominem.
You're attacking the person instead of the argument. Well, then, you know, you're going to intend to use them yourself, and you're going to intend to be persuaded by them because the reason they're around is they're very persuasive. They're just false is the problem. So today we're going to be talking about some additional fallacies that you should be on the watch for. The first one is going to be appeal to emotion.
And you should be aware of arguments that appeal to emotions, such as pity or anger or excitement, instead of being built on objective facts. In other words, the speaker is appealing to your heartstrings rather than to your head. Now, there's nothing wrong with appealing to emotions as well as to our reason. I mean, if you're going to be a persuasive or motivating speaker, you're going to have to reach people's hearts. That is today, we usually think of the heart as a seat of emotion, not that it really is.
But yeah, you're going to have to reach the hearts of people, not just their heads, not just their reasonings. But even then, our sermons and our writings should never override facts. They shouldn't be built just on emotion. And they shouldn't be based on invalid or uncritical thinking. Just some examples of appeal to emotion. Revival meetings depend a lot on appeal to emotion. And that doesn't make them wrong.
You know, when you reach somebody's heart and bring them to Christ, I don't think I'm going to complain about how you did that. If the conversion is real and if it's lasting, then I would say, you know, as long as you didn't use something blatantly false, then I'm not going to complain that you used a lot of emotion.
But what I have experienced in my life, seeing revival meetings, being at a lot of them, is that they appeal so much to emotion that the speaker will get people to make decisions, a decision for Christ, to on their spot, you know, say a certain prayer, you know, to invite Jesus in their heart. But so often, just a few days later, and I have personally witnessed this, that that person has totally abandoned Christ. It was a momentary thing.
And that was because the speaker just overwhelmed them with emotional feelings and didn't really provide some substance to what was being said. The person didn't really surrender their life, realizing all that was involved in that surrender, that is to Jesus Christ. They simply made a decision to say a prayer based on the emotion of the moment. Another example of appeal to emotion, and like I say, these are very effective is why people use them, and lawyers use them all the time.
The one that stands out in my mind that probably most of you wouldn't even remember that it was back in the mid-'90s. This was the O.J. Simpson trial. Now, O.J. Simpson was a football player, had been famous. I think he won the Heisman Trophy in college, and then he went on to be very successful as a professional player. He was a running back. He was black and very talented, a very nicely mannered person, good-looking. And he appealed to both the white and black communities back when that was still somewhat new.
This was, you know, long before Michael Jordan, when O.J. Simpson, now his trial was in the mid-'90s, but when he was a famous football player would have been, I believe, in the 1970s. Anyway, he ended up being tried for murdering his wife, and the evidence against him was absolutely overwhelming. I don't think there was any way you could convince a jury this man was innocent. But there was one way, and that was appeal to emotion.
So when the jury was picked, they ended up with a predominantly black jury who, of course, would have liked to believe that their hero, O.J. Simpson, and a lot of people's hero, not just black people, was innocent. But how do you do that in the face of all of this overwhelming evidence? Well, you had to get some emotion in there. So, they got one of the detectives on the stand. They played some recording where he made some comments disparaging to black people. So, of course, that's going to tick off the jury.
And it's like, we don't like this guy. And this was the detective that was very instrumental in coming up with the evidence. So now, the lawyers just have to convince the jury. This detective, he was so prejudiced against black people that he just planted the evidence in O.J.'s apartment. All this evidence they had recovered, oh, he put it there just to incriminate him. That's a pretty wild claim.
Somebody would have to be extremely prejudiced to go to those kind of extremes, risking their job, their career, and even prison for doing that. But this appealed to the emotion of the jury. They just wanted anything because in their hearts, they wanted this man to be innocent, so anything that they could hang their hat on. And the lawyers, of course, did an effective job, but most people would say justice was not served. And then later on, O.J.
