 This is what I don't do very often, so it's a challenge here. I'm going to talk about the right reasoning this evening, and that's certainly something that is very helpful, especially in today's world. We need to be able to discern truth, because we live in a world of lies. There was a time when that wasn't the case. There was a time when every statement was true, when God first made the world and his conversations with Adam. What a rich world that would have been, where everything that was said was true and God honoring, but we now live in a world of lies, a world full of sin, where people have challenged God's word, and they claim you can't trust what God has said in his word and so on, and so at no greater point in history have we needed to be able to discern truth, to think rightly about things, and that's some of what we do at ICR. We help people to think straight in a crooked world, realize what it comes down to. After all, we must admit many of the things we read in books or see on television or especially read on the Internet are not necessarily true. I hope you realize that. Man, the Internet, it's crazy, and of course any of those things can be used for God honoring purposes. I'm very grateful for the Internet. I love it, but you have to be discerning, and I'll tell you, it's getting harder. Used to be when you saw a video of something, man, that established it, but now I look at some of these things, I don't know just by looking at it, because they can make it look true when it's actually a lie. And so it's all the more important that we learn to be able to think rightly so that our beliefs will correspond to reality. It's very important that your beliefs correspond to reality because beliefs have consequences, right? If you fail to believe in gravity, that will have consequences. Negative consequences. I trust you understand that, but that is not the worst belief that you could have. The worst belief, the worst lie that you could believe is the lie that Jesus Christ is not the Lord, because that lie has eternal consequences. So you see, this isn't just a dry academic subject, logic and reason. It's one of the most practical things that we can study as Christians. So if you're a Christian, you have to be concerned about this. If you're not a Christian, you need to become a Christian, and then you need to be concerned about this. If you're a Christian, you have the truth. You have the book of truth. The Bible gives us the foundation for all reasoning. Not everything that's true is in the Bible, of course, but everything that is in the Bible is true, and it gives us the foundation by which we can learn other things. But today, this has been challenged. People say, no, this isn't the truth, and they've substituted something else, and they say, this is the lie. And we specialize in Genesis defending creation, defending biblical creation and refuting evolution. That's kind of what we do at ICR. That's our main specialty, because Genesis is one of the most attacked books of the Bible. People attack the Bible right at the beginning, and then they say, well, you can't trust the rest of it then. But if you think about it, people end up in hell because they've failed to discern truth. They've believed the lie. They've rejected the truth. And the interesting thing, of course, is we know scripturally that people actually prefer to believe the lie. It's not just a question of, well, you know, I just didn't get enough evidence. Actually, God's made himself abundantly clear to everyone. Romans 1 teaches that. Verse 18, it tells us that it's not that just people don't know any better. It says, they suppress the truth and unrighteousness. So you can't make people abandon a lie, but you can make it more difficult for them to continue to believe a lie. And that's what I'm gonna do this evening. I'm gonna challenge, I'm gonna show you how you can challenge people to think rightly, to think rationally. That's what it's all about. Rationality. Rationality, to be rational is to think correctly, to have good reasons for what you believe to be true. That's what it means. It doesn't necessarily mean a certainty or anything like that. Because sometimes we don't have all the facts and we have to make the best guess. We can. The Lord knows that. And He's given us means by which we can use things like probability to make our best guess about whether or not we should take an umbrella with us and things like that. You understand that. But my point is, if we're not thinking rationally, you're gonna tend to be wrong about a lot of things. Children are not rational. We don't expect them to be, they're children. They believe that there's a monster in the closet and they do not have good reasons for that belief. Right? But they act on it. They pull the sheets over their head and so on and that seems to work. Keeps the monster from attacking them because they survived. We expect that sort of silliness from children. That's okay. As we grow up, we're expected to become rational. That's the whole point of education really. It's to help people to develop good reasons for what they believe. So that your beliefs then will correspond to the real universe, the one that God created. Now here's the thing that I found, to me it was an epiphany when I realized this. We have a moral obligation to be rational. It is immoral. It is sinful to be irrational. Do you realize that? Because God has commanded us to emulate his character. We're to be like him on a creaturely level. We're to think in a way that's consistent with his character and God's thinking is right about everything because he's God. God is perfectly rational. We don't always understand why God does what he does. God doesn't always list his reasons for us. He's under no obligation to do that. That God always has good reasons for what he does. And we're supposed to think like him. We're supposed to be rational. And so for the sake of being obedient to God, we need to be concerned with this issue. We need to be rational. For the sake of having our beliefs correspond to reality so that we don't make horrible mistakes, we need to be rational. And for the sake of winning other people to the kingdom, we need to be rational. We need to help them see where they've made mistakes and reasoning and very graciously point that out and lead them to the truth. We will know the truth and the truth will set us free. Knowing that will set us free. Isaiah 55, seven and eight. I love Isaiah chapter 55. This is a neat chapter. It tells us here the problem with the unrighteous, the problem with the wicked is that they don't think like God and their way is not God's way. And so he tells them that they need to turn from that. Let's have a