As such, even Herod didn’t kill the infants as Matthew says, even if there was no star that guided the wise men and even if there was no census as Luke says, even if The Bible were wrong on these 3 facts, it would still be the case that (1) Jesus died by crucifixion, (2) Jesus’ tomb was empty the following Sunday morning, (3) Jesus’ The methodology I employed at arriving at those facts did not presuppose the divine inspiration, the inerrancy, or the historical reliability of The Bible. Historians use these principles all the time when examining secular documents, and that’s what I was doing with The New Testament! Using these historical tests of authenticity, I applied them to The New Testament and concluded the 5 aforementioned facts. No! I treated The New Testament documents as I would any other set of ancient documents as purely human fabrications that claim to be able to tell us about something that happened a long time ago. I didn’t presuppose that The New Testament was divinely inspired when making my case. Moreover, I arrived at those facts by employing the historian’s criterion of authenticity. He perceived as an appearance of the risen Christ.
The basis of what he perceived as the risen Jesus appearing to him, and (5) theĬhurch persecutor Saul Of Tarsus converted to Christianity on the basis of what James, the brother of Jesus and hardened skeptic of Christianity, converted on Look, the historicity of the 3 aforementioned events has absolutely no baring on whether Jesus rose from the dead! The 5 facts of (1) Jesus’ death byĬrucifixion, (2) Jesus’ tomb was empty the following Sunday morning, (3) Jesus’ĭisciples strongly believed they saw Him alive shortly after His death, (4) He brought all 3 of these objections up in a single Twitlonger post and guess what? I fell for it! And I’ve been kicking myself over it ever since. I had presented The Minimal Facts Case For Jesus’ Resurrection, and instead of dealing with my argument that only the Resurrection hypothesis could explain all 5 facts, he quickly turned to disputing the historicity of the slaughter of the babies in Bethlehem by King Herod, and the legitimacy of the star that guided the wise men to the baby Jesus, and the historical plausibility of the census that Luke records. The topic was the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. One example of this fallacy happened to me a while back when I debated an atheist on Twitter (Twitlonger to be precise). The origin of the name of this logical fallacy comes from when people would use kippered red herrings to train hounds to follow a scent, or to divert them from the correct route when hunting. If Person A falls for the red herring, he’ll try to refute argument Y instead of drawing attention back to argument X and forcing his opponent to deal with it. Usually this happens when Person A gives argument X and Person B, instead of giving a rebuttal to argument A, brings up Argument Y instead. This time, I’ll be talking about…Ī red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue. Last time, we looked at The Genetic Fallacy. This isīecause of something within the content of the argument itself. Of the premises are true, you still can’t infer the conclusion. Valid (i.e it doesn’t break any of the rules of logic) and even if all
Informal fallacies, as I explainedĬontent of the argument is fallacious. Once we’ve gone through the informal fallacies, I’ll move on For theįew posts in this series, I’ll be talking about what informal fallacies However, we won’t be examining any formal fallacies until later. Gave an example of what a formally fallacious argument looks like. The premises of the syllogism are all true. Obeying the rules of logic, the conclusion cannot be inferred even if Syllogism doesn’t follow one of the rules of logic (e.g modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical syllogism, Logical fallacies can come in two forms formal and informal.įormal fallacies, as the name suggests, is when a fallacy is made in
Stumble on occasions while walking, so one can stumble on occasions when A logical fallacy is a mistake in reasoning.
#RED HERRING FALLACY DEF SERIES#
This is part 5 of my series on logical fallacies.