© 2016 Santiago Flores
© 2016 Urantia Association of Spain
| Luz y Vida — No. 45 — Presentation | Luz y Vida — No. 45 — September 2016 — Index | The government of a neighboring planet: the possible utopia |
(Exposed in the board list “El rincón de Urantia” in June 2015)
I must clarify that I have no specific training on the subject, I am essentially a self-taught person who has not even completed secondary education. Therefore I emphasize that everything I say is perfectible and subject to criticism and revision. Paraphrasing Plato (what audacity!): What I say I do not say as a wise man, but searching together with you.
Those of us who have spent years debating on the internet about The Urantia Book have been learning what is worth discussing and what is not. Which arguments are worthy of reply and which should be either ignored or marked as incorrect. Personally, it has helped me to learn a little about argumentative fallacies (I recommend reading http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo: Cognitive_biases).
Next, I include a detail about the most frequent ones, with a brief explanation and an example related to The Urantia Book. The examples were given by me, so they are open to correction if they find that they do not fully represent the corresponding fallacy. Even in the last three examples I did not find how to exemplify it in reference to The Urantia Book, so if something occurs to you, welcome it.
Perhaps among all of us we can unravel and understand which arguments we should use and which not when defending a thesis on The Urantia Book, as well as prepare ourselves to segregate from our interlocutors the valid arguments for the fallacies debate.
Improving our understanding of the presentation of arguments and contrasting them will allow us to optimize resources and energies, and thus achieve debates with more substance, with more “wheat” and less “chaff”, both among ourselves and (especially) in contexts that are more hostile to our theses. .
The list of fallacies and their definition are taken from http://imaginario-nopensar.blogspot.com/2011/09/lasfalacias-y-sus-tipos.html. I only modified some of the examples to bring them to cases relating to The Urantia Book. By the way, there are other interesting things on that page, like the “ten rules of argumentative behavior.”
¶ Types of argumentative fallacies
A- Disqualification: discredit an argument, disqualifying the person who formulates it
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A.1. Direct personal attack (ad hominem-offensive): disqualify the opponent’s personality. Example: “We should not listen to what he proposes, we all know it is black”. A person’s race has nothing to do with their credibility and has nothing to do with the acceptability of a point of view.
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A.2. Indirect personal attack (circumstantial): disqualify a person by virtue of the special situations in which they find themselves. “he is going to oppose the removal of the Urantia Book article from Wikipedia because he is a reader of the book”. What is done here is to argue based on the conditions in which the person finds himself and not on the arguments he gives in defense of his point of view. It is always possible that someone has “vested interests”, but to evaluate an argument we must focus on the quality of their reasons and not on other aspects that are impossible to evaluate objectively.
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A.3. Poison the well: We directly disqualify the opponent before he has an opinion, in such a way that his defense becomes impossible. You don’t want to leave water for when your opponent arrives. He purports to deny that he is qualified to give an opinion. For example: «_we must not accept the point of view of the readers. It is known that readers distort the truth according to the convenience of spreading their doctrine. What is being pointed out here is that whoever holds the point of view is a “liar”, thus we nullify any possibility of accepting what is said. What is done is attack the person (also based on a generalization), instead of showing the weaknesses of his argument.
B- Appeal to ignorance (ad ignorantiam)
It consists of defending the truth or falsity of a statement based on the idea that no one has proven otherwise. Example: “life outside Earth does not exist, because no one has proven otherwise”
C- Appeal to authority
It constitutes a fallacy when the intention of the words is misrepresented or a character who has nothing to do with the subject matter or with that sphere of knowledge is quoted.
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C.1 To the authority of a person: the prestige of a well-known or famous person is used. Example: “The Urantia Book is a publishing business, says Martin Gardner”. Martin Gardner may be a well-known academic and have written many books, but he is not a connoisseur of The Urantia Book.
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C.2. To consensus (ad populum): appeal to the opinion of the majority. For example: “most people do not know The Urantia Book, therefore it must be an inconsequential book.”. The fact that the majority has a certain opinion does not make that opinion the most reasonable.
D. Appeal to mercy (ad misericordiam)
Instead of reasons that support the thesis, the goodness of the person is appealed to. It consists of appealing to mercy to achieve assent when arguments are lacking. He tries to force the adversary by playing with his compassion (or that of the public), not to complement the reasons for an opinion, but to replace them. Example: “nevertheless, Urantia Foundation sells its books without considering the economic limitation of the poorest” (feelings are used).
E. Appeal to fear (ad baculum)
Implicit threats or intimidation are used. For example: “the Christian faithful should not read The Urantia Book because they put their eternal salvation at risk”. It’s more of a threat than an argument.
F. Complex question
It involves asking questions that assume the acceptance of prior information. Example: “how do you justify that The Urantia Book endorses the extermination of the retarded?” The question assumes that The Urantia Book endorses this extermination, without corroborating that it really does.
G. Accident and inverse accident: Incorrect use of deductive and inductive modes of reasoning
-G1. General rule for a particular case: Obeys the idea of improperly deducing an application of a general rule to a particular case that does not conform to it. Example: “All the revealed books are prior to the 20th century. The Urantia Book is from the middle of the 20th century. Therefore, The Urantia Book is not a revealed book.”