look at that. Let the wicked forsake his way, let the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to the Lord and he will have compassion on him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon. And then God says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts nor are your ways, my ways, declares the Lord. You see, the reason that sin is sin is because it's contrary to what God has decreed. It goes against what he has said. That's the problem with the wicked. They're not thinking like God. They're not acting like God. And God says, that's a problem. You're wicked. You need to turn from that. You need to start thinking like I think. You need to go in the direction that I go in. And that's the problem. For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Your ways are not my ways. That's the problem. And lest the person say, well, yeah, I know there's a difference, but you God should correspond to me. You should be the one to change. The next verse tells us the reason why we need to adjust to God. For as high as the heavens, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. God's infinite. We're finite. So if there's a mistake to be made, it's gonna be on our part. We need to think like him. He doesn't need to think like us. And some people see that maybe as contradictory. Well, if God's thinking is infinite and ours is finite, how can we possibly think like him? Well, the Lord doesn't expect us to think infinitely like he does, but he does expect us to think in a way that it's consistent with his character and consistent with what he's revealed in his word. As an analogy, I like to think of it like, imagine this spotlight coming down from heaven. It's coming from a distant quasar and it's illuminating the earth right here. Now I could never reach the source of that light. I could never do that, but I can come over here and stand in that light and then I can see, you see, I see it's in God's light, we have light. The problem with the unbeliever is that he's over here. He's in darkness. He knows not over what he stumbles, the Bible says. They're stumbling about, groving about the darkness. We need to stand in God's illumination. That's the key. Line up our thoughts with his thoughts. The Bible tells us that those who are his will cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. Every argument, everything that comes against God's knowledge, we need to be ready to defend, to defend the Christian faith against that argument, which means we need to be able to spot the errors in that kind of thinking. We need to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. There's an interesting passage. If ever you think, well, you know, I really did pretty good this week. I really didn't, you know, I really didn't sin very much at all. Think about that. Was everything you thought about glorifying to God every thought? Was it in obedience to Christ? I confess I've got a little work to do in that area. I trust you do too. Until glory, we're all good. You know, that's a process of sanctification. And so it's, it is a process that'll last all of our lives, of course. Well, people are going to hell because their poor reasoning leads them to reject Christ. They ultimately go to hell because they rejected Christ, but their bad reasoning leads them there. So we all ought to be concerned with correct thinking. And so that's what I want to hit tonight. And really there's, anyone can spot faulty reasoning. It's not something you have to go out and get a PhD in science like I did. It's actually something that anyone can do by recognizing three keys. There are three keys to keep in your mind. If you know these things, you can spot a bad argument when you see one. And they're not hard to learn. The first is to identify arbitrariness and inconsistency. Okay, again, children are arbitrary. It means they don't have good reasons for what they believe. And they're inconsistent. They behave one way here and another way there. And we expect that nonsense from children. But adults are supposed to be rational. We're supposed to systematically learn to think in a way that's consistent with the nature of God. So arbitrariness and inconsistency, that really, that one's pretty easy. That's the easiest of the three, I think. Understanding the basics of logic. Logic is the study of reasoning, correct reasoning. And the more you know about how arguments are supposed to work, how right thinking works, the more you'll be able to spot bad thinking by contrast. Maybe take a class in logic or at least maybe pick up a textbook on logic. And I'll show you at the end some resources you can get on that very topic. But I've found that a study of logic is probably more important than learning specific lines of scientific evidence when it comes to debating origins, for example. And I'm a scientist. I know a lot about the science of astronomy anyway. And when it comes to debating the Big Bang, I can debate with folks. I know the issues, I know the science. But I've found that most of the issue comes to mistakes in reasoning, errors in logic. And so how important it is to know the basics of logic, how I wish every student, every high school student knew the basics of logic. They don't teach that in most schools anymore. They would, frankly, in my opinion, they wouldn't be able to teach logic and simultaneously teach evolution. Ah, yeah, and you know why that is. But in any case, if students graduated high school and they knew logic, then when they went off to college, it wouldn't really matter too much where they went because the professor gets up there, he makes, he's got an ax to grind against God and he makes this bad argument against Christianity. But you see what happens is most students today, they don't know logic and they're persuaded by that bad argument. I know it's bad, I know logic. They don't know that, they end up saying, well, maybe I need to rethink this whole Christianity thing, they walk away from the faith. We've seen that happen. And it can be avoided if they learn to discern truth. And the younger, the better. Knowing the most common logical fallacies is the third key. It turns out there are only a certain number of ways that you can mess up an argument. There's only so many. And it's not a real long list. In fact, the most common mistakes that people make in reasoning, there's maybe something like 30. I'll have to go through and count it at some point. But it's not very many. And could you learn 30 things? If you learned one thing every day in a month, you'd know them all. And it turns out that of those 30, only about 10 or so are really common. And so if you knew those 10, 90% of the arguments, you'd be able to spot the error in them right