Transcript

Whether it's atheists, Protestants, Muslims, and even the Eastern Orthodox, there's one fallacy I've noticed in many of their arguments against the Catholic faith.

That's what we're gonna talk about today on the Council of Trent, but before we do that, don't forget to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss all of our great content.

All right, so I call this the you lose so I win fallacy.

It happens when a person does not give evidence for his own position, but merely attacks what he thinks are all of the competing positions.

He thinks he can prove his worldview is true through a kind of ideological battle royale or a philosophical Hunger Games, where the last position standing wins by default.

But that's not how answers to ultimate questions work.

If you want people to believe your worldview or your faith is true, then you must provide evidence for what you believe to be true.

So let's take a look at four examples where the you lose so I win fallacy gets employed.

Number one, atheism.

Traditionally, atheism has been defined as the rejection of the existence of God.

Atheist William Rowe says in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Atheism is the position that affirms the non-existence of God.

It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief.

And the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, Atheism is the view that there is no God.

But many atheists describe atheism as a mere lack of belief in the existence of God, also called lacktheism.

Now, thoughtful non-theists recognize lacktheism is unworkable for a variety of reasons, including that it makes atheism trivial.

I lack a belief in thousands of concepts simply because I haven't investigated them, but that does not mean those concepts are false or that they describe non-existent things.

Babies lack a belief in God, but they also lack beliefs in morality, value, and politics, but that doesn't make babies atheist or amoral nihilists or anarchists, and it says nothing about whether those positions are true.

And that's the main problem with lacktheism.

Truth-seekers wanna know how the world works, which means they wanna know if theism, the statement that God exists, is true or false.

They don't care whether somebody merely lacks a belief in something.

Atheists employ the you lose so I win fallacy when they define atheism as just the lack of belief in God.

For example, Matt Dillahunty says God is not guilty of the crime of existing, or that we should be atheists because of this lack of evidence.

And so, what we really got with theism and atheism is, the prosecution, theists, are claiming that God is guilty of existing, and the atheists are saying, Not guilty, which isn't the same as believing tha- that God- that it's innocent.

I don't claim to know that there's no God, I don't claim to prove that there's no God, I'm not even necessarily sure that I would assert that there's no God.

The problem with this analogy is that we care far more about falsely convicting people than we do about falsely convicting ideas.

That's why there is a presumption of innocence in a court of law.

It results in more guilty people going free, because we consider that better than condemning an innocent person.

Or as Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons would say

I'd rather let a thousand guilty men go free than chase after them.

But when it comes to ideas, we do not start with a presumption of innocence.

We start with a presumption of neutrality.

Do aliens exist?

I don't know.

Do numbers exist?

I don't know.

Does God exist?

We could start with, I don't know.

Saying the arguments for God's existence don't work does not prove atheism is true, just as debunking evidence of alien life does not prove there are no aliens in the universe.

As atheists Austin Dacey and Lewis Vaughan write, What if these arguments purporting to establish that God exists are failures?

That is, what if they offer no justification for theistic belief?

Must we then conclude that God does not exist?

No.

Lack of supporting reasons or evidence for a proposition does not show that the proposition is false.

So notice the pattern.

Instead of starting in a neutral position and building their own case, Catholic critics, in this case atheists, start with their view as the default, and then say if other views fail, they win by process of elimination.

And we see a similar faulty inference in our next example.

Number two, Islam.

When I watch Muslims debate Christians on YouTube, I notice a similar trend in their arguments.

They tend to focus on alleged contradictions in the Bible, or doctrines like the Trinity, and then they say that Islam is a clearer alternative and should be accepted on that point.

Here's an example.

Even if you take it back-

No, but, no, but, no-

to King David, the number of generations is different, right?

I'm sure you've studied this, sir.

Different than what?

Than the account in Matthew and Luke don't match, right?

Well

I can show you at least 50, standing here, in the Bible, numeric inconsistency.

It can't be rec- Even MacArthur, what did he say?

He said these are copyist errors.

The Qur'an was memorized word-by-word, letter-by-letter, in the language that it was revealed to the Prophet Sallallahu by the people around him.

Imagine that.

Notice in this clip that the Muslim apologist, Sheikh Uthman, says the Qur'an was transmitted without error, which doesn't prove it was composed without error, or that we should believe Muhammad was divinely inspired.

Now, granted, that's only part of his argument.

However, time and time again, when I review Muslims engaging Christians, the standard tactic is to make Christianity look contradictory and then say Islam is the simpler alternative, just believe in one God and his prophet, so they should embrace that instead.

Although, when you drill deeper, you see Islam has its own set of complicated doctrinal questions, like the question of whether the Qur'an itself, as God's word, is uncreated and distinct from God, which threatens Islam's claims to being a monotheistic religion.

You can see these and other contradictions in Islam laid out in a recent debate on the subject featuring Sam Shamoun and Jay Dyer representing the Christian side of the debate.

