SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Round 4 Part 1

In this post I venture to offer some debate advice: be very hesitant to accuse your opponent of a logical fallacy.

• First, your lack of sympathy for his position can easily cause you to be see ones which are not really there.
• Second, it is often unclear whether or not the dude is actually making an error in reasoning – begging the question is particularly tricky to diagnose, for instance, and some of the “flags” I’ve thrown in judging previous rounds are debatable.
• Third, there is a temptation to quickly allege a fallacy rather than dealing with the truth or falsity of your opponent’s premises. (This can verge on making an ad hominem fallacy yourself.)
• Fourth, you may be tempted to make up a new sort of error in reasoning new for the occasion, and accuse your opponent of it.

In round 4, Burke makes the 3rd error, Bowman the 4th.

Burke argues,

Even Acts 5, where the apostle Peter accuses Ananias of “lying to the Holy Spirit” (verse 3) and his wife of trying to “test the Spirit of the Lord” (verse 9) is not an open and shut case. The usual argument made from this passage is that Peter accuses Ananias of “lying to the Holy Spirit” and Sapphira of trying to “tempt the Holy Spirit”; but since an impersonal power cannot be lied to or tempted, the Holy Spirit must therefore be a person and therefore it follows that the Holy Spirit is God. The logic here is not terribly good, and the argument ends with a non sequitur.

Neither this nor what follows it make clear what Bowman’s errors in reasoning are supposed to be. What exactly is the argument he’s criticizing? Is it this?

1. h can be lied to and tempted.
2. If something can be either lied to or tempted, then it is a self.
3. h is a self.

This argument is patently valid; there is no error in reasoning here, for if 1 and 2 are true, 3 must be true as well. If this is Bowman’s argument, Burke will probably want to say it is valid but unsound – because premise 1 is false. Or he might instead argue that the argument is not known to be sound because there are not sufficient grounds for thinking 1 true. (Do you see the difference?) So IF this is the argument in view, it is a mere distraction to cry “fallacy”.

However, it may be that Burke has another argument in mind:

1. These sentences can be true: “some human has lied to h” and “some human has tempted h”
2. If something can be either lied to or tempted, then it is a self.
3. h is a self.

This argument is invalid – it is possible for 1 and 2 to be true, while 3 is false. As Burke says, its “logic is not terribly good”.

At the end of the quote above Burke reads his trinitarian opponents as arguing like this: h is a self, therefore h is God. That would as he says be a non sequitur (conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise) but surely his opponents aren’t offering such a patently bad argument.

In round 4 Bowman tries to pants Burke with a novel fallacy accusation:

A common strategy that anti-Trinitarians use to show that the Holy Spirit is not a person but is simply the power of God involves an argumentative strategy that I will call the definition-by-parallelism fallacy. The classic example in this context is the use of Luke 1:35 to prove that the Holy Spirit is simply another term for the power of God. In Luke 1:35, the angel Gabriel tells Mary that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” …

If this reasoning were to be followed consistently, it would lead to the conclusion that God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the gospel are all “the power of God”:

“power of God” = God the Father (Luke 22:69)
“power of God” = Christ, the Son (1 Cor. 1:24)
“power of the Most High [God]” = the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35)
“power of God” = the gospel/word of the cross (Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:18)

This method of handling biblical expressions like “power of God” is hermeneutically fallacious.

Let me first say that the probability that anyone, no matter how smart, is going to identify a new sort of fallacy is very low. It is far better to stick with a standard term, found in a list like this one (you want a list generated by philosophers – it is going to be more precise than ones emanating, e.g. from debaters, lawyers, English professors); if there really is a reasoning error, it is 99% likely that it already has a standard name.

Bowman is right about one thing – none of these texts by itself proves anything about what the authors of the NT believed the “Holy Spirit” or “holy spirit” to be.

But Bowman has not analyzed the structure of the argument here (from Luke 1:35) and so he has not shown that there are invalid or otherwise fallacious arguments with that same structure. So his fallacy accusation falls flat.

As we all know, Hebraic parallelism involves asserting the same thing, or almost the same thing, in two different ways, often in rapid succession. This sort of repetition adds color and emphasis. Luke is employing this – so that the Holy Spirit coming down on Mary is the same event as her being overshadowed by the power of God. In other words, the angel predicts the same event twice. It’s really an easy and natural reading of the text.

Compare: the wrestler’s manager yells out to his opponent before the match:

You, unfortunate slob, shall be pounded by the muscle of Mexico, you’ll suffer the mighty wrath of El Musculo!

Pretty clearly, the manager is threatening one event here (a butt-whupping), and it seems that El Musculo just is what he in the first clause calls “the muscle of Mexico” – those terms refer to the same thing, the manager’s wrestler.

So… where’s the fallacy? There is no error in taking one half of the parallel as a guide to the meaning of the other. In my example, it is clear that “the muscle of Mexico” is supposed to refer to the dude named in the parallel clause. In the Luke passage, unitarians reason that the impersonal “power of God” clause should lead us to understand “the holy spirit” in the other clauses as also impersonal – for again, it is one event which is in view – the miraculous impregnation of Mary. They argue that this best fits the pattern of spirit-talk in both OT and NT.

If I understand him, Bowman is  attributing a silly view to them – that whatever is truly spoken of in impersonal terms really is a non-person. (So, e.g. they’ll think Peter is literally a stone.) But no one thinks that, and it is uncharitable to attribute this to Burke.

Bowman should have stuck with this more modest point: a possible and somewhat plausible reading of the passage goes the other direction. (As we know, say, from John, that “the Holy Spirit” is personal, we should hold the other clause to merely applying an impersonal term to this person.) Of course, Burke’s reading is also possible and plausible. So again, by itself Luke’s usage here proves nothing.

Bowman’s alleged parallels involve various non-literal devices of language, but as far as I can see not parallelism. His first is something like synechdoche – referring to God by way of an attribute. (Linguist types out there – is this the right or best term?) In the second, Jesus is depersonalized – referred to as “the power of God”. Again, a common device. (“Luigi the assassin was the power of the Godfather.”) His fourth example, it seems to me, is a way of saying that the message of Christ is the means by which God saves – an abstract thing (a message) is spoken of as if it were another abstract thing (the power of God). I think the term for this is just the generic “metonymy“. (Again, anyone have a better term?)

Bowman asserts that the unitarian is inconsistent if she doesn’t also think that God, Christ, and the gospel are also impersonal realities. I don’t see any inconsistency there, though. Nor has any clear “definition by parallelism fallacy” been defined, much less convincingly pinned on Burke. Neither trinitarians nor unitarians should have any problem recognizing and understanding the linguistic devices just mentioned.

In sum, these fallacy accusations have got us exactly nowhere. Both are to some extent criticizing arguments the other side wouldn’t and/or shouldn’t assert.

OK, I’ll stop being an annoying logic nerd now. In the next post I’ll say something more substantial.