away. And that's just not that hard. So I'm gonna share some of those with you this evening. That'll be the fun part. I like spotting logical fallacies. Because once you know that, you see them everywhere. You start seeing them in television commercials like, ah, that's a reification fallacy. You're not fooling me with that one. It's interesting. You'll see them in Christians. We're not immune from making logical fallacies. You'll see them in your brothers and sisters in Christ. And you can politely graciously correct them perhaps. But anyway, these are the three keys to spotting errors in reasoning and to learn to think rightly. So let's just hit the first one here. Arbitraryness, to be arbitrary means to not have an objective reason. And so when you said, I'm gonna wear a blue shirt today instead of yellow. And you don't really have a particular reason for that. That's arbitrary. And that's fine when you're picking shirt colors. But when it comes to beliefs, beliefs must be grounded in a reason. Beliefs should not be arbitrary. Why? Because there'd be no reason, literally, to believe that they're true. If your belief is arbitrary, if you pick a belief, like you pick shirts, there is no reason why your belief should correspond to the real universe. And so more than likely, because there are more false options than the one true option, more than likely, you're wrong. If you want to be right in the way you're thinking, your beliefs cannot be arbitrary. And again, this is the central problem that little children have. They believe things, they do not have good reasons for what they believe. But they just believe them. The funny thing is, people realize this when it comes to most practical situations. Most people would not say something like, you know, I just don't believe that cars require any fuel. Right? Because they couldn't get very far with that line of thinking. I guess it's about one tank of gas. And then they would reconsider their hypothesis. Well, but when it comes to spiritual matters, oh, that's different. People feel free to be arbitrary when it comes to things that you can't immediately test, life after death. Well, I just believe in reincarnation. You say, well, why do you believe that? Oh, I just do. That's totally arbitrary. Children think that way, adults shouldn't. If you want to be right, you better learn to have reasons for your beliefs. And it's in a scriptural, we should be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks a reason for the hope that's in us. Which means we better have a reason for the hope that's in us and be able to state it. Inconsistency, the other key intellectual sin. To be inconsistent means to be at variance with one's own principles, self-contradictory. You've heard people that will make a statement and they'll say something that really is, goes against what they just said. Now that person cannot have a correct belief, at least on that issue, because truth doesn't contradict itself. There's a law of logic called the law of non-contradiction that says you can't have A and not A at the same time and in the same sense. It's impossible. If I told you my car's in the parking lot and it's not in the parking lot, you would not rush out to see if I made a true statement. You would immediately dismiss that statement as false and you'd be right to do so. Because it's inconsistent with itself. Truth never denies itself. By the way, the reason truth never denies itself is because it stems from the nature of God and God does not deny himself, the Bible says. And all truths in God, therefore truth will never contradict. So even the law of non-contradiction has its basis in scripture. That's a different presentation. That's just bonus. There are behavioral inconsistencies where people will say one thing and they'll behave another way. And so something's not right in their reasoning. The professor who is an atheist, he believes in millions of years of evolution teaches at the classroom. You're just, life's an accident. You're just the accumulated mutations over millions of years. Life has no value. Then he goes home and kisses his wife and plays with his kids as if they did have intrinsic value. Ah, something's wrong there. There's inconsistency. That kind of behavioral inconsistency is sometimes used by another word, hypocrisy. And Jesus harshly criticized and rightly criticized the Pharisees and scribes for their hypocrisy. They'd say one thing and they'd do something else. That is irrational. It's an inconsistency. And it's one that Jesus indicated was very wrong. Take a look at Matthew 23 sometime and look at the list of woes of the scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Well, these are pretty easy to spot. So we won't spend too much time on arbitrariness and inconsistency. You must have good reasons and they can't contradict each other. Logic, let's spend just a little bit of time on logic. I'll give you a crash course on logic. Maybe some of you've had that, but like I said, sadly, it's not taught too much anymore. Logic is the study of the principles of correct and by contrast incorrect reasoning. So it's about the chain of reasoning rather than the specific lines of evidence used. So logic wouldn't be about fossils or stars or things like that, but rather what conclusions can I reasonably deduce from certain other premises, from certain ideas? What can I conclude from that? And of course, the study of correct thinking, that's key. Knowing logic will just revolutionize the way you defend the Christian faith because evolutionists, God bless them, they make mistakes in logic left and right. And we let them get away with it and we really shouldn't for their sakes and for ours as well. So we need to know about how to do a correct argument. There's some terms that I wanna cover here. Real quickly, that's a necessary evil when covering a topic sometimes, but I want you to be familiar with these. There's a proposition. In logic, a proposition is a statement that affirms or denies something. So it's a claim. And as such, it's either true or false. So any statement you make that can be evaluated as true or false would be an example of a proposition. Commands like do your homework are not propositions. Questions like have you done your homework are not propositions because they don't affirm, they don't claim something. Technically, the proposition is the meaning of the statement. So if I said the sky is blue, that's a proposition. If I said blue is the sky, that's the same proposition, even though the wording's different. Or if I said the sky has the color of blueness, you get the idea. It's the meaning and the exact wording doesn't matter as long as the meaning's understood. So some examples