- G.2. Hasty generalization: Consists of incorrectly using inductive reasoning, stating a general rule from the exceptions. Example: «_Edmundo Chirinos was a psychiatrist and abused his patients. All psychiatrists—including William Sadler—abuse their patients."
H. False cause (Non causa pro causa)
It consists of establishing as the cause of an event that which immediately precedes it in time. Example: “William Sadler was an Anglican believer, therefore The Urantia Book is a reflection of his beliefs”.
I. Petition of principles (Petitio principi-tautology-circularity)
We argue in favor of our point of view, giving a reason that is equivalent to it. In other words, I use the same principles that are tried to base. Example: “The Urantia Book is not a revelation, because it cannot be a revealed book”.
J. Contradictory premise (Ignorantio elenchi)
A statement used as support is incompatible with what is stated in another expression, also used as support. Example: “I believe that everyone should form their own opinion about The Urantia Book; but, naturally, I agree that the Christians who read it will be anathematized”.
K. Wrong
It consists of using a word or phrase with different meanings within the same reasoning, which obviously generates false conclusions. Example: “death is the end (term) of life, therefore, all life must have death as its end (objective)”.
L. Ambiguity (Amphibology)
It appears when arguing from premises whose formulation is ambiguous or confusing due to careless wording. The premise is false in one sense and not in another. This occurs especially in the headlines of the newspapers, where for reasons of style or to achieve greater sensationalism, ambiguities are incurred such as: “Delinquent killer granny”.
M. False analogy
Compare different situations as if they were the same. Example: “Why can’t students consult the books while we take the exams? Doctors consult their books to prescribe a medication and lawyers, the codes to prepare their defense.”
Propositional logic (that of syllogisms) has among its rules two that say: “nothing can be concluded from negative premises” and also “nothing can be concluded from particular premises”. In other words, we cannot make solid theoretical constructions based on interpretations of particular cases and on what The Urantia Book does not say.
The Chinese say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I am going to do an exercise and, to avoid banal discussions, I am going to clarify beforehand that I don’t believe in anything that I am going to put next, but come on, it will be totally rational, coherent and logical-deductive… as we have become accustomed to .
As The Urantia Book does not deny the possibility that dinosaurs developed intelligence (it nowhere says “dinosaurs did not develop intelligence”) and nowhere does it deny the “hollow Earth theory” (it also does not say “the hollow is wrong”), I have discovered that the apparent visits from extraterrestrials and the reptilian races that a lot of people talk about (close brethren who are new ageists, just like us who are readers of The Urantia Book and therefore we are new age) do not contradict the story of The Urantia Book.
Yes, yes, I know that they will tell me that The Urantia Book says that the will did not appear until Andón and Fonta were born, but that is a general case… and this is a particular case. This is a decimal planet, besides, didn’t you notice that the Planetary Prince took half a million years to come after the will of Andon and Fonta appeared? That’s because the will had already developed among the dinosaurs, but it didn’t spread because they almost went extinct soon after, so the Most Highs wanted to make sure that the descendants of Andon and Fonta wouldn’t go extinct before sending the Prince, and they segregated the two races. because it is a rarity in the universe that intelligent lizards have developed and the universal economy was not going to waste that opportunity, of course not.
In UB 49:2.18, it clearly says “But these modifications of early intelligent creatures are neither human fishes nor human birds. They are of the human and prehuman types, neither superfishes nor glorified birds but distinctly mortal.» Here is the proof! It says: ”neither super fish nor glorified birds" but it doesn’t mention dinosaurs, did you notice? That is why here he leaves open the possibility that dinosaurs (which are neither fish nor birds) could develop intelligence.
Since we haven’t seen intelligent lizards out there, it’s obvious that they must have hidden somewhere, and since there are so many and so big we can only explain their hiding place with the hollow Earth theory, which must also be true because a large number of people believes her
As they are many millions of years older than us on this planet, they have superior intelligence and technological development, which is why we see them ride around in flying saucers and we assume in our ignorance that they are from another planet, when in fact they are the true primordial inhabitants of the planet. planet.
So if someone had the arrogance to disregard the theories of the hollow Earth and the reptilian races just because of a stubborn prosaic interpretation of The Urantia Book, review your truths because I have just shown that it does not contradict what it exposes at all. The Urantia Book, ergo must be true.
Making an exposition about a thesis, using language specific to the subject in question and dressing it with plausibility does not make the thesis true: it must be supported by the firmness of its arguments, demonstrated by the ability to resist criticism to which they are subjected.
Search the internet for “The Bogdanov Scandal” and you will see how a long piece of writing with correct technical terminology is capable of deceiving even respectable scientific publications. That is why EVERYTHING must be subjected to criticism and review and what SEEMS coherent must be checked with as much or more care than what does not.
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/
| Luz y Vida — No. 45 — Presentation | Luz y Vida — No. 45 — September 2016 — Index | The government of a neighboring planet: the possible utopia |