Tools of Integrated Apologetics Course 1.7.7
Fallacies
Seen frequently in cult apologetics
By Bob Passantino
My survey today will cover a few of the fallacies that I have seen frequently in cult apologetics. Remember, logical fallacies are very user-friendly. The same ones can be used both by cultists (to mislead us), and by us (as mistaken substitutes for critical thinking).
1. Unfalsifiability
This is the favourite fallacy of the conspiricist. How does Satan-battler Rebecca Brown explain the devastating medical and legal documentation of the loss of her medical license for mental instability and drug abuse? Easy — the satanists and witches’ conspiracy manufactured false records. When every piece of even hypothetical evidence that could be proposed to falsify a claim is twisted to be an evidence for the claim, then the claim is unfalsifiable and useless.
In one film, a client at a mental institution claimed that he saw a man sitting in a cypress tree, talking to an owl. When the medic pointed out that there were no cypress trees on the grounds, the client responded, "Anyone with money can dig up a tree. And after that it’s a simple matter to fill in the hole." Because his story was unfalsifiable, it was unbelievable. But you don’t have to go to a mental institution to find instances of unfalsifiability. Cult apologetics abounds with unfalsifiable conspiracies. I was even accused of being part of a conspiracy.
Several years ago I received a letter from someone I’ll call Roscoe. He said he had ordered materials from us for witnessing to the cults but had not received them. I wrote back that we had no record of his order or payment, but that if he would re-order and send a copy of his canceled check, we would be happy to replace his order and reimburse him for the extra postage and the copying cost of his check. I didn’t hear from Roscoe, but we did hear from our local Postal Inspector. Roscoe had lodged a formal complaint against us for mail fraud. Two reasons were listed on the complaint form. First, he repeated his claim that he had ordered materials and not received them. Second, he accused us of misrepresentation since we called ourselves a "counter-cult ministry" and yet we had no publications against what he termed "the biggest cult of all, the Great Whore of Babylon, the Roman Catholic Church."
It was easy to provide the Postal Inspector with copies of our correspondence asking for verification that his check had cleared, and we went ahead and sent his order without proof of payment (which we never did receive) to go the extra mile. Fortunately, the Postal Inspector didn’t require us to respond to him concerning Roscoe’s second charge. He said that if he became involved in that, he’d be violating separation of church and state and free speech. But we wanted to respond to Roscoe anyway.
I obtained his phone number from directory assistance and called him one evening. Our conversation quickly degenerated into Roscoe shouting epithets at me about my conspiracy with Roman Catholicism. I tried in vain to reason with him. Then Roscoe’s real argument came out. He was convinced that I was on a secret mission of the Roman
Catholic Church, commissioned by the Jesuits to masquerade as a non-Catholic cult apologist. In fact, Roscoe announced, he was convinced that I was a Jesuit myself! I tried to reason with him. "Look, Roscoe, how can I be a Jesuit?" "That’s easy," Roscoe cut in, "Look at your last name — Passantino — that’s Italian Catholic if I ever heard it!"
"But Roscoe," I answered, "you can talk to my mother. She’ll tell you I haven’t practiced Catholicism since I made my first communion. Talk to my pastor. He’ll tell you I’m not Catholic. And because we don’t have a tract against them, and I don’t think they’re the Great Whore of Babylon, doesn’t prove I’m their secret agent, much less a Jesuit. Come on, Roscoe, Jesuits spend half their lives in Catholic schools and seminaries. They’ve taken vows of celibacy. Roscoe, I have a wife and children. I can’t be a Jesuit!" "Only a Jesuit would have such a clever disguise!" Roscoe hung up.
2. Accident
The accident fallacy does not mean a fallacy you made by mistake, although I hope none of you commit fallacies on purpose. The accident fallacy is a useful (but not valid) way of evading responsibility for a general principle you don’t like. For example, a general principle is that we should obey speed laws. But how many of us rationalize to ourselves, "Well, if I had a medical emergency instead of being late for work, it would be all right to speed. So I don’t really have to obey the speed law." That’s the accident fallacy at work: you overturn the trustworthiness of a general principle on the basis of an extreme case, the extremity of which has nothing to do with your general principle.
The extremity is an "accident" of the principle. Plato brought up an accident fallacy. Is it really good to repay what you borrow? What if you borrowed weapons from a man who since has gone crazy? Surely you would not put human life in danger by repaying what you borrowed! In fact, it can be dangerous to believe in that principle! (Plato’s example omits the fact that the man’s mental instability is incidental, or accidental, to the general moral.)Here’s another one. People might tell you that cult apologetics can’t possibly be Biblical because they know someone in a cult who was so depressed after a Christian had witnessed to him that he went out and got drunk. Cult apologetics can’t be of God if it drives people to drink! (The critic has failed to notice that the cultist’s drunkenness was not caused by the witnessing, but was accidental to it.)