of propositions. The sky is blue, that's a good one. You can evaluate that as true or false. It happens to be true. Yes, at least if we're staying at during the daytime on a clear day. All dogs are purple, is that a proposition? Yes, it's a proposition. It's a false proposition, but it's a proposition. Because it's making a claim and that claim happens to be false. So it is proposition. How about the number of stars in the visible universe is an even number as opposed to an odd number? Is that a proposition? It is a proposition because it's making a claim. The claim is either true or false. Now the interesting thing about that claim is only God knows if that's true or false. That's why I picked it. There are some propositions that we don't know the truth value, but it still has a truth value. It would have to be either even or not even. That has to be the case. So it's either true or false. Now an argument, in a logical sense, an argument is a group of propositions where the truth of one is claimed to follow from the truth of the others. And again, I have to put the disclaimer because an argument is not what people commonly think of. As a yelling match or something like that. Something, a discussion that's very heated, people will think of as an argument. But in a logical sense, that's not what it is. It's just a group of propositions where you're trying to prove something, you're trying to demonstrate something. So if I said all mammals have kidneys, that's true. All dogs are mammals. And then I conclude therefore all dogs have kidneys. That's an example of an argument. Three propositions there, and I'm trying to prove number three from numbers one and two. Now we're supposed to argue biblically. The Bible tells us we're to contend for the faith. So we're supposed to make arguments when we're supposed to be ready all this to give an answer. It's a reason to defense of the hope that's within us and to do so with gentleness and respect. That's an argument. We're supposed to do that. We're not supposed to do it in a way that is argumentative. It's unfortunate those two words sound so similar because I'm using them in very different ways. An argument, a logical sense is just a proof as it were, a demonstration of a claim. Now the claim being demonstrated, that's the conclusion. And then the other statements which provide support for that conclusion are premises. And so one and two are premises there. Each one is a premise and the conclusion is therefore all dogs have kidneys. And usually you can recognize a conclusion. It'll often have a tip-off word like therefore or a hence or thus. It follows that, whatever. Sometimes the premises will have keywords and they'll be like since or because or something like that. And generally in an argument, the arguer assumes that everyone agrees on the premises and he tries to demonstrate to his opponent or perhaps to himself that the conclusion is true. The conclusion is the new thing you're trying to establish from the premises which we assume everyone takes for granted. Sometimes we end up not agreeing on the premises and then we have to take a step back and say now you have to prove I wanna know that dogs really are mammals. And so you have to take a step back and then prove that claim. A fallacy then is a common error in the chain of reasoning. A mistake where the conclusion really doesn't follow from the premises. So here's an example. Some mammals are cats, that's right. All dogs are mammals, that's true. Therefore some dogs are cats. Something's wrong there, right? Now premises one and two are true. And so if it was a good argument then the conclusion would follow. And so the fact that the conclusion doesn't follow tells you that there is a fallacy in that argument and there is. That's called the fallacy of the undistributed middle. That's not one of the more common ones. I'm not gonna cover it tonight in detail but it is a fallacy, it's an error in reasoning. So if the argument does not have an error in reasoning if the conclusion does follow from the premises it's called valid. And if there's a fallacy in it, if the conclusion doesn't follow it's invalid. So that's pretty easy. Valid has nothing to do with the truth of each premise. It simply means that the conclusion does follow from those premises. So let me give you an example of this. All mammals are reptiles. All dogs are mammals. Therefore all dogs are reptiles. Is that valid? And the answer is yes, it's valid because the conclusion does follow from the premises. Now it happens that the first premise is wrong. And so that means the conclusion's unreliable. But not because there's a fallacy. There's no error in the chain of reasoning. The chain of reasoning is good. If it were the case that all mammals were reptiles and all dogs were mammals then it would follow that all dogs are reptiles, you see. So that is a valid argument. It's not sound. That's the other word we wanna learn about. Argument is sound if it's valid and the premises are true. Sometimes people will say, well your argument's invalid and it's not, it's a perfectly valid argument. It's just one of the premises is false. So what they really should be saying is your argument is unsound. And don't mix those up because I've seen well-meaning Christians mix that up and it makes them look bad when they do that. So in a sound argument, you got true premises and it's valid, the conclusion must be true. In an unsound argument, the conclusion we say is unreliable. Why did I say unreliable instead of false? Because you could make a mistake in reasoning and by accident end up with the right conclusion anyway. That can happen. But we say it's unreliable because it doesn't follow necessarily. So let's just try, these are easy I know, but let's just try a few of these just to make sure you get the terminology. Is this argument valid? Is it sound? All mammals have kidneys. All dogs are mammals. Therefore, all dogs have kidneys. Valid? Yes, it's valid. Is it sound? Yes, it's right. It's valid and sound. How about all mammals are reptiles? All dogs are mammals. Therefore, all dogs are reptiles. Valid? Yes, okay, good. Sound? No, very good, that's right. Because the first premise is false. But this one, all dogs are cats. Some cats are chickens. Therefore, the sky is blue. Is that valid? No, because the chain of reasoning doesn't follow up. In fact, there is no chain of reasoning there, right? The conclusion is totally irrelevant to the premises. And I picked it that way to illustrate that. Is it sound? No, if it's invalid, it's automatically unsound because sound is valid plus true premises. But notice that the conclusion is true, yeah? It just, it doesn't fall. It's still a bad argument because