Simpson, it was a couple of decades later, was arrested for a totally different crime and went to prison for that. Okay, the next one is proof by verbosity. And what this means is when someone makes an argument that's far too complicated and wordy for someone to be able to analyze all the particulars. Now, if you're speaking to an audience that's maybe not highly educated, that could backfire on you because it's going to be so over their heads, they're just going to reject it because they can't follow it.
But if you're using this on certain audiences, they are going to understand you to a certain extent. And because you're using big words and you sound like you really know what you're talking about, and you certainly know more than what they know. Sometimes that overwhelms people and they just give in on the argument or they accede to it because they're overwhelmed by either so many words.
You've thrown out so much language, or you've used words that are so highly academic, they're impressed, " Well, this guy knows a whole lot more than I do. " And some examples of this, the one I've seen, I haven't read a lot of master's or doctoral thesis, but I have read some of them. And it's always, you start reading, and sometimes they have even dumb thesis that they're trying to prove, their, you know, main point of argument.
But they put in, you know, just all of this exalted academic language that the average person, even if they have a college degree, can't understand. And you think, " Wow, this person really knows what they're talking about. " And of course, when I read that stuff, I recognize that that's just nonsense. If you have something real to say, you can say it in language, that a person with at least a college-level reading ability would be able to understand.
If you have to talk in language above that, it's because you don't have something real to say and you're just bluffing. I read a book, and this book would not fit this. He would not be guilty of the fallacy of verbosity, but he got close to it. The book actually, I agree with the basic premise. The book was called The Unintended Reformation. I just read it like a week ago. I had a long flight ahead of me and I had read a chapter or two and I thought, I'll just read it on the plane.
And yeah, I had like an eight hour flight, whatever it was. So I was able to read most of the book. In fact, I finished it on the plane because I'd already read part of it. And I agree with the basic premise that the Reformation, the Reformers were only interested in reforming the Church and getting back to what was the original teaching of Christianity. At least that was their stated objective. But it did have some unintended consequences. And that led to the secularism that we have today.
And I think the author made his point pretty well, but there's a lot of things he says that I think are not valid. He uses such high exalted academic language that, oh, you think, well, this guy is really brilliant. And then when you sit back and analyze, it's like, wait a minute. There's some big holes in some of his side arguments. I think his main premise really holds up pretty good, but he uses a lot of history, and I had to contrast in my mind.
I've been listening to the history of the British people written by Winston Churchill. There's actually several volumes of it, and I have it on Audible. I've been listening when I drive, just because I have such an interest in history, and I like to be informed on history, because it often does overlap with Christian history. And so I like to know what was going on in secular history. And of course, when you're talking about the Middle Ages, religious and secular history are just totally intertwined.
Now, Winston Churchill was a master of language. In fact, in my lifetime, I would say there has been nobody who mastered the English language as well as Winston Churchill, maybe nobody in the last century. And yet he's understandable. I mean, I can sit and drive and listen to his history, and it doesn't like overly tax my mind. I can still be paying attention to the signs, you know, where I need to turn and all of that and follow him.
Whereas this book on the Reformation, which covers, again, a lot of history, wow, no, I couldn't drive and listen to that. I would have to sit there and I had to just really, really concentrate because of using such academic language that, come on, there's no need to do that. You know, I've got a doctoral degree myself. I have a high reading level. And so, if I have to work hard to understand somebody, I'd have to say, look, this is over the top. There's no need for it.
But anyway, be careful when you're out there reading things. If the language is above your head, it's probably not you who are necessarily dumb. It's that the person maybe has some weak arguments, and they try to cover that up by sugar coating them in this exalted language. Okay, let's move on. And the next one has been called the definist fallacy. I hate that term. It was coined by, again, some academic person, I think, in the 1930s. I'm going to just call it the fallacy of definition.
And this occurs when in the course of an argument, a person uses a word in a biased or misleading manner. Maybe they create their own definition. They use this word, and then they give it their own special definition, or they maybe grab a legitimate definition, but that's the one they focus on, and they're using it in a very misleading way. And the example that I'm going to give is a real-life example that happened to me back when I was in college.