3. Affirming the Consequent
You "affirm the consequent" when you have an "if….then" argument, but you put things backwards, affirming your "then," or "consequent," before you affirm your "if," or the antecedent which rightfully proves the consequent. This is kind of complicated, so let me quote an example from The Book of the Fallacy: ‘If he had wanted to cut up the body, he would have needed a big saw. Such a saw was found in his toolshed. [Therefore, we can assume he is the murderer.]’
(There could be alternative explanations, innocent ones, for all of these actions. It would be fallacious to say that any of them proved him guilty. But as they mount up, it becomes progressively easier for [juries] to eliminate reasonable doubts about coincidence. No doubt they are sometimes wrong and thereby hangs many a tale, together with the occasional innocent man.)
We find this fallacy in cult apologetics when a cultist’s "if" doesn’t have only one "then," but the cultist wants you to believe there’s only one "then." This is a handy fallacy for someone whose story of cultic involvement isn’t credible and is being questioned. The person can respond to all inquiries for documentation with, "You wouldn’t be asking me these questions unless you were out to catch me. You must be out to catch me!" Whitley Strieber, horror novelist, talk show gadfly, and, he would have you believe, UFO abductee, uses this fallacy well. So does fellow UFO enthusiast and author Budd Hopkins. Without going into their whole stories, here’s how they use "affirming the consequent" as one way to prove that hundreds, maybe thousands of people have been abducted by UFO entities.
Now, as we all know, UFO entities don’t want anyone to know they’re here. But they also have to do their specimen studies on us humans. So after they have abducted and studied us, they erase that portion of our memory so we don’t know we were abducted. We are left with a "time gap," or "missing time," a period of time for which we cannot account.
This is Strieber and Hopkin’s use of "affirming the consequence." They say that they have been contacted by hundreds of people who have "time gaps," evidence that they are abductees. Strieber and Hopkins conclude that the time gaps themselves provide one of the proofs of UFO abductions. While it is possible that the time gaps are the result of UFO abductions (whatever those are), they could be due to daydreaming, inattention, forgetfulness, mind-altering drugs — a variety of options.
4. Argumentum ad Baculum
Behind the Latin phraseology is a very persuasive fallacy: believe (or do) what I say, or I’ll smash your face! This is an appeal to force. Kruschev put it this way, "When Stalin says dance, the wise man dances!" Sometimes cult apologists find themselves hard pressed to reject this fallacy, especially when it is used against them. How many of you have written books on Scientology or Witness Lee’s Local Church? "Oh", but you respond, "those groups (we won’t call them cults — that might be misconstrued as libellious) have a reputation for suing their detractors!" But does that have anything to do with whether or not their doctrines are Biblical? Where is the liberal press and the ACLU when we need them to help us with prior restraint problems?
5. Blinding with science
This is one of my favorite fallacies. There’s such a solid sound to an argument that’s filled with scientific jargon and fifty-dollar words. One is "blinded with science" when an argument consists of complicated, technical vocabulary or allusions to sophisticated scientific reports, charts, or (best of all) statistics. You don’t understand a word of the argument, but you’re not about to let anyone know, or argue with it when you don’t know what you’re talking about. Your opponent has won by default. Pirie notes the rules for using this fallacy:
The first rule for using this fallacy is to remember to use long words . . . . Never use a four-letter word, especially if you can think of a twenty-four letter word to take its place. The jargon itself is harder to master . . . . Remember that the basic function of words is to transform what is banal, trivial and easily refuted into something profound, impressive and hard to deny . . . .
The fallacy of blinding with science is well worth the time and trouble required to master it. The years of work at it will repay you not only with a doctorate in the social sciences, but with the ability to deceive an audience utterly into believing that you know what you are talking about. Think about your work with the cults. Which cult used to be known as a religion (old Beatle fans don’t get to vote), but now bills itself as a scientific method of relaxation? Which cult has voluminous appendices "explaining" its aberrant translations of the Bible? Do you ever use "blinding with science?" Do you explain clearly and simply what you mean by "an anarthrous predicate nominative"? Do you report to your supporters about witnessing to people, or "handling cases"?
6. Arguing in a circle
This is one of the most common fallacies. This fallacy occurs when you try to prove one point by another point that is in turn proved by the first point. It’s kind of like the Three Stooges vouching for one another’s intelligence. Larry says Moe is smart, Moe says Curly Joe is brilliant, and Curly Joe returns the compliment to Larry. Does such circular endorsement prove anything about the IQs of the Three Stooges?