And as I said before in a previous video on Islam, even if I wasn't Christian I would not be a Muslim.

You could believe there is one God and practice other forms of monotheism besides Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

You might practice Sikhism, Bahá'í, or you could be a philosophical monotheist like Aristotle.

Or you could be a liberal Christian who just bites the bullet on Muslim objections and believes the Bible has some errors but it still witnesses to Christ's divinity and resurrection, which is incompatible with Islam.

All of these options allow for belief in one uncaused cause without accepting Islam.

So Muslims cannot just attack traditional Christianity and think they've made their case.

They have to make their own positive case.

If you are a classical theist, the starting position is not the God of Islam.

The starting position instead is just the God of classical theism.

And then if someone claims that this god, the monotheistic god, has given revelation, then that revelation has to be tested on its own merits.

In the case of Islam, the merits are not a miracle like Christ's resurrection, but a text, the Quran, that supposedly no human being could ever write.

Check out my previous episodes in the description below where I show that the evidence for Islam possessing a genuine divine revelation is sorely lacking, my favorite being Sheikh Uthman's claim that Muhammad split the moon in two based on late legendary sources.

I've also seen Jewish apologists do this with Christianity and Islam.

But these kinds of apologists are pretty rare compared to other faiths.

So once again, notice the pattern.

The critic's view is the default view, and that view wins if its main competitor loses.

However, this fails to acknowledge the existence of other alternative views such as theisms beyond Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

And it also merely assumes Islam's truth instead of proving it.

And this same lack of acknowledging alternatives and creating a faulty starting point can be seen in our third example.

Number three, Protestantism.

On Catholic Answers Live, I used to host a segment called Why Are You Protestant?

And without fail, almost every reason the callers gave for why they were Protestant was basically a rejection of Catholic dogma.

They would say, I'm Protestant because I don't believe in the Pope, or, I'm Protestant because I don't believe in Mary's Immaculate Conception.

The underlying assumption was that a Protestant is just any Christian who is not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.

If those alternatives fail, Protestantism wins by default.

But that's the you lose so I win fallacy.

Just as the starting point when discussing atheism cannot be the position God doesn't exist, but instead the question does God exist, the starting point when discussing Protestantism cannot be the position Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith, but instead the question how many infallible rules of faith exist.

Now, a Protestant might say, Well, let's start with this position.

Scripture is one infallible rule of faith and if you can't prove other infallible rules of faith exist, then Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith.

But how is that different than an atheist saying nature is one existing reality and if you can't prove God exists then that proves nature is the only existing reality or that naturalism is true?

The discussion becomes much more interesting with Protestants, however, when we start from the question how many infallible rules of faith exist?

Is it three, scripture, tradition, and the universal magisterium as Catholics believe?

Is it two, scripture and tradition as Eastern Orthodox claim?

Is it one, just scripture as Protestants claim?

Or is it zero?

Protestants like to say that God could use a fallible Church to give us infallible knowledge of the canon of scripture.

Even though the Church erred on other important matters, it gave us this infallible knowledge on the canon.

But by that logic, why couldn't God use a fallible Scripture to give us infallible knowledge of the doctrines He wanted to reveal even if other parts of the Bible turned out to be in error?

Cameron Bertuzzi recently interviewed philosopher Philip Goff who converted from atheism and panpsychism to liberal Christianity.

He believes in Jesus but he denies key doctrines like the Virgin Birth and Biblical inerrancy.

This shows that there are options like progressive Christianity that have zero infallible rules of faith, that these other options exist besides Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxies' multiple infallible rules of faith.

Therefore, Protestants have to make a positive case for their claim that there is indeed one infallible rule of faith and that it's the only infallible rule.

They can't only raise objections to Catholicism and Orthodoxy and consider their view to be the default that wins if the other two fail.

I'll address this more at length in a future video, but this is one of the big reasons I'm not Protestant.

The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox view of the Church provide more resources through authoritative and infallible tradition and magisterial teaching that allow us to cross what I call the Christian authority gap.

Namely, how do you get from the purely historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead to concluding that, for Protestants, a 66-book canon of scripture isn't just the only infallible rule of faith but that all of these writings are infallible in the first place?

Now, a Protestant might say that we can logically deduce that the writings of the apostles are an infallible rule of faith.

Setting aside the fact that this is an assumption, you still have a problem.

Texts like Mark and Luke were not written by apostles and Mark isn't cited in any other apostolic work.

Hebrews is technically anonymous, so how do you know that it's apostolic?

And even worse, modern scholarship calls into question Pauline authorship of many of his letters, like 2 Timothy, which provides the central text in verse 3:16 that is used to justify sola Scriptura in the first place.