the way that we arrived at that conclusion is crazy. It doesn't follow, it's unreasonable. It's irrational. But the conclusion can be true by accident. That's why I picked that one. How about all dogs are mammals? All cats have kidneys, therefore, the sky is blue. Valid? No. Because the conclusion does not follow from these premises, you see? You can't conclude that because dogs are mammals and cats have kidneys, that the sky is blue. Can't conclude that. But the interesting thing is every sentence there, every proposition in that statement is true. But it's still a bad argument because it doesn't follow. It's not logical. Okay. There are two kinds of logic primary. You can divide it different ways, but deductive arguments, which is what we've been looking at, are those that the conclusion is definitely true if the premises are. And usually when you see those ones that have therefore and things like that, that's usually at the deductive variety. There's also inductive arguments and that's where you're not trying to prove something absolutely, maybe you can't. And so you're just saying, but it's very likely that whatever that's gonna rain tomorrow. You don't know that conclusively, but you say it's very likely that's gonna rain because of these conditions and so on. That would be an inductive argument. With a deductive argument, we've said it's either valid or invalid and sound or unsound. And we wanna make sure we're using sound arguments if they're of the deductive variety because sound means the premises are true, the chain of logic follows and therefore the conclusion must be true if it's a sound argument. That's the kind we wanna be using if we're of the deductive branch. Now if we're in an inductive argument, it wouldn't make sense to say that it's valid because the conclusion doesn't have to follow 100%. It can just be likely. And so with an inductive argument, you say it's either strong or weak. Strong if the conclusion really is likely to be true given the premises and weak otherwise or sometimes cogent versus weak. So here's an inductive argument. It's probabilistic in nature. And so here's an example. Dr. Lyle has not answered his phone all day. That's the premise. Therefore, conclusion, he's probably out of the office today. Seems like a pretty strong argument, doesn't it? But it's not conclusive because I could have other reasons for not answering the phone. But you'd say, well, yeah, that's pretty likely to be true. I called him several times today at his extension at ICR, he didn't pick up. He's probably out of the office. Pretty good argument. But what if I added an additional premise? What if I said, and by the way, Dr. Lyle, even when he's in his office never picks up his phone, which is true because I don't know. I just don't like talking on the phone. I get more research done if I just plug in. But if I added that premise, would it still be strong argument? You're weak now, right? Because now you'd say, well, you can't conclude anything then about whether he's in the office or not because he doesn't answer it anyway. So additional information can alter the conclusion. That's not true with a deductive argument, but it is true with an inductive argument. So now we get to the fun one. Common logical fallacies. Common errors and reasoning that people make. And I'm gonna try to illustrate these with errors that happen in the origins debate. Errors that evolutionists commonly make. But you would find these types of errors though in any textbook and we'll be specializing on the type of logical fallacies called informal ordinary language fallacies. This is what you're gonna use most of the time. There's another branch. I'm not gonna go into that and take too much time. But these are the ones that are commonly committed and there are three subcategories of these informal fallacies. There are fallacies of ambiguity where something is unclear in the argument and that's what makes it wrong. There's a word that's being used in a way that's inconsistent or unclear. It's vague or being used in two different senses. There's fallacies of presumption where the arguer has assumed something that he really doesn't have the right to assume. Something that's not well established as a premise and you'd have to say, I think you need to bolster that claim a little bit. Now sometimes these fallacies can be fixed by adding the extra information that was missing. But if that's not there, then they're a fallacy. They're a mistaken reasoning. And then you have fallacies of relevance where the conclusion of the argument is not related strongly to the premises but it kind of sounds like it is. Now the thing about fallacies is they tend to be persuasive. People tend to be persuaded. Yeah, that sounds like a good argument. That's why they're fallacies. That's why they're common. They work. You might see on a television show maybe a lawyer who's being an unethical lawyer might intentionally use fallacies because he knows they work to persuade a jury of a position that he knows isn't true. They work. But of course we as Christians have an ethical obligation not to use fallacies, even though they work because we want to be truthful. Not only in the end, the ends don't justify the means as they say. We want to make sure that the way we argue for the faith is truthful itself. But we need to be able to spot these fallacies when they occur because if you don't, people will buy into them. That's why they're common. If they weren't persuasive, they wouldn't be common. So let's hit each of these in a little bit of detail. And I won't go through all of these but I'm gonna go through each of these categories and hit some of the top fallacies that occur in the category of ambiguity. And again, you'd find this in any logic textbook. There are really only six fallacies in that category and I'm only gonna hit two this evening because there are only two that come up commonly in debates on religion or origins or things of that nature. The equivocation fallacy and reification, very common in debates on origins. So I'll hit those this evening. With fallacies of presumption, this one has the most fallacies in this category. But again, it's not that many really and only a few of these come up commonly in debates on origins. So I'm only gonna touch on those ones tonight and maybe not all of those depending on time. And then we have fallacies of relevance where the conclusion is not related to the premises but it kind of sounds like it is. And in that one really I'm only gonna hit two or three in that category, I guess three in that category. So, and if you know those ones, so I'm hitting only nine fallacies this evening and if you know those 90% of arguments you're gonna be able