#874 Playing Catch-Up

Dr. craig’s response

Thanks so much for your kind remarks, Stephen! I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem unkind in what I’m about to say, but in the spirit of “tough love,” I feel I’ve got to tell you frankly that you are way behind the curve in your grasp of logic and need to take drastic action to catch up. Since there are probably vast numbers of Christians in a similar situation, it seemed to me good to take your question this week. If Christians are to be effective as salt and light in our dark and decaying culture, we need to be more intellectually engaged.

It just grieves me that you should be bamboozled by such a weak objection. If you had read even my children’s book Learning Logic (not to speak of a college textbook), you would have learned in chapter 5 what the fallacy of affirming the consequent is and seen immediately that the moral argument doesn’t commit it. Honestly, this is kid stuff!

The moral argument as I have formulated it runs

In premiss (1) the antecedent is “God does not exist,” and the consequent is “Objective moral values do not exist.” The fallacy of affirming the consequent is agreeing to or affirming the truth of the consequent and on that basis inferring the antecedent. Such an inference is logically fallacious, since it is not validated by any rule of logic.

But obviously the moral argument does not affirm the consequent of (1). On the contrary, premiss (2) denies it! The inference of (3) is therefore validated by the logical rule of inference called modus tollens, which warrants inferring the negation of the antecedent from the denial of the consequent.

Undoubtedly, the reason your friend was confused is because he doesn’t understand the logical principle of double negation, that for any proposition p, not-not-p is logically equivalent to p. So to say that “Objective moral values exist,” is to say that objective moral values do not not exist, and to infer that “God does not not exist” is to infer that God exists!

Now, as I say, this is all so elementary that your question would not be worth selecting were it not for what it reveals, not only about your friend, but also, my brother, about you. You say that you’ve been following my ministry for 15 YEARS, and yet you remain so limited in your understanding of logic. Stephen, I urge you to engage now in a crash course to catch up, so that you can be more effective in your evangelism.

I’m glad that at long last you’ve begun to share the theistic arguments with unbelievers. I wonder why it took you so long. Remember, people’s souls are at stake. This is a life and death struggle. We cannot afford to be lackadaisical and negligent in preparing ourselves to be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks us the reason for the hope that is in us. I would encourage you to master the rules in Learning Logic, and then to move on to my book On Guard and to master the arguments therein. Then you will find yourself far better equipped to deal with unbelievers like your friend.