This places the question of what is an infallible rule of faith in the hands of modern scholarship- whereas the Church infallibly taught in the 16th century these works are scripture irrespective of who ended up writing them, be it, say, Saint Paul or one of Paul's secretaries or disciples.

The question of authorship is not a fatal one for Catholics, because we know divine revelation is not found in scripture alone.

It is found in the Church, who is the custodian of tradition and scripture.

The early Church received this revelation primarily through unwritten tradition during the time it took for the sacred writings to be copied and distributed.

Or if you say a fallible fourth-century church got the question of the canon right, I would ask you, how do you know that the Church got it right in the fourth century?

After all, most Protestants would say the fourth-century Christian Church got questions about baptism, Mary's perpetual virginity, the priesthood, the episcopacy, the mass, confession to a priest.

They got questions about that and many other doctrines wrong.

If the early Church got so many doctrines wrong, from a Protestant perspective, how do they know that it got the question of the canon right, unless you already believe in the canon for other reasons and you're just using this fact of history to justify a preexisting belief?

And how would you answer a progressive Christian like Goff who says God can use fallible scriptures to communicate infallible doctrines, so there are zero infallible rules of faith?

Now against this view of scripture, James White writes the following in his book, Scripture Alone: Infallible teaching is not derived from errant foundations.

But in that same book, White sees no problem in an infallible teaching about the canon of scripture coming from an errant or fallible Church, thus revealing an inconsistency in his own position.

To summarize, Protestants engage in the you lose so I win fallacy when they claim that their unique authority structure, a 66-book canon of scripture that is one infallible rule of faith and also the only infallible rule of faith, that this claim is true merely because additional rules of faith found in Catholicism and Orthodoxy have not been proven to exist.

You do not get to start there.

Instead, everyone must start at the truly neutral question, how many infallible rules of faith exist?

And then each side must provide evidence to justify their answer to that question.

And as I'll show in a future episode, Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology has a much easier time than Protestantism when it comes to answering that question and crossing the gap from Christ's resurrection to the Bible.

And finally, number four, Eastern Orthodoxy.

Just as some Protestants think that refuting Orthodoxy and Catholicism makes them winners by default, some Eastern Orthodox do the same thing.

They will try to argue that Catholicism entails historical contradictions concerning doctrines like the papacy, and then they'll say Protestantism relies on the incoherent and unfounded doctrine of sola Scriptura.

But they also have a burden to prove that their two and only two infallible rules exist.

After all, progressive Christianity with its zero infallible rules is an alternative.

Or one might just be an agnostic on the question of how many infallible rules of faith exist.

Moreover, the alleged historical contradictions that the Orthodox raise against Catholics also comes up against them as well.

Orthodox cannot just say, Well, the data doesn't support the Vatican I view of the papacy.

All right, well the historical data doesn't support your view of the papacy either by that stringent standard, or many other ancient doctrines you might hold to.

For example, as Eric Ybarra shows in his book, The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholics and Orthodox, the evidence from the first millennium shows that the popes themselves and the Eastern patriarchs viewed the papacy as having a divinely established authority that goes beyond what is given to the other patriarchs.

So instead of just attacking Catholicism, the Orthodox should hold their doctrines to the same epistemic and historical standards.

Here's Catholic apologist, Christian Wagner, making this same point.

So basically, what they'll do is they will shift the debate in a certain way, and the debate that they, the way that they shift it is basically if Roman Catholicism is wrong, then Orthodoxy is right.

But no, no, no.

That is not true, because if we have sufficiently demonstrated that there's something in the early Church, and you say, Well, you have departed from that thing that you have sufficiently demonstrated in the early Church, then we've both departed from the early Church.

We're both wrong.

Let's say if we had Ybarra debate Ubi Petrus, and rather than Ybarra defend the papacy, we had to have Ubi Petrus defend Orthodox ecclesiology.

He would get smoked.

He would get smoked.

It, it would be, it would be so embarrassing for the Orthodox if rather than we were always on the defense, you know, we always had to defend our doctrines, if Orthodox for once had to defend their doctrines.

That's absolutely right.

If the Orthodox held themselves to the same stringent standards, they'd see that many of their own doctrines and practices are either novel or they have developed over time and have undergone doctrinal development, which is something they usually make fun of Catholics for claiming.

A better path for moving forward would be for Catholics and Orthodox to seek reunion by allowing both sides to have leeway in determining how doctrines like the papacy and other ancient doctrines developed over time and how we should understand them today, and this might lead to the Orthodox discerning aspects of the papacy that were neglected from their perspective since the schism.

And it may lead to Catholics discerning that there are some aspects of the papacy that are not essential elements of the doctrine, but instead serve as barriers to full union between the Eastern and Western churches.

Pope Saint John Paul II made a similar point in Ut Unum Sainte where he said of the Catholic and Orthodox, or the Eastern and Western churches, The Church must breathe with her two lungs.

So that concludes today's episode, and if you like this content, please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.