Appeal: self-contradiction
From FULL Muslim Lantern Vs Jay Dyer Debate / SNEAKO - Islam / Christianity.
- #64357:11upheld Jay Dyer psogos: self-contradiction (+1)
The council upheld the call: Jay Dyer gave away 1 point.
“Appealing to scholars is a fallacy of authority if you think that proves a position. You argued that there's a bunch of scholars that debate the early church. So what? That has nothing to do with proving a position.”
Diogenes: His own opening rested on named scholars (Sommer, Boyarin, Schäfer) to establish a historical claim, so declaring citation of scholarship worthless when the other side does it applies a standard he does not keep.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Jay Dyer opened by citing Sommer, Boyarin, Siegel, and Schäfer for the claim that Second Temple Judaism recognized plurality within monotheism, and explicitly said "these scholars prove that in the time of Christ, there was not a generic Unitarianism" (12:04); at 57:11 he declares that citing scholars "doesn't prove anything" and calls it "the fallacy of appeal to authority" when Muslim Lantern cites Corwin and Schoedel on Ignatius for a structurally identical historical-critical claim about the fathers. Jay's own words at 12:04 ("these scholars prove...") directly contradict his later blanket claim that appealing to scholars "doesn't prove anything" and constitutes a fallacy, applied against the opponent's structurally identical practice of citing named scholars on primary source content, with no acknowledgment of the reversal.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "misrepresentation", on the same ledger as the callout. Jay reduces S2's citations of named scholars — Corwin and Schoedel with specific page numbers and quoted findings on Ignatius (27:20), and named non-Muslim scholars on Qur'anic preservation — to a bare "fallacy of appeal to authority," as if S2 had merely said "scholar X believes it, therefore it's true." But those citations carried specific, checkable textual reasoning, not bare authority-assertion, so reducing them to the fallacy label mischaracterizes what was actually argued rather than engaging its content.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Jay's opening method was scriptural-historical argument buttressed by named scholarly citation treated as proof of a historical claim; at 57:11 he asserts, without acknowledging the tension, that such citation "proves nothing" and is fallacious when his opponent does structurally the same thing he did. In his opening Jay said, of his cited scholars, "I'm saying that these scholars prove that in the time of Christ, there was not a generic Unitarianism" — the very "citation proves the position" move he condemns here as "a fallacy of authority... if you think that proves a position." The sweep of his 57:11 dismissal ("that has nothing to do with proving a position") also catches ML's specific, checkable citations (Corwin, Schoedel on Ignatius) that this bench separately credited as evidence, showing Jay applying a standard to the opponent he did not hold himself to earlier in the same debate.
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