Circular arguing is frequently encountered in cult apologetics. I have noticed what appears to be a particularly disturbing use of it recently in attempts to document individuals’ involvement in Satanism and witchcraft. We might get a phone call from someone who tells us he used to be a Satanist. In an attempt to determine the caller’s credibility, we might ask him to describe the Satanism he was involved in. But we ask him leading questions which actually reveal to him some of our own knowledge. By the end of the conversation, our caller could have acquired a credible amount of knowledge about Satanism just from what we said, and yet because he echoes it back to us, we believe him, and, to complete the circle, add his "testimony" to our list of people "confirming" what we know about Satanism! This circular arguing is even more easy to fall for when we expand our circle to include other cult apologists. Let’s say my hypothetical caller has also called four other ministries to cults and got even a little bit of information from each one. Then he calls five more after me. By the time he has finished ten phone calls, he’s mixed all the information together, passed it off as his own experience, and added it in bits and pieces to every other ministry’s accumulation of information. We have helped to create a phantom data base and to elevate someone’s dubious testimony to legendary status! We don’t really know any more than when we started, but the real danger is that we think our knowledge has multiplied abundantly.
7. Complex question
This is another of the most common fallacies. A "complex question" is formed when your proposition affirms more than one thing, but your question allows for an answer to only one thing. The standard example is the question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" Two things are affirmed: First, that you beat your wife, and second, that you stopped. Once the two affirmations are made, then the question remains, "When?" The respondent has no opportunity to deny the first affirmation. He is stuck with providing information just about the second affirmation.
"Is your stupidity inborn?" is another complex question. It assumes that you are stupid, and then asks you to explain the source of your stupidity. Cultists often use complex questions when they ask, "Why are you persecuting us?" They haven’t established that we are persecuting them, but they’re already demanding to know why.
8. Emotional appeals
How many of you have given a talk on Satanism? How many of you have given a talk on Satanism accompanied by pictures of bloody cauldrons, skulls with wax dripped on them, and church windows with satanic graffiti? What is the difference among your audiences’ reactions? If your experience is like mine, you will agree that talks with graphic slides generate more response than those without. Why? Because of the emotional appeal. Facts and figures can communicate truth, but, as the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words." This is because of the emotional appeal. Satanism isn’t really any better or worse with or without pictures, but when our emotions are engaged, we tend to take things more seriously.
Appeal to emotion can be an effective tool of cult apologetics, but it should never be confused with proof or valid argumentation. For another example, abortion is as bad whether you give a dry and boring lecture on it or show a picture of a bloody, dismembered victim of abortion. But the picture catches our emotions.
9. Equivocation
Equivocation is the skill of being able to use one word or idea with varying meanings depending on what you want your hearer to think you mean. Those of you who are parents know the most equivocable word in our parental vocabulary: "Maybe." It serves as the universal answer to any request from any or all of our children. "Dad, can I have ice cream for dinner tonight?" I answer, "Maybe. Leave me alone. I’m working." At that moment I want my child to understand "maybe" as "Sure — as long as you let me work in peace." But at dinner time, when the broccoli and cod stare up from his plate, I want him to understand "maybe" as "I said maybe, not yes, now eat your dinner! It’s good for you!"
Jehovah’s Witnesses are good at equivocation. "Greek scholars support our translation," they’ll say. They want us to believe their translation is reliable and approved by Greek scholars. But when they’re pressed, we find out they really mean that they have quoted Greek scholars out of context and to "prove" things the scholars’ statements were never meant to prove.
Mormons equivocate on the "miraculous" birth of Christ, hoping Christians (and even many of their unsuspecting members) will (mistakenly) think that "miraculous birth " means the same thing as "virgin birth." They also say they only believe in "one God." Of course, they want you to think that means they believe only one God exists, but they know it means they worship only the one God of this planet.
10. Secundum Quid
My final fallacy for consideration today is better known by its common name, "hasty generalization." That is, you reach a general conclusion based on insufficient evidence. We in-cult apologetics can slide into this fallacy easily because we never have enough time, money, staff, or resources to do the exhaustive research projects we would like to.
How much easier, quicker and less expensive it is to come to a general conclusion about a cult based on two or three brief encounters with its members than to do a full-scale research project! Unfortunately, our brief encounters are not always representative of the cult as a whole. How many cultists have you talked to who have made eternal decisions based on a hasty generalization like, "I’ve known three so-called Christian pastors, and all three were dishonest. That proves Christianity is a lie! I’m so thankful I left it for my cult!"
Summary:
By now you have a good idea of why we tend to fall for fantasies instead of truth. It should be no wonder, then, that the religious world is full of "legends," people, stories and ideas that are poor substitutes for real apologetics. Now, armed with our critical thinking, we can take a brief look at some of these legends before we move to the last portion of our study, the right way to accomplish religious research.(Article used with permission)
Fallacies
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