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User:Philip J. Rayment/How to debate (view source)
Revision as of 14:50, September 1, 2008
, 14:50, September 1, 2008More formally
So sometimes arguing from a presupposition that the other person doesn't accept is inadvertent and understandable. But in the case of the origin of the Bible example, I don't believe that atheists have any excuse. That is, Christians have always believed that the Bible had God as its ultimate author, and this is widely known. So very few atheists would not realise that Christians believe this. Therefore, for an atheist to ''start with'' the presupposition that it wasn't written by God simply shows a gross inability to put together a coherent argument.
So sometimes arguing from a presupposition that the other person doesn't accept is inadvertent and understandable. But in the case of the origin of the Bible example, I don't believe that atheists have any excuse. That is, Christians have always believed that the Bible had God as its ultimate author, and this is widely known. So very few atheists would not realise that Christians believe this. Therefore, for an atheist to ''start with'' the presupposition that it wasn't written by God simply shows a gross inability to put together a coherent argument.
== More formally ==
This is not in the language of formal logic, but is another way of looking at the discussion above.
Some arguments are of the form ''because A, therefore B''. For example, ''because God doesn't exist, therefore life evolved''. This is logical, but relies on A, the premise, being correct. That is, if God ''does'' exist, the argument that life evolved has no merit (which is not to say that it is wrong). This is the problem with the cases above: the argument is of the form ''because A, therefore B'', but A is not accepted by the other party. Therefore the argument is pointless.
A different form of argument is ''if A, therefore B, and we have B, therefore A is true''. An example might be ''if evolution is true, we should see speciation occurring, and we see speciation, therefore evolution is true''. Assuming that both agree that we have B (speciation is occurring), then this is a valid logical argument ''if another condition is met''. That other condition is that we can rule out other causes. It may be that the argument could be made that ''if A '''or''' C, therefore B''. So if we have B, does that mean that A is true? Not necessarily; C might be true instead. This is another fallacy that evolutionists frequently make. They might argue ''if evolution is true, we should see speciation occurring, and we see speciation, therefore evolution is true''. But if creation ''also'' predicts speciation, then the occurrence of speciation does ''not'' mean that evolution is true.