‘Begging the question’ and the ‘fallacy fallacy’

Christians are supposed to be imitators of Jesus Christ. In John 1, He is called the ‘Word’, which in the original Greek is Logos/Λόγος, from which we derive the word logic. Jesus masterfully employed logic in His teachings; therefore, Christians should be logical in their reasoning.

“Abortion is right because it is legal” begs the question that everything legal is right. But not everything legal is right, and not everything illegal is wrong. E.g. murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was perfectly legal but a moral abomination.

Begging the question is a fallacy where the conclusion to be proved is presupposed (‘begged’) in one of the premises. That is, assuming what needs to be proven instead of providing independent evidence. The Latin name for the fallacy is petitio principii, meaning ‘assume the first thing’.

An example of begging the question is:

Abortion is right because it is legal.

This statement begs the question that everything legal is right, because this is not proven. We know from history that not everything legal is right, and not everything illegal is wrong. E.g. murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was perfectly legal but a moral abomination. Preaching the Gospel is right, but it is illegal in many countries.

A related fallacy is that of a loaded question. The standard example is, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ It is impossible for anyone to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without admitting to wife-beating. If asked in the absence of evidence, such an interrogation would unethically beg the question because it implicitly assumes that the suspect beat his wife either now or in the past.

Many arguments against Christianity beg the question. For example:

Skeptic: Miracles can’t be true because there are no reliable reports of them.

Christian: But the Bible reliably reports many miracles.

Skeptic: The Bible is clearly unreliable because it reports that miracles occurred.

That is, the skeptic has already begged the question that miracles have not occurred. That is the only evidence he presents—that the biblical reports are false.

Clearly, a strong overlap exists between begging the question and arguing in a circle. (But see creation.com/circular to address the skeptical claim that Christians use the Bible to prove the Bible.)

Evolutionists are also known for this fallacy. For instance, chemical evolution (life from non-living chemicals) could not have occurred if free oxygen gas were present. It would destroy any building blocks and, in fact, prevent them from forming in the first place. But how do we know that the early earth had an oxygen-free atmosphere? Some chemical evolutionists seriously claim that the strongest evidence is that we are here and ultimately arose by chemical evolution. This begs the question of whether chemical evolution occurred at all.

Another example is in cosmogony, i.e. ‘birth of the universe’. The big bang theory says that nothing exploded and became everything, producing almost exclusively matter and hardly any antimatter. But the Standard Model of Particle Physics says that an equal amount of matter and antimatter must have been produced. However, big bangers claim that the Standard Model must be wrong or incomplete. Why? Because we are here and arose from the big bang!

Both of these evolutionary arguments are logically similar to the following ‘reasoning’:

Food is essential for life, and pizza is food. You must have eaten pizza. How do we know? You’re alive, aren’t you?

Begging the question is an example of an informal logical fallacy. That is, it breaks no laws of logic as such. After all, ‘If P is true, then P is true’ is logically valid. However, it is fallacious because it provides no good argument for why we should think P is true.

(Note: We advise against using ‘begs the question’ if you mean ‘prompts the question’ or ‘raises the question’. If you mean either of the latter, just say so.)

The fallacy fallacy is not a typo! It means the fallacy of assuming that the conclusion of an argument is false because the argument contains a fallacy. It is also called the argument from fallacy. However, people can believe the right things for the wrong reasons.

For example, several people have told me they reject evolution because, ‘If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?’ This fallacious argument is one that CMI has long argued that creationists should avoid (see creation.com/dontuse). But just because they argued fallaciously doesn’t mean their conclusion is wrong.

Why was the argument fallacious? Because both evolutionists and creationists understand that variation can occur most readily in a small population that became isolated from the main one. That is, the small population can vary greatly, while the large one remains generally unchanged.

The difference is that evolutionists believe that new kinds can arise in a small population, leading to essentially unlimited variation. However, creationists point out that after the Ark landed in the mountains of Ararat, small populations rapidly expanded and became separated by mountainous barriers. Therefore, they could rapidly diversify into different varieties and even species (called allopatric speciation). But this variation is limited, with no new kinds arising. An ancestral canid pair gave rise to e.g. coyotes, jackals, wolves, etc. while always clearly of the ‘dog’ kind.

[TBC: for the full article and footnotes, see;]

https://creation.com/begging-question-fallacy