to spot the error in them because these are, I tried to organize this and so that I'm hitting the ones that are the most common. And so let's just go through these now. Fallacies of ambiguity, we have the two that are the most commonly committed, equivocation and reification. Now equivocation is the fallacy of shifting the meaning of a word within an argument. Sometimes it's called a bait and switch because you bait people in on one word and then you switch it to something else to try and prove something that really isn't well established or isn't even true. And I'll give you an example of this. Practice makes perfect, doctors practice medicine, therefore doctors are perfect. Oh, you don't buy that, huh? Well, that's because the word practice is being used in two different senses. Practice in the sense of doing something over and over. Practice in the sense of a medical practice that's different. And so the conclusion doesn't follow because the word switched meaning. Here's another example. Doctors know a lot about medicine, that's certainly true. Dr. Lyle is a doctor, therefore Dr. Lyle knows a lot about medicine. Not true, I don't. Because I'm not a medical doctor which is what the word meant in the first sentence. That's a medical doctor, I'm a PhD doctor, I know, which means I know nothing about medicine or anything else other than astrophysics really. So that's another example of an equivocate. Now those ones I picked because they're obvious. When they're used in conversations that persuade people, they're less obvious. But one of the ones that I see all the time that evolutionists commit is they equivocate on the word evolution. Which can mean change in a general sense, we all agree with that. Or it can refer to the idea that all organisms are descended from common ancestor. That I dispute, okay? But you'll see evolutionists will try to bait you in on one and then switch it to say that it proves the other. It's very common. Let's say I know evolution is true, common descent, because we see evolution just change happening all the time. Well, I know dogs change into dogs. I have no dispute about that. And you get different breeds of dogs, but they're dogs. Now say, oh, we know evolution happens. Because see this bacteria developed resistance to antibiotics. Yeah, it changed from a bacteria to a bacteria. I agree with those kind of changes. But I've not seen a bacteria turn into a person. You see? Establishing this type of change does not prove this type of change. It doesn't. And so that is fallacious. That's an equivocation fallacy. You believe in science, don't you? Well, evolution is science, so you should believe in evolution. I hear that one a lot. Now what word was equivocated there? Science. Yeah, science can mean the procedures of science, the tools that we use. Now I believe in that. I'm a scientist. Of course I believe in the tools of science. It can also refer to a specific model, of a specific scientific model like evolution. And I'm being generous calling it a scientific model. But you get my point. It's not science in the sense of procedural tools, is it? It's a specific model. And the fact that I believe in the tools of science doesn't mean I have to accept every model that comes along. Some of them are contradictory, so I can't accept every model that comes along anyway. So that's an equivocation fallacy. Or how about this one? Evolution is a theory, sure, but so is gravity and you believe in that, don't you? Now there the word is only used once, but the word that equivocated is theory. Which to layman just means something that's unproved. But in science, a theory is something that has good support. And so it means two different things. Evolution is a theory in the sense that it's not proved. Gravity is a theory in the sense that it was well established. It has good evidence to support it, you see. And evolution is not a theory in a scientific sense because it doesn't have supporting evidence, in my view anyway. And I think I can establish that. So that's an equivocation fallacy. By the way, because this occurs so often, I think Christians should never say evolution is just a theory. Because in a scientific sense, it's not even that. Okay, so we should just say evolution is an unproven conjecture or something like that. But it's not a theory. Reification is where you attribute concrete and often personal characteristics to an abstraction. And there's nothing wrong with reification when it's used outside of an argument. But when it's used within an argument, it's fallacious. And I'm gonna show you why that isn't a minute. But let me illustrate reification. So you pick something that's a concept, an abstract, and you treat it like it's a person or like it's physical. An example is it's not nice to fool mother nature. As if nature could be literally fooled, as if nature had a mind and could think, they can't. It's just the name we give to the events that happen in the universe. Or here's another example. Though Dr. Lyle was on vacation, his job continued to call to him, luring him back to the office. And that's fine poetically. There's nothing wrong with that. But my point is it's non-literal. A job can't literally do that because it's not a person. It doesn't have physical substance to where it could literally do that. Reification in poetry is fine. Proverbs chapter eight gives a great example of that where wisdom is personified. That's fine. But when you use it as part of a logical argument, it's a fallacy because you're giving something a literal trait that it can't literally do. So let me give you an example of this. Somebody says, well, the evidence says evolution's true. Does it really? I said no such thing, right? Kind of a double reification there, but you get the idea. Well, let me back up on that. When people say things like, you know, this evidence, the evidence is clear. The evidence speaks. Well, the evidence doesn't speak. It doesn't say anything at all. People speak. The evidence says nothing. Evolution figured out a way around these problems. How do you evolutions account for the magnificent hand or your eyes or whatever? Well, you know, obviously evolution figured out a way. I know. Evolution is just a name you give to your idea of common descent. It's not something that has a mind that can figure out anything. That's a reification fallacy. Life will find a way, as they said in the first Jurassic Park movie. Now an individual organism might find a way because it's real and it's smart and it might find a solution, but life as a concept can't do that because it's abstract. It can't figure out anything. The evidence speaks for itself. Does it? No, it doesn't. If evidence speaks, run. Because that's not