I remember talking to my history professor about the military draft or conscription. I assume being a liberal professor, you know, most of them would have been against the Vietnam War. This was in the mid-70s and against the draft and all of that. And so, you know, we were talking about military conscription versus an all-volunteer army. And I was surprised to hear that, yeah, he was very strongly in favor of a military draft for all men. And he argued to me, we were just having this discussion.
He said, well, now there was a time when a volunteer army worked. Like at the time of the American Revolution, he said, " Well, a farmer with a shovel was just as effective as a British soldier armed with a musket. " Because when he was trying to reload his musket, you could run up and bang him over the head with your shovel. But he said, " Today, you know, we need a professional army. A volunteer army doesn't work anymore. " And, you know, I didn't know what to say. He kind of won the argument.
But then later, I realized he had disarmed me by playing on that word " volunteer. " Now, I didn't know about the fallacy of definition, and looking back, I realized he committed that fallacy of definition. He played word games with the word volunteer. He was using volunteer in the sense of non-professional, which is not the sense that an all-volunteer army means.
He was using it like a volunteer firefighter, although today volunteer firefighters do often get a good bit of training, but they're not usually on the same level as a professional one who does it full-time. And he was saying, " Well, see, we don't need a volunteer army because, you know, we have these highly complicated weapons nowadays and all of that. " Well, of course, in reality, an all-volunteer army is a professional army.
The only difference between it and a conscripted army is that the men have voluntarily chosen the army as their profession. They're in it willingly. In fact, arguably, an all-volunteer army is more professional than an army composed of man who didn't want to be there in the first place, and you forced him to be there. As I said, my professor had used the fallacy of definition on me, and it was very effective. But once I grasped what had happened, then, of course, his entire argument fell apart.
And I'll just mention this. He was also very wrong about his history. In the American Revolution, in a standard open pitch battle, you know, on a battlefield, the colonial militia were no match for the British Army. And the militia were not armed with shovels. They were armed with rifles and muskets, pretty much the same as the British. Now, often, the British weren't armed with rifles. They had muskets with bayonets. The colonials often had rifles that were in some ways more effective.
You know, there were advantages to each, but they weren't using shovels. But the British Army was a professional army, and the colonial militias were not. Ironically, most of the soldiers in the British Army were volunteers, whereas the ones in the colonial militias were conscripted. You know, if you were a man between certain ages, then you had to serve in the colonial militia for a certain period of time. Now, the continental army that George Washington would have led, now that was made up of volunteers.
People volunteered, but once you were in it, then it wasn't volunteer. You couldn't decide to leave. If you did, I mean, he hung you. But the militias, those were people who were drafted. I mean, some of the people no doubt volunteered, but in general, it was required that you do that in contrast. And actually, a British soldier, I learned much later, could reload his musket in 20 seconds.
So if you were going to attack him with a hammer, you'd have to be pretty close by to be able to run up and hit him over the head with a hammer before he could reload. Because like I say, he could reload his musket in 20 seconds. Plus, as I've mentioned, the British soldiers had bayonets at the end of their muskets. There's one reason they used muskets because they fit a bayonet well, and they would have killed you with their bayonet, you know, before you could use a shovel on them.
So, I mean, his argument, not only did he use the fallacy of definition, but his history was wrong. This is surprising because this was he taught world history, not American history, but you would think a guy with a PhD in world history would know his American history a little bit better than that, but anyway. Okay, another and it's very similar fallacy is the fallacy of equivocation. And this refers to using ambiguous language in an argument, particularly with the intent of misleading your argument.
You know, probably most words have more than one meaning. And yeah, you can pretend you're using the word in this meaning when you're really using it in this meaning and confuse your audience. And that's called equivocation. And the example I gave above about my professor's use of volunteer army maybe could be an example of equivocation, although you don't usually think of the word volunteer as an ambiguous term. But yeah, he was giving it his own special meaning.
