Appeal: begging the question
From FULL SAVAGE DEBATE: Jay Dyer Vs Indiana Brunner: Protestant Bible Wrong???.
- #60547:43upheld Indiana Brunner psogos: begging the question (+2)
The council upheld the call: Indiana Brunner gave away 2 points.
“You take what you know to be the speech of God and measure it against what is proposed to be the speech of God.”
Diogenes: Told that his example presupposes the canon in dispute, he restates the same method, which still requires an already-known standard of God's speech that is precisely what he was asked to justify.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: S1 has held since the opening that doctrine and here, canon status must rest on what is already known/explicit rather than assumed; this line is meant as that same standing method applied to the canon question, but it fails on its own terms because the "already known" standard he invokes is itself part of the disputed canon, making this a real instance of begging the question rather than a new or different move. Jay had already identified, moments earlier at 46:46, that using Acts as evidence for how canon is determined presupposes Acts's own canonicity; here S1, given the chance to give an independent standard, instead restates the identical abstract formula ("what you know to be the speech of God") and immediately re-applies it to the same example (the Bereans in Acts, "This is the word of God"), never explaining how that antecedent standard is itself known without circularity. That is the "no mechanism" side of the circle: he never says which independent thing, council, apostolic succession, an agreed prior canon, breaks the loop, so the charge is not answered but repeated.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "begging the question". Brunner states his canon-testing method in the abstract, but he immediately cashes it out by naming the Bereans "coming to the church in Berea" — an episode from Acts — as the "known" speech of God against which to measure Matthew's authorship, even though Acts's own canonical status is exactly what is in dispute; Dyer's objections moments later ("we don't know yet that Acts is actually part of the scriptures," "you're using a thing in question") are pointing at precisely this move.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Indiana's declared method is that doctrine (including which texts are scripture) must be tested against explicit textual/apostolic standards; here, having just been told his Berean-model example (Acts) presupposes Acts' own canonicity, he restates the identical "measure the proposed against what you know" formula without supplying any independent, non-circular ground for that antecedent "known" standard. Jay had just flagged the circularity (we don't yet know Acts is scripture, so citing Acts' Bereans as the method for identifying scripture assumes the conclusion), and Indiana's reply simply repeats the same circular formula rather than grounding "what you know to be the speech of God" independently, which is a clean instance of begging the question, made more pointed for having been named and restated unchanged.
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