supposed to happen. Natural selection guided the development of these creatures. No, no, no. Natural selection is just the name we give to the fact that survivors survive and things that don't survive don't survive. It's a true principle, but it's not something that can guide anything because it doesn't have a mind. It can't think. Science is atheistic in its outlook and procedures. Science is inherently atheistic. Science has beliefs about God. Really? If it did, it certainly wouldn't be an atheist. I can tell you that. Because science is predicated on the Christian worldview. But no, science is a set of tools that we use to test certain kinds of truth claims. It doesn't have beliefs. People have beliefs. Tools don't. Science says. Have you heard people say that? Creationists say this, but science says. That's a reification fallacy. Science says nothing. It's a set of procedures that we use. They could correct that by saying, scientists say, now at least would not be a reification fallacy. Why don't they work it that way though? Doesn't it have more persuasive power this way? It's like, all science, that's a great thing. That puts people on the moon and so on. And science says it treated as a monolithic thing that just almost deified really. Scientists, why don't you say scientists? Oh, you got a person there with a face who can make mistakes and you'd have to admit there are other scientists that disagree with that person on those issues. But that is a reification fallacy. We have fallacies of presumption where the arguer has assumed something that's not necessarily true or at least unproven. And again, we'll just hit a few of the top ones here for time's sake. Bifurcation fallacy, I found this one's very, very common. This is also called the either or fallacy or the false dilemma. And it's good to know all those names because it kinda tells you what it is if you know those names. It's falsely assuming that there are only two options when in fact there are three or more options. Now if there are only two options, it's not a fallacy. But if there are other options and you state it's either this or that, well no, actually it's this over here. So if somebody said either the traffic light is red or it's green, that would be an obvious example of a bifurcation fallacy because it might be yellow. Either Bob will go into the ministry or he will move to Kansas. Now maybe that's not a fallacy because maybe he's narrowed it down to those two options. But if he hasn't, if there's a third option, if he says well maybe I'll go to the ministry and move to Kansas or maybe I'll do neither and become a farmer and go to Nebraska. There might be another option. If there's another option it's a fallacy. I'll give you some examples here that evolutionists use. I don't live by faith because you see I'm rational. Now it's implied, but the implication is that we either live by faith or you're rational. Is that a true distinction? No, I live by faith and I'm rational. In fact, it's because I live by faith I'm able to be rational. And if you were rational you'd live by faith. It's only because we have faith in God we can have things like laws of logic that govern correct reasoning and laws of nature that God upholds the universe in a consistent fashion. It's because I live by faith that I'm rational or I'm able to be rational. Or somebody says I can't accept the Bible because you see I believe in science. Now evolutionists will say that kind of stuff all the time but the implication is either the Bible or science and I'm thinking I'm a Christian and I've got a PhD in science. I believe in the tools of science because they stem from scripture. Because I trust that God upholds the universe in a consistent way and he's designed my mind and my senses so I can interface with the universe and learn things and so on. Evolutionists have no logical reason why science ought to even be possible in a chance universe. Either the universe operates in a law-like fashion or God is constantly performing miracles. And we know God isn't constantly performing miracles. Things aren't just crazy. Therefore the universe must always operate in a law-like fashion. Seems to me there's a third possibility. The universe normally operates in a law-like fashion and occasionally God does a miracle. Why can't that be an option? So that's an example of a bifurcation fallacy. One person challenged me with this. He said, the Bible teaches that in Christ all things hold together, right? Adam's galaxies are held together by Christ but we now know that the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are what hold the universe together. Now that's a bifurcation fallacy because in fact both are true. It is true that gravity holds the solar system together. That's not a replacement for God's power. That's an example of God's power. Gravity is the name we give to the way that God upholds all things by the word of his power. So it's a bifurcation fallacy. We have begging the question. You're familiar with this one. Most people are circular reasoning where you assume the very thing you're trying to prove and you do so arbitrarily. You kind of smuggle the conclusion into one of the premises. And so it's not a very useful way to argue because you're assuming the very thing you're trying to prove. You say, we know evolution is true because it's a scientific fact or we know evolution is true because the alternative creation is impossible. In both cases the person has arbitrarily assumed what he's trying to prove and so he hasn't really proved anything. Christians sometimes make this mistake in the way that they argue. For example, sometimes people will say, well the Bible says it's the word of God and we know that God wouldn't lie. Therefore it must really be the word of God and we know it's the word of God because the Bible says that and we know God wouldn't lie. And so on. Now don't get me wrong. Both of those statements are true. Bible is the word of God and it's true that God doesn't lie. But if you use one statement as the sole support for the other, then it's not a good argument. It begs the question. Evolutionists or other atheists will make this kind of mistake. They'll say supernatural miracles cannot happen. Why? Well because they would violate laws of nature and we know that doesn't happen, why? Because there's no such thing as miracles. And how do you know that? Well because that would violate laws of nature. You see, it's a circular argument. They've assumed the very thing they're trying to prove. Begging the question is kind of weird because it's actually valid. Most of these logical fallacies there's a break in the chain of reasoning and the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Begging