CIRCULAR LOGIC: USING THE BIBLE TO PROVE THE BIBLE'S CLAIMS

 

A dog chasing its own tail. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Circular reasoning is a well-known informal fallacy that takes the form "A is true because B, which is true because A." It assumes to be true that which ought to be demonstrated to be true by the argument. It is bad reasoning because it's not very good reasoning. (See what I did there?) It is a shortcut hack that can be very appealing to people who have a deeply ingrained commitment to the truth of the belief they are expressing.

One of the commonest examples of circular logic in pop conversations is when religious people claim the Bible is true (or is the inerrant, infallible word of God) because the Bible itself says so, thus assuming that the Bible is true upfront. This is not very good reasoning because it assumes to be true (that the Bible is true) that which ought to be demonstrated to be true (that the Bible is true). 

A recent thread on Twitter aimed to show that this well-acclaimed logical fallacy is, somehow, not a fallacy. It was an ambitious project, and I was quite interested in understanding the perspective of the author, Mohsule. Because of time and space, I will not be addressing everything he said in the thread; I will only focus on the relevant points. 

First, Mohsule lays what, it seems, he believes to be the case of the sceptics when arguing against the truth or validity of the Bible. He alleges that sceptics and critics of the Bible have an "insufficient knowledge" of what the Bible says, and this "constricts the scope" of how sceptics investigate the Bible. As a result, sceptics have a "serious misunderstanding" of Old Testament passages where God seemingly committed "atrocities," finding this irreconcilable with "an all-loving, benevolent God." While I don't consider this germane to the main point, it, as I perceive it here, is merely an attempt to poison the well. 

Now, onto the main subject. (Specific quotes may be extracted from the thread and coloured. Quotes may be edited for readability but will remain close to the original text. Emphases, unless otherwise stated, are mine.)

So according to [sceptics'] assessment, one cannot defend such a faulty book with the same faulty book seeing as that would be circular logic and and secondarily, doing so would further lead to faulty conclusions.

It might be crucial to note that circular reasoning as a fallacy is independent of the 'faultiness' of the source material. The mere fact that A is used to justify A is all that's necessary for the reasoning to be fallacious, whether A is actually true or not. But this is a rather trivial point, so let's move on. 

Mohsule goes on to say that to make the above inference would be "grossly subjective." But why? Circular reasoning is a near-universally accepted fallacy of reasoning. Just as an example: one of the cases that Christian apologists make against atheists is that many atheists hold on to the philosophical view called 'scientism'—the notion that science is the only reliable path to truth. Christian apologists point out that scientism relies on circular reasoning; it merely assumes that scientism is true to assert that scientism is true. Will Mohsule be happy to claim that the Christian case against scientism is also "grossly subjective" or does he consider it definitive? 

Circular logic is a fallacy where the conclusion of a claim only leads back to its premises. For instance, I ask a friend “why are you a doctor?” He replies, “Because I studied medicine.” Not satisfied, I inquire, “Why did you study medicine?” He responds with finality, “Because I want (sic) to be a doctor.” Now that’s circular logic because the conclusion led us back to the premises; he was basically saying “I’m a doctor coz I’m a doctor.” 

This example is not circular logic. He did not say "I am a doctor because I am a doctor." He said, "I am a doctor because I want(ed) to be a doctor." That might be an insufficient reason, but it is not a circular one. The fact that Mohsule used this example suggests that he does not understand what circular reasoning means. 

Shortly after this, Mohsule somewhat befuddlingly says he agrees, "logically, that saying 'the Bible is true because it’s the word of God and it’s the word of God because it’s true' is circular reasoning ... " This baffles me greatly. He does admit that appealing to the Bible to prove the Bible's claims is circular reasoning! 

So what exactly is his project in this thread? He says that the charge of circular reasoning "does not apply ... because [of] how the Bible is structured." The Bible is a combination of many books, not a single book. Implicitly, he seems to mean that some books of the Bible can offer corroboration for other books of the Bible, thus making it noncircular internally. But why should this be convincing to the sceptic, especially one who sees clearly that Christians treat the Bible as one single book with a single revealed will and has been told several times over by Christians that the entire Bible is true, inerrant and infallible? 

Mohsule then goes on to make a rather interesting claim: that since the early church fathers and councils that determined the canon of scripture went for sources with "only the earliest of sources as those are deemed to have more authenticity than later manuscripts," this somewhat precludes the Bible from the need for external corroboration. He says, "The earliest sources was (sic) what the church fathers and councils canonized, hence the Bible," quoting Bart Ehrman as support (no citation given). But this is not quite the truth about the canonisation process. The canonisation process for the New Testament books took centuries for them to be furnished. And even at that, several questions still abounded regarding what counts as scripture. Early forms of the canon were very primitive and lacked many of the books in today's recognised Bible. Some modern denominations even have other so-called deuterocanonical and apocryphal books included in their canon. It's not very obvious that dating played any significant role in what books eventually got selected by the councils. Many selective factors were in play, universal acceptance being a major one. Yet, all these denominations make similar claims of historical rigour and reliability about their own canons, whereas the canonisation process in most of them relied on not much more than consensus agreement. 

Furthermore, the early fathers and councils who canonised these books intended them all to collectively be the authoritative, inspired word of God. In this sense, the Bible is unitary. Even if it was written by multiple human authors, they all supposedly had the same divine inspiration—God. In this sense, the Bible is still a single source material and, therefore, should not be used to justify its own claims. Questions about secondary sources versus early sources are misplaced. The point of the sceptic's claim is that the Bible should not be given the privileged status of being a self-justifying source material as that would amount to circular reasoning. That has nothing to do with whether the sources were early or late.

The comparison with Socrates, apart from its weakness, is also a distraction. No one argues that Jesus never existed just because Christians using the Bible to justify the Bible amounts to circular reasoning. (I, for one, am not a mythicist.) And while there is indeed a Socratic problem in philosophy and history, the existence of Socrates can be confidently inferred from several independent source materials. But even more crucially, Socrates's words are not taken to be divinely inspired or authoritative, so the standard of evidence for the claims of the Bible's historicity are even higher for the Bible, since one not only has to demonstrate that these fact claims are true but that they are true as stated—that divine miracles did occur in first-century Palestine.

So, as far as I'm concerned, Mohsule's thread fails to show that using the Bible to prove the Bible is not circular reasoning. It incorrectly subsumes that circular reasoning claims about the Bible are "grossly subjective"; it concedes the main point of the interlocutors on logical grounds; it aims to special-plead for the Bible; and it addresses irrelevant issues, such as the existence of Socrates.

It is very easy to see why a Christian would not want it to be the case that using the Bible to prove the Bible's claims amounts to circular reasoning. We all tend to be circular on our deeply held beliefs because they appear so true that they don't seem to require external justification; and for most Christians, the Bible is the word of God. This makes them more willing to accept its claims as immediately true and not to see that believing that the Bible's claims are true because it says so in the Bible is circular reasoning. But if we care about proper reasoning, we should be willing to not only identify the fallacies we commit but revise our premises to eliminate them.