Equivocation, which I can say is a similar fallacy, I think, refers more to using something that's ambiguous. It's not a clear term, and you're taking advantage of that. An example from back in the ' 60s, when diet soft drinks were first coming out and the sugar industry was trying to fight these new diet soft drinks. As it turns out, what we know now, it's too bad that they weren't effective in their fight because these diet soft drinks we've learned aren't necessarily good for people.
And then later, it turned to using high fructose fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar. So the sugar industry lost out in the end anyway. But in their argument back in the ' 60s, they made the point that your body needs sugar. And that, yeah, if you go to these artificial sweeteners, then that's, you know, not good for your body. And it's a true statement that in the normal course of things, that your body needs sugar, but the word sugar has two different meanings.
It can refer to table sugar, the sugar that comes from sugar cane, and that was used in soft drinks back then. This is chemically known as sucrose. But then sugar, in the chemical or biological sense, the word sugar refers to a certain group of soluble carbohydrates. And there are many of them. There's glucose, fructose, galactose, lactose. That's just a few of them in addition to sucrose.
For example, your body breaks down starches like bread into sugar, but it doesn't break starches down into sucrose or cane sugar. So when the sugar industry was saying your body needs sugar, no, it doesn't need white table sugar, but it does need the biological type of sugar, which like I say, there's glucose and many different forms of that. So that was an example of equivocation of using a term that has several different meanings, and you're using it in a misleading sense, playing on its double meaning.
Now, in theology, this occurs so often dealing with the divinity of Christ. The statement, and you hear this all the time, " Jesus is God. " Now that is an absolutely correct statement. If you mean Jesus is divine, that He is of the same substance as the Father, then it's absolutely correct to say Jesus is God. But it is incorrect to say Jesus is God if you mean that Jesus is the Father. Now, this is particularly confusing because 99% of the time, the person the Scriptures refer to as God is the Father.
So the word God has these two different senses in theology. It can mean the Father, which is the normal, like I say, 99% of the time, when the Bible says God, it's talking about the Father. But the word " God " can also mean any one of the three divine persons of the Trinity. Now, usually when people misuse the term " God " in theology, when referring to Jesus, they're not trying to mislead anyone. They're confused themselves. To them, Jesus is God in the exact same sense that the Father is God.
They either think that Jesus and the Father are one and the same person, or they imagine that you can interchange the persons of the Trinity without any theological significance. Oh, well, it doesn't matter if it's the father who came to Earth or the Son, it's the same thing. No, it's not the same thing. And that's the fallacy of equivocation, not being used on purpose to mislead people, but it's there because people are confused themselves.
Now, this next one is going to sound like I'm pulling something fast on you, but this is the name of the fallacy. It's called post-hoc ergo propter hoc. And that's a Latin phrase, and translated it literally means, " After this, therefore, because of this. " In other words, what the fallacy is saying is because something followed a certain event, then it must have been caused by that event. If B follows A, then A must have caused B. But that's a faulty conclusion. B may have been caused by A, but not necessarily.
It may have been caused by something totally independent. It may be a coincidence that it happened to come right after A. Now, by the way, people who talk about fallacies usually refer to this one as simply the post-hoc fallacy. They don't usually use that big, long Latin name. They just use the first two words. So if you hear about the post-hoc fallacy, that's what we're talking about. It's this fallacy of thinking that something is necessarily caused by something else because it comes after it.
Now, the catchy thing to remember is that there may be a correlation between two things. A and B may have a correlation, but that correlation may not be that A is the cause of B. They may be correlated in some other way. In other words, there may be a third factor that influences both A and B. So you have to be careful in generalizing that, oh, because someone did this, and then later on they did something else, that see, that caused it. I'll give you just a, you know, fairly silly example.
A rooster may crow every morning right before the sun comes up. However, we all know the rooster's crowing doesn't cause the sun to come up. And yet, there may be a correlation between the two. The rooster may be on an internal time clock that's connected to the rising of the sun. So, always remember, correlation doesn't equal causation. You know, you've got to look carefully as to what really causes something.
