Appeal: fallacy spotted
From Jay Dyer vs Pastor P Debate Orthodoxy vs Protestantism, Sola Scriptura and Church History.
- #130932:31upheld Jay Dyer epainos: fallacy spotted (+2)
The council upheld the call: Jay Dyer earned 2 points.
“What I'm asking you about is the actual contents of the word of God, and you're saying that I follow what follows the word of God. But this is about the putting in into into the word of God, the books of the word of God.”
Diogenes: He names the circle exactly: the criterion offered for identifying the canon presupposes the canon already identified.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: S0 has held since the opening that the canon and apostolic authorship are knowable only through the historical witness of the church, not by private assertion; this line applies that very standard by showing Pastor P's 'agrees with the Old Testament' criterion presupposes the disputed content of the Old Testament, which is consistent with, not a departure from, his stated position. Throughout the debate Jay Dyer's consistent line is that the canon can only be known through the church's historical tradition, and that Pastor P's justification for accepting the Carthage canon while rejecting the deuterocanon rests on an unargued assumption about what counts as 'the Old Testament' — the very content in dispute. Earlier in this same exchange Pastor P had explicitly given his criterion as agreement with the Old Testament, and Jay is here pointing out that this criterion is circular because whether the deuterocanon belongs to the Old Testament is itself unsettled between them; Pastor P never supplies an independent, non-circular mechanism (only 'I believe God blessed it'), so this is a genuine instance of begging the question in what the opponent actually argued, not a mischaracterization of a mechanism-based answer.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "clarification", on the same ledger as the callout. Jay is not making a fresh argument here but restating, amid Pastor P's drift toward general talk of "following the word of God," that the live question is specifically which books count as the word of God (the canon), not whether one adheres to it once fixed. This keeps the exchange focused on the actual point in dispute rather than letting the interlocutor answer a different, easier question - a minor but genuine clarifying move, consistent with the sustained line Jay pursues throughout this segment about the canon's justification.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Jay Dyer opened by arguing that the canon and apostolic authorship are historical facts known only through the church's continuous tradition, not through ad hoc individual appeals to "the Holy Spirit told me" or bare assertion; this line is a direct, consistent application of that opening claim to Pastor P's specific canon-justification. Throughout the debate Jay's recorded framework holds that canon and apostolic authorship are known only through the church's continuous historical witness, not through an individual's private appeal to "the word of God" as self-validating. At this exact juncture Pastor P has just answered why he accepts Carthage's New Testament but rejects its accompanying acceptance of the Deuterocanon by saying the criterion was that books had to "agree with the word of God" / the Old Testament. Jay's quoted line correctly identifies that this criterion is circular: the content of "the word of God" (specifically, whether the Deuterocanon is part of the Old Testament) is precisely the thing in dispute, so citing agreement-with-the-word-of-God as the standard for canonicity presupposes an answer to the canon question it's meant to settle. This is a genuine begging-the-question caught in what Pastor P actually said, not a restatement of a circle that named a mechanism (Pastor P offers no independent means of knowing the OT contents other than the assertion itself), so the misrepresentation exception in the rubric does not apply here.
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