the question is weird because the conclusion does follow from the premise because it's just a restatement of the premise. So why is it a fallacy? I think it's a fallacy because it's arbitrary. You just assumed the very thing you're trying to prove. And so that's not a good way to argue. Question-begging epithet. You should become familiar with this one. This is very, very common, especially on the internet. Debates that take place on the internet. I've seen ones that are almost exclusively a sequence of question-begging epithets. This is where you use biased language to support a claim that's logically unproved. And I'll just give some examples of this. One would be a reporter, for example, who says, well, this criminal is charged with the vicious murder of the innocent victim. Now, if the reporter knew all that, okay, but if the reporter just got on the scene, well, this criminal is really a criminal, okay? Maybe it's, you know, the person is charged would be a better way to say it. With the vicious murder, vicious is kind of charged, isn't it? Do we know it was a vicious murder? Do we know it was a murder? I guess you could say charged with murder, that would be legitimate. Of the innocent victim, do we know that it was a victim and do we know it was innocent? Maybe the person was acting in self-defense. So how about this person is charged with the murder of the other person? Would be a more objective way to say it that. But when you use these little nuances in substitution for logic, that's a fallacy. There's nothing wrong with using emotional language at the appropriate time and place, but it can't be used as a substitution for rational reasoning. Somebody told us this, he emailed to me or someone else in the ministry and said, I pray you'll have any epiphany and stop misleading people to believe in nonsense and lies. I'm thinking, that's kind of what I was thinking about you actually, right? See, he didn't offer any evidence that I was wrong, he just made a statement, he just assumed that I was and used emotional language to try and persuade. I'm not gonna go through all these for time's sake, but question-begging epithets can be subtle. Evolution versus creationism, what's wrong with that? Evolution versus creation, okay. You put ism on the end, well that's a belief then, you see, so it subtly implies that creation is a belief, but evolution's a fact. Just by the way it's word, it's very subtle. Genesis teaches that God created in six days however the best scientists tell us the universe is billions of years old. The best scientists, the ones who agree with my position, you see, that's a question-begging epithet. You're using emotional language, loaded language, to make a point instead of logic, very slippery fallacy and one that is just very common on the internet. I'm gonna skip some of these for time's sake, I wish I could do them all, but so many fallacies, so little time, I'll end with this one because it's so common, the strawman fallacy. That's where an argument is against a misrepresentation of the opponent's position, not the actual position. And this one also abounds, I'm sorry to say, on internet forums, people will misrepresent what it is that I say or what creationists teach and then they'll shoot down that strawman argument. Well creationists believe that God created all the organisms as we see them today, but some breeds of dog are known to be quite recent. So see how, therefore the creationists are wrong. But we know that breeds of dog are recent, we understand that, we don't think that there were, St. Bernard's and Labrador retrievers on the Ark, we just think there were two dogs and they've diversified since then, I get that. That's a misrepresentation of my position. The person might find it a lot harder to refute what I actually believe, what I actually teach. So it's very easy to misrepresent your opponent and say, oh, these creationists, they believe in a flatter, they don't believe in science, they don't believe in change. If only they had a brain, right? But that's not true to what we really teach. And so it's not really a legitimate reputation. Well, in summary, any one of you, any one of us can learn to spot faulty reasoning using our three keys that we covered this evening. Look for arbitrariness and inconsistency. The person doesn't have a good reason for his position, he just believes it and expects you to believe it. And you can state the exact opposite, right? If somebody's arbitrary, oh, we don't need good reasons to believe things, you can say, well, then we do. Right, he said, defend, how do you know that? I don't have to defend it. You just told me I don't need good reasons for things. If somebody says, oh, we don't need to be consistent in our thinking, you could say, well, then we do need to be consistent in our thinking. Right, and he says, well, you can't do that, you just what, contradicted you? Yeah, but you just said that's okay, right? We need to be consistent in our thinking. And you'll learn to spot those things really fast. It doesn't take long. Understanding the basics of logic, and again, I have some books on that I'll show you about in a moment. And then knowing the most common logical fallacies. And we hit just a few this evening, but they were very common. Maybe some of you were even thinking, oh, yeah, I've seen that in an argument against the Christian worldview. I've seen those kind of fallacies. They really do take place. The book that I've written that's along this topic, it's, you could read it in a day. It's called The Serving Truth. And it goes through the top 10 fallacies that evolutionists commit in some detail. And then it gives a list of some of the more minor ones in a lesser detail. And it's got even two tests in it where you can test your logical fallacy detection skills. And with an answer key provided, so you can check and see how you did. Or at least compare your answer with mine. I might be wrong on some of these too, but in any case, I think it's a neat resource. It's an easy read. Again, you can read it in a day. It's not a problem. And I think it'll really help in terms of your defense of the Christian faith. A book that I have that you want a little bit more on this kind of topic, how to think, how to debate properly, ultimate proof of creation. That's going to give you an irrefutable proof of the Christian worldview. Very, very powerful. It's going to teach you to think and to debate like Christ did in His earthly ministry. And Christ was not the sort of person you wanted to debate against. God has yet to lose an argument. Learn to think like God, that's a key. Learn to think rationally. Learn to think in a way that's consistent with God's character.