How to Spot Logical Fallacies

Most people have encountered logical fallacies. The average person could likely name a couple but would struggle to articulate a comprehensive definition or explanation.

Regrettably, logical fallacies factor prominently in the ongoing debates between Catholics and Protestants, to the point where we might wonder if Protestants are exploiting Catholics’ lack of in-depth knowledge regarding this topic. However, with a firm grasp of how logical fallacies function, Catholics defending the Faith can expose many common Protestant arguments as invalid. This book aims to impart a clear understanding of what logical fallacies entail and illuminate the ways in which Protestants rely on them.

Fallacies are, essentially, just errors in reasoning. Many times, people can notice these fallacies, even if they don’t know what they’re called. For instance, say a friend came up to you and said, “I had a bad experience at the restaurant in town. All the restaurants in this city are horrible.” Despite not knowing what this fallacy is called (hasty generalization), you can tell that this is an invalid form of reasoning: Just because you had one bad experience in one restaurant, that doesn’t mean that all the restaurants in the city are bad.

Here is another kind of fallacious argument that hits home for many Catholics: When people who are pro-choice argue that because women will still get abortions even if they are illegal, we should not bother criminalizing abortion. In reality, people who want to make abortion illegal recognize that abortions will occur even if abortion is illegal, just like any other illegal behavior, yet we don’t refrain from criminalizing all manner of other acts on these grounds.

Knowing logical fallacies not only makes them easier to recognize and call out, but also makes us more logical thinkers and debaters. For an example, I’ve been told both of these statements on more than one occasion.

Statement 1: “Catholics hid the Bible until Luther made it available to the people.”

Statement 2: “Catholics contradict the Bible explicitly.”

For the sake of argument, let’s grant that both of these statements are true. Together, they make very little sense. If the Church hid the Bible because of the supposed contradictions with Church teaching, but also only the Church had access to the Bible, then why not change the Bible to line up with Church doctrine? This would have been easy to do, particularly in the many hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century. Changing the Bible would make much more sense than hiding it but continually copying the book word for word.

Remember, we’re not questioning the accuracy, historical or otherwise, of the above statements. Even if we assume that each is true, logically, they can’t both be true. Now any Protestant we’re debating has to choose only one, and he has lost half his arsenal.

As another example, suppose a Protestant came up to you and said, “The Catholics added the deuterocanonical books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.” This is something I have been told many more times than I would like, and it also is not historically accurate. However, you don’t have to know the intricate history of the deuterocanonical books of the Bible to know that Catholics did not add to the Old Testament. How? Because another group of well-pedigreed Christians—namely, the Eastern Orthodox—also consider these books part of Scripture. Given that the Eastern Orthodox broke from the Catholic Church in the eleventh century, and the Council of Trent took place in the sixteenth century, it wouldn’t make sense for the Orthodox to accept as Scripture the books that Catholics added to the Bible five hundred years later.

Picking out logical problems in Protestant argumentation is important not only for the person you are debating, but for listening bystanders as well. In a formal debate, your opponent is probably not going to change his mind. However, “My opponent is making a logical fallacy known as X, and here’s why it’s fallacious” can be resoundingly convincing for the audience.

An easy fallacy to spot would be the straw man: when your opponent mischaracterizes your position and then argues against the mischaracterization.

For instance, it’s often said that Catholics worship saints. This is a mischaracterization, and Protestants who use it to draw sensationalistic conclusions—for example, that Catholics commit idolatry—are arguing only against a straw man, not against the actual Catholic position. Most people I have interacted with in theological discussions know what a straw man is, so we won’t go in depth on it beyond this paragraph.

Another all-too-well-known fallacy is sometimes called the out of context fallacy, or the contextomy fallacy. This fallacy occurs when—you guessed it—you take someone’s quote or saying out of context.

 Now, I have seen Protestants use this fallacy with Church Fathers and Scripture more times than there are grains of sand in the Sahara. However, everyone knows that you shouldn’t do this, and an informed Catholic can spot it.

When someone breaks the rules of logic, he normally doesn’t break just one. It’s like with criminals: When they break one law, they frequently break others in the process.

Want to know more? Order your copy of The Protestant Fallacies: Ten Anti-Catholic Arguments that Break the Laws of Logic today!