Now, an example of this, and it comes up a lot in the spiritual realm where I fellowship among the Anabaptists. And the illustration I'm going to give you is not going to make sense unless you are an Anabaptist or you're familiar with them. And there's a lot of examples I could use among the Anabaptists. I'll use the one of the head covering. When the Anabaptist movement started in the 1500s, the style of spiritual head covering worn by Northern European women was a white cap. You can see that in all kinds of art.
I just was at the Scottish National Art Gallery a couple weeks ago, and there's paintings there from the time of Rembrandt and before then. And you notice that all the women have you know white caps on their head. So that's what the Anabaptists wore since they were German or Swiss or Dutch.
Unfortunately, today, many Anabaptist churches think that if you change that head covering from this cap to a hanging veil that would be actually closer to what the early Christian women wore, that somehow that's going to cause you to abandon the head covering altogether. Now, that's not just nonsense, because often there is a correlation. It is true that some Anabaptist churches that have gone to a hanging veil instead of a cap have later abandoned the head covering altogether.
But that doesn't mean that going to a hanging veil was the cause of their abandoning the head covering. Anabaptist churches that are becoming more Protestant and heading away from Anabaptism often adopt the hanging veil for a while because they can see it's more biblical. But then they eventually quit wearing a head covering altogether, not because they wore a hanging veil for a while, but because they've become more and more Protestant.
And of course, once you adopt Protestant thinking altogether, then you look at commandments like the head covering as just a form of legalism. So yes, you can say, well, that church, they used to wear a cap covering, then they went to a hanging veil, and then they quit wearing it altogether. But that doesn't mean going to the hanging veil was the reason why they quit wearing it altogether.
It's because they were on a journey of adopting more and more Protestant thinking, and that was the cause of eventually abandoning the head covering. Or they were on a journey just heading more and more into the world. But there are plenty of Anabaptist churches that for 30 years or so have been wearing hanging veils, and they're still wearing them because they're wearing a veil out of regards for 1 Corinthians 11, not out of culture.
And so when someone understands why they're wearing a head covering and they're doing it out of conviction, then changing the style to what is perhaps a fuller covering or a more biblical covering is not going to cause you to quit wearing it. And in the world in general, I mean, all churches, women wore a covering on their head. This was not a unique thing to the Anabaptists. It's not even anything that made the Anabaptists stand out.
All of the women of their time period dressed the same way, wearing a cap covering on their head. But in the 19th and 20th century, most Christian women quit wearing a head covering. And this was because of the feminist and secular movements that began in the 19th century and continued on the 20th and 21st century. And yeah, they're not going to wear a head covering today because they don't like the teaching of 1 Corinthians 11, but it's not because of the style that's going to make the difference.
Okay, let's go to another one that's very similar. And this is the fallacy of slippery slope. And this fallacy claims that adopting some proposed small action will result in a chain of incremental actions with a negative result in the end. And, you know, this isn't nonsense. Slippery slopes do exist. And things often do work that way in real life. You start down a certain road with one small thing, and it does lead to something else and to something else and something else.
The fallacy is when you think that every change is going to cause that. And you see this in some Anabaptist groups, like, wow, well, if we start using the English language in our church, well, then that's going to lead to the next thing we're not going to be wearing a head covering, or we're going to go to war, or whatever.
And they can point to churches that, yeah, they used to speak German, and then they went to English, and now you look at them today, and they're just a total, just Protestant church without anything that stands out at all, and they don't hold to any of the Anabaptist distinctives. But yeah, was it changing the language from German to English that really caused that slippery slope?
There are plenty of conservative Anabaptist churches that use English in their services, and they have not abandoned Anabaptist distinctives. So that would be an example of the fallacy of slippery slope, imagining that you can't change anything because every change is going to lead inevitably to this slope. So we have to be careful in suggesting that everything led to this chain reaction. Often, there's many factors involved.
