Claryfing category confusions in the debate about God

Two popular arguments against theism sound compelling at first but collapse under scrutiny. They fail not because they're poorly delivered, but because they're built on logical errors that no amount of wit can repair.

1. The Disagreement Fallacy (Non Sequitur)

The Claim: Thousands of religions exist and contradict each other, therefore they must all be false.

The Problem: This is a non sequitur. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. Disagreement about truth doesn't eliminate truth—it confirms that truth exists and that people are searching for it.

Consider a math problem with ten different answers. Does this mean mathematics is fictional? No. It means nine people are wrong (possibly all ten). The existence of error doesn't negate the existence of correctness.

This argument commits what we might call the "plurality fallacy"—assuming that because something is contested, it cannot be real. But objective truths are, by their nature, exclusive. Only one answer can be correct, even if millions of alternatives exist.

Christianity makes a specific claim about reality: that a particular person said and did particular things in history. The question isn't whether many religions exist. The question is whether this specific claim is true. 

• The Logical Flaw: Disagreement is not evidence of absence; it is evidence of a complex subject. If ten people calculate a math problem and get ten different answers, it doesn't mean mathematics is a myth. It means nine (or ten) people are wrong.

• The Heightened Argument: By citing the plurality of religions as proof against God, this falls into the "Subjectivist Fallacy." He assumes that because truth is contested, truth is non-existent. However, Christianity is not a "preference"; it is a claim about objective reality. Objective truths are, by definition, exclusive.

 

The Replicability Argument

The Claim: If we destroyed all books, science would return exactly as it is, but religion wouldn't. Therefore science is real and religion is not.

The Problem: This commits a category error. It compares two fundamentally different types of knowledge as if they should behave identically.

Science studies repeatable natural phenomena. Gravity will always fall at the same rate. Chemical reactions will always produce the same results. This is what we expect from natural law.

History records events that happened once. If we destroyed all records of the Magna Carta, no laboratory could reconstruct it. Does this mean the Magna Carta never existed? Of course not. It means we've lost the testimony.

Christianity is not a scientific theory about how nature behaves. It's a historical claim about events that occurred: a God-man who lived, taught, was executed, and according to witnesses, appeared alive afterwards. These claims stand or fall on the reliability of testimony, not on laboratory repeatability.

Demanding that God be "rediscoverable" like a chemical element is demanding that the Creator of the universe behave like an object within the universe. It treats God as a phenomenon rather than as the source of all phenomena.

• The Logical Flaw: Comparing Natural Law (which is constant) to Historical Revelation (which is an event).

• The Heightened Argument: Science relies on induction (repeatable observation), but human knowledge also relies heavily on testimony and history. If we destroyed all records of the Magna Carta, it would never be "rediscovered" in a lab, yet that doesn't invalidate its historical reality.

• The Rebuttal: To demand that God be "rediscoverable" like gravity is to demand that God be an object within the universe rather than the creator of it. It treats the Creator as a chemical compound. If God is a Person who chooses to reveal Himself at a specific point in history (the Incarnation), He cannot be "re-evolved" through a microscope. 

The Hidden Assumption

Both arguments assume a closed system where, if humans lose information, that information is gone forever. But this assumption already contradicts what Christianity claims about God.

The Christian God is not passive or silent. If God is a person who communicates, then the destruction of books doesn't require Him to remain mute. The claim is that God's word is not merely ink on pages but the active communication of a living being who sustains reality itself.

To argue "if the books were gone, God would be gone" is to presuppose deism (a silent, absent god) in order to disprove theism (an active, communicating God). It's circular reasoning. It assumes that if the text of Bible was lost, God would not speak again through people, as he did in the past, and his Word delivered.  

What This Means

These arguments may sound decisive, but they're built on confusion:

• Plurality doesn't negate truth. It demands we search for it.
• History isn't a laboratory. We assess historical claims through testimony and evidence, not through reproducible experiments.
• God isn't an object. If God exists, He's a subject who reveals Himself on His own terms, not a natural phenomenon awaiting detection.

 Christianity doesn't offer a hypothesis to test in a lab. It offers testimony about a person who entered history. That testimony can be examined, questioned, or rejected. But it can't be dismissed through category confusion.