Appeal: equivocation
From Jay Dyer vs Mike Lowry Urantia Debate: Christianity vs Urantianism.
- #132657:54upheld Mike Lowry psogos: equivocation (+2)
The council upheld the call: Mike Lowry gave away 2 points.
“Well, so then we have a small disagreement of terms.”
Diogenes: Mike claims agreement with the Nicene doctrines while, on his own account, assigning the words different meanings, then downgrades the substantive difference to a verbal one — trading on shared vocabulary to manufacture consensus.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Mike has held since early in the debate a habit of retaining Christian vocabulary (resurrection, atonement, trinity) while assigning it the different, graded/emanationist content of his own framework — a pattern Jay already flagged directly ("you're using the words in a different way than we mean them," ~45:27) — and this line is the culmination of that same pattern: claiming agreement ("I do believe in the trinity") and then, once caught out, relabeling a substantive doctrinal gap (non-homoousion vs. homoousion, per his own later-stated Trinity view) as merely "a small disagreement of terms.". This is the same conduct Jay's immediately preceding line correctly called out (upheld elsewhere as "fallacy spotted"), and the two ledgers are not netted against each other: Mike's use of shared terms to manufacture apparent consensus, followed by downgrading an admittedly major doctrinal divergence to a merely verbal one, fits equivocation on its own merits and is not a new position but the visible seam of a pattern held since at least the earlier "resurrection"/"eternal life" exchange.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "self-contradiction", on the same ledger as the callout. Minutes earlier Mike had laid out, at some length, a Trinity that is graded rather than consubstantial — Father as unified absolute deity, Son as "vehicle" of creation, Spirit as "conjoint actor," explicitly not the Nicene one-nature/homoousion picture Jay then restates. When Jay points out that Mike's own account redefines "trinity" away from what Orthodoxy means by it, Mike downgrades that very divergence to "a small disagreement of terms," understating a difference he himself had just described as a distinct, graded metaphysical scheme rather than a mere semantic variance.
- Plato overturn: On the record: Mike has held since the opening that his theology is coherent with and continuous with core Christian claims as he understands them, and here — after being pressed — he is narrowing that claim rather than freshly trading on a shared word to manufacture agreement. The quoted line is not itself an equivocal argument — it is Mike's assessment of how serious the just-identified difference in what "trinity" means to him versus Jay is, immediately met by Jay's flat denial ("Not a small disagreement"). The actual equivocal use of terms (giving "resurrection," "atonement," etc. different content while affirming agreement) occurred much earlier, around 42-49, where Jay already identified the disconnect ("I see the disconnect now"); this later line is Mike narrowing his earlier blanket claims of agreement toward something closer to an admission that a real difference exists, which cuts against, not toward, manufacturing false consensus by hidden equivocation.
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