Appeal: begging the question
From Protestant vs. Orthodox: Scripture and Tradition (Gavin Ortlund + Stephen De Young).
- #16121:32:55tied, awaiting the moderator Stephen De Young psogos: begging the question (+2)
The council is split: nothing counts until the moderator decides.
“Well, I I don't think there was a need for that if it was the general practice.”
Diogenes: The absence of any pre-500 advocate is explained away by an assumption — that icon veneration was already the general practice — which is precisely the claim the missing testimony was asked to establish.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: S3 has held throughout that Orthodox practice and doctrine can be established through the church's collective historical reception rather than named individual advocates, and here, pressed for any positive early witness, he shifts from citing evidence (as he does elsewhere, e.g. the Jerusalem Talmud, Basil) to assuming the conclusion to explain its absence — a genuine lapse from, not a mere restatement of, his evidentiary method. Asked to name any pre-500 AD advocate for icon veneration, De Young answers that none was needed "if it was the general practice" — using the truth of the very proposition in dispute (that veneration was already widespread and ancient) to explain away the total absence of positive testimony that was supposed to establish that proposition. Ortlund himself flags this in the moment ("that seems to me to be assuming the very context that we're trying to get"), which corroborates that the circularity is real and recognized on the floor, not merely a summary imposed after the fact. Given this goes to the heart of the antiquity claim for icon veneration — De Young's case has no positive pre-500 witness and instead leans on this circular defense of the silence — major severity is warranted.
- Socrates overturn: Read blind, found "direct answer". Pressed by Ortlund to name any pre-500 AD advocate of icon veneration, De Young does not evade: he effectively concedes no such named advocate exists and directly engages the evidentiary point, explaining that uncontested practices typically generate no defensive literature until challenged — the same silence-argument pattern already used on both sides regarding Trinitarian doctrine's pre-Nicene silence.
- Plato uphold: On the record: S3 has held since ~82:23 that universal, uncontroversial practices generate no defensive literature and are attested only once challenged (the parallel he drew for Trinitarian dogma and for Moses' assumption); this line reapplies that general inference to Ortlund's "name an advocate" challenge rather than introducing a new move. Taken on its own terms, the line does explain the total absence of any pre-500 positive testimony for icon veneration by presupposing that veneration was already the common, unremarked practice — exactly the fact in dispute — which is a genuine instance of assuming the conclusion to answer the challenge; the general "uncontested practices aren't defended" principle is a real interpretive heuristic he's used before, but it does not on its own supply independent evidence that veneration specifically (rather than mere silence) obtained before 500, so the circularity charge lands, though the earlier-cited Jerusalem Talmud and Basil material elsewhere in the debate meaningfully soften how central or unanswered this single move is.
- Thesmothetes leave: The judges do not dispute what De Young said or that he had earlier stated a general principle (uncontroversial practices generate no defensive literature until challenged, first applied to the Trinity/Moses parallel around 82:23-83:00) which he reapplies here and then elaborates ("this is part of the ethos of how church fathers work"). The disagreement is purely whether reapplying that stated heuristic to explain the silence on icon veneration is a valid, consistent inferential move (Socrates, and Plato's softening note) or an illicit circularity because the heuristic's application here presupposes the very antiquity of the practice in dispute (Aristotle, Plato). No listed rule — not bare assertion (a reason was in fact given), not "do not complete the argument" (De Young supplies the ethos-reason himself), not the circle-with-a-mechanism doctrine (which addresses a different dispute), and not any dodge or straw-man provision — settles whether this counts as begging the question rather than a defensible historiographical inference; this is a judgment call about argument validity that the rules leave to the archon.
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