On the other hand, it's not wrong to be on guard, to recognize that slippery slopes are a real thing, and that, yeah, when you start changing one thing, it can lead to others. But yeah, you have to look at a balance there, look at it from all sides, and particularly look at what the scriptural principles are involved. But yeah, good changes can often bring undesirable or unintended consequences, but sometimes those changes are good.
I mean, for example, the scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries by men like Isaac Newton, I mean, those are a good example. Those men believed in God. It was good that they learned more about our universe around us. But yeah, those discoveries led to other discoveries. And scientists got this inflated head that, " Oh, well, they didn't need the Bible anymore. They didn't need theologians to teach them anything or ministers that, yeah, science could tell us everything.
" And so, the unintended consequence of those early scientific discoveries are where we are today, where so many scientists don't even believe in a personal God. But yeah, would any of us say, " Well, we'd rather stick to what they knew in the Dark Ages and not go any beyond that. " No, like I say, sometimes there are unintended consequences, but it doesn't mean that we can't make changes that are good. We just have to be careful to guard against those unintended consequences.
And I talked about that book I was reading called The Unintended Reformation, and he does show the author that breaking free from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, it led to where instead of having one authority, you had a bunch of different church authorities. And over time, this eventually led to religious toleration. That after fighting each other for a long time, people got tired of that.
And it's like, well, why don't I just allow you freedom of religion and tolerate your beliefs, what you believe doesn't hurt me and what I believe doesn't hurt you. And of course, tolerating different religious churches or Christian churches eventually led to tolerating atheists, secularists, and non-Christians. And this eventually led to our present situation where anti-religious and secularist thought dominates our universities and our public lives.
But does that mean that we should have all remained Roman Catholics? No, but that's one of the thesis or premises that this author is arguing. We'll see, yeah, we were better off as Roman Catholics. I would say no, but I don't like the unintended consequences that came from the Reformation, but that is how things do work in life sometimes.
So, as I said, the Anabaptists sometimes are overly worried about the slippery slope, but they do, I think, validly recognize that you do have to be careful when you make changes and weigh what's going to be gained versus what might be lost. Sometimes nothing is lost. You worry for nothing. But, you know, sometimes it is going to lead to some kind of change of events. Okay, so that's going to end my discussion today on fallacies. Let's just go over what we talked about today.
We talked about appeal to emotion, where instead of depending on logical, verifiable arguments, you overwhelm people with emotional appeal. And it can be very effective, but it can lead to people following false teaching as a result. We talked about proof by verbosity, where you just overwhelm somebody either with a bunch of language or, yeah, high-faluting words that are going to intimidate them.
We talked about the fallacy of definition, where somebody takes a word and gives it his own special definition, and then by insisting on that definition, he can turn the whole course of the argument against you, and you don't always realize, " Oh, he's given his own definition to this word.
" We talked about a very similar one that's related, the fallacy of equivocation, which is almost the same thing, but it generally refers to when there is an ambiguous word that has several different meanings, and you're picking one meaning, but you're pretending you're using this other meaning, and you throw your opponents off because you're playing on that double meaning of the Word.
We talked about the post-hoc fallacy, where just because something follows something that preceded it, doesn't mean that that is what caused the later event. It may have caused it, they may not even be related, or they may have a correlation, but it's to some third factor that's operating on both of them.
And then very similar to that is the slippery slope fallacy, which assumes that if you make any kind of change, even one that is arguably good, it's going to necessarily start this slippery slope and it's going to lead to bad things. And people use that in the political realm. And there's a lot of truth there in the social realm. Again, there's a lot of truth. So many things do have a slippery slope to them.
And then in Anabaptists and a lot of kingdom churches, we often use that same fallacy, even though there is a truth, and you have to be on guard, that, yeah, making changes can start this chain reaction and lead to something bad. So you always have to weigh it, but it's a fallacy to just assume it's going to always work out bad. It's going to always set this chain reaction in place, because often you can change things for scriptural reasons, and it doesn't cause any reaction at all.
Well, thank you for sitting in this evening, and I hope this has helped you in being able to be a better thinker, a more critical thinker. God bless you.