A common example of a straw man fallacy is one used by Arminians and anti-Calvinists alike, frequently charging Calvinist with the teaching that God drags the elect kicking and screaming to their predestined position in Christ; because we say man is dead in trespasses and sins and does not seek after God and that the redemptive grace of God cannot ultimately be resisted, then therefore, God drags those He had elected into the Kingdom against their will. Likewise (as the straw man goes) we teach that there will be persons in Hell who desired God and obeyed Him but God didn't save them because they were not numbered among the elect. Nothing could be further from the truth ans no Calvinist would say (or even draw the conclusion systematically) that God drags persons into the Kingdom kicking and screaming—so the anti-Calvinist builds up a “straw man” (the conclusions with which straw men are made, even their Calvinistic opponents would disagree) which can be knocked down with ease, QED, the Calvinistic position is wrong...so goes the straw man argument.
A red herring fallacy is where someone side-steps the real issue. For instance, I can discuss the points of historic Calvinism with my non-Calvinist friend and, inevitably he will bring up the “fact” that Calvin had persons burned at the stake for not believing as he did, thus everything Calvin taught is invalid. All historical absurdity and misrepresentation aside, we need not conclude that Calvinism is formally invalid because of this objection—in fact, my friend’s argument is formally invalid because he has not dealt with the issues Calvinism raises biblically, nor has he accurately represented the history of Calvinism or John Calvin himself but instead, he has introduced information that has no relevance to the validity of Calvinistic doctrine.
The fallacy of equivocation is where one changes the definition of terms mid argument, and it might look like this, I say to my dispensational friend that, because we are made the children of Abraham at our rebirth, the Church is the Israel of God and he replies by asserting that, because we do not become ethnic Jews at our spiritual rebirth, the church is not the Israel of God. We can see that the term being equivocated is the "Israel of God". I have made no indication in my statement that I am talking about the physical, ethnic nation of Israel, in fact I have qualified my use of the term in question by stating that we are Abraham's children but my friend redefines the term thus rejecting my premise due to his faulty argumentation.
Another, perhaps clearer example of equivocation is this: non-Calvinists agree that the bible calls the unbeliever dead in his trespasses and sins, but they also say that the unbeliever is not so dead as to be rendered incapable of seeking God. In this example, the equivocation occurred in the word "dead". It is one thing to say that the unbeliever is dead in his trespasses and sin, we all agree on that, but to assert that the same dead man is capable of seeking and even choosing God in his state of deadness is to redefine the meaning of dead as contextually defined in the first premise and thus formally invalidates the non-Calvinist's position on the deadness of the unbeliever.
2 comments:
Would the as hominim argument be an example of a red herring? Ad hominim: A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
Person A makes claim X
There is something objectionable about Person A
Therefore claim X is false
Does this fall under the category of a red herring?
Well, not formally. I think the ad hominem means, "against the man". The idea is that the opponent is attacked instead of the issues about which are being disagreed. So in one since, the ad hominem argument is a sort of red herring, but in the same since so would most fallacies, i.e. an appeal to authority or and appeal to majority, or an appeal to tradition all, in that sense, do side step the real issues, but I don't think they are formally considered sub categories of the red herring. I think the example I used of a red herring kind of confussed the explaination. A red herring is simply this: introducing information to the argument which is irrelavent to determining the formal validity of the premises of the argument. In an argument against Calvinism, one may introduce the historical fact that most Calvinists have been covenant theologians, thus concluding that "...they are wrong about that, therefore they can't be right about Calvinism."
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