Old bookLately I've been hanging around Foru.ms (formerly known as ChristianForums.com, RIP), mostly in the Apologetics, Christian Philosophy & Ethics, and College / Bible College forums. Recently I observed a fine example of a fallacious sort of argument that we might call "argument from overwhelming".

Greg Koukl might call it the steamroller tactic. In its electronic, forum-based version, a person will post (usually as his/her first and only post(s) on a forum) a ridiculous amount of information, usually copied and pasted from other websites. Then, they will add their own comments as the last paragraph of the post, something along the lines of "See Christianity has been proven wrong!"

Now, I'm sure people of every religious persuasion are guilty of doing the very same thing. But this sort of tactic is dishonest regardless of who is doing it. The perpetrator can confidently fold his or her arms and gloat, since it'd be practically impossible for someone to respond to everything that has been pasted into the thread.

Anyways, the post on CF demonstrated a second fallacy. The thread I quote from below has been rightly deleted as trolling/spam, but I saved a copy of the post before it was removed. Here's a portion of what the author actually wrote him/herself:

The truth is that all religions were simply made up by ancient peasants that didn't have the science and facts we do today and just took a guess based on nothing which is that a ghost with magical powers created everything.

Here we have an example of the fallacy of chronological snobbery. (Which, I just learned, was coined by C. S. Lewis and friend Owen Barfield.) Essentially, it is the unjustified assumption that all thinking, art, science, etc of previous eras is inherently inferior to our own. (As an aside, this comment also uses loaded language as its author builds a straw man depiction of God.)

Chronological snobbery assumes that all "ancient" people were ignoramuses who can't be trusted. Where the line is to be drawn in history to divide these supposedly ignorant savages from today's enlightened, intelligent thinkers is never explicitly stated, but likely lies just prior to the birth of the person espousing such a view. I certainly hope that, a hundred years hence, everything we think and believe isn't dismissed out of hand by those living in 2107 just because "Everyone in 2007 was ignorant of modern science."

Even though ancient peoples were indeed ignorant of many areas of modern science, they still knew how to make accurate historical claims. For example, people knew that, generally speaking, dead people stay dead. Unless, of course many independent witnesses were convinced, to the point of their own deaths, that a dead mad had risen …

Related reading:

  • The Facts Concerning the Resurrection – Dr Gary Habermas explains why even if we don't accept the Bible as "inerrant" we can build a case for the resurrection using only facts agreed upon by the vast majority of critical scholars.
  • Good people – What makes a person "good"? What did Jesus say when he was asked this question?

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