Appeal: red herring
From HEATED DEBATE! “jesusandwhatnot” Vs Jay Dyer! His ‘Gotcha’ Fails LOL.
- #99612:05upheld Jay Dyer psogos: red herring (+1)
The council upheld the call: Jay Dyer gave away 1 point.
“Did you know that modern modern calculators after 1970 were the first calculators that could even calculate a billion? So that's not even true because you couldn't even calculate it.”
Diogenes: The caller's point was about divorce and remarriage in Romans 7; Jay leads the exchange onto a fabricated joke about calculators instead of answering it.- Aristotle uphold: On the record: Jay Dyer's declared and consistently-held position is that Orthodox divorce/remarriage practice is defensible via economia and a non-exhaustive reading of the exception clause; in this particular exchange with S1 he does not deploy that argument but instead mocks the caller's "billions of bibles sealed it" phrasing with a calculator tangent, departing from direct engagement into a side issue. S1's substantive claim was that Romans 7 forbids remarriage while a spouse lives and that Orthodox/post-1970 practice therefore contradicts "sealed" scripture. Rather than engaging that claim (which Jay does answer substantively for other callers later, e.g. the economia explanation at 19:29-20:20), here he seizes on the caller's rhetorical flourish ("billions of bibles sealed it") and spins out a tangent about calculator history, then pivots to "are you a Roman Catholic"/Protestant-hypocrisy tu quoque — at no point in this specific exchange does he address whether the exception clause or economia actually answers Romans 7 for S1. That is a diversion from the point on the table into an irrelevant side-issue, which fits red herring; it is minor since the exchange is short and Jay does substantively engage the underlying divorce question with other callers minutes later.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "non sequitur", on the same ledger as the callout. S1's "billions of bibles, sealed" was rhetorical hyperbole for "this teaching is plainly and universally attested in scripture." Dyer's rejoinder — that pre-1970 calculators couldn't compute a billion, therefore "that's not even true" — treats the hyperbole as a literal claim requiring arithmetic verification and then declares the underlying scriptural point refuted on that basis; the premise about calculator capacity has no bearing on whether Romans 7 says what S1 says it says or on whether pre-1970 church practice forbade remarriage. It is a joke dressed as a refutation, not an answer to either the exegetical or historical claim on the table, though Dyer does go on to engage the substance (the 1973 COGIC point, Protestant divorce practice) immediately after.
- Plato overturn: On the record: S1's opening and consistent claim (never abandoned) is that Romans 7 "seals" the adultery of remarriage while a spouse lives, using hyperbolic phrasing ("sealed... billions of bibles... nobody can get around that"); S3's consistent counter-method throughout the whole debate, with this caller and others, is a mix of mockery of overreach plus substantive rebuttal (tu quoque that Protestantism itself permits divorce, and later, with other callers, a full economia-based defense of Orthodox practice). The calculator gag mocks S1's own hyperbolic embellishment ("billions of bibles sealed it") rather than substituting for engagement with the underlying Romans 7 claim: in the very same breath Jay pivots to "Let's go over your doctrine, Jay" and then delivers a real tu quoque ("this critique would apply to your own position... all of Protestantism is apostate too"), which S1 never rebuts. Since the jab is followed by, not instead of, a substantive point, it fails the substitution test for a fallacy and is better read as rhetoric/mockery, which the rubric says scores nothing on its own.
Appeal this callout
Appeals come only from the debaters themselves. Sign in with Google to start; you'll then prove which debater you are, once.