Logical Fallacies and Faith

I get into trouble in debates sometimes. I'm perfectly capable of using rational, deductive methods to make my point, but I seem determined to abandon all reason at a certain point in every argument. Sometimes, however, I think faith calls for that. I would never pit faith and reason against each other; they can always work in tandem, and at times when they seem divergent, they seem to me to be occupy such different planes that it's like comparing apples and oranges—or maybe apples and elephants. In any case, I went back and looked up some of those formulaic logical fallacies I learned to avoid in high school philosophy class and found that two of them—appeal to emotion and appeal to tradition—could get me into a lot of trouble with a philosopher but are valuable, maybe even necessary, within Christianity.

The one that gets me most often is the appeal to emotion. I'll follow a logical argument and hold my own for a while, but at a certain point, it all breaks down and I make a flot-out appeal to the other person's heart. I know I can't stop bringing up this issue lately, but the place where thisgets me the most is in the homosexuality debate. I can be convinced by logic of the soundness of church tradition (which will come up later, obviously) and the sanctity of marriage, but in the end I always want to ask—what about Christ's mandate to love your neighbor? What do I do when a dear friend senses a call to ordination and is unable to pursue it—and I don't know whether to support him/her? Although in a strictly logical argument, my comment would be out of line and fallacious, I firmly believe that these questions are vital within Christianity. The way our logic causes us to treat other member of the body of Christ matters a great deal, and so I will not relinquish my insistence on the appeal to emotion even—and especially—when the logic is so sound.

I found it amusing that the appeal to tradition was listed in the fallacies I looked up; I had forgotten about that one. I was recently told by a friend that to resort to tradition (again on the issue of homosexuality) was ultimately a cop-out. I think this is incorrect, and I think this is what the fallacy of appeal to tradition assumes. However, 2,000 years of tradition cannot simply be ignored; we may indeed need to wrestle with it, and sometimes changes should be made—take the ordination of women, for example—but to discount it entirely is foolish and completely against the nature and continuity of the Christian faith over time. In the case of homosexuality, the appeal to emotion and the appeal to tradition both come up a lot and are often at odds one with the other. Both are valuable and need to be considered as more than logical fallacies.

Just to add on to the two fallacies I've discussed, another good one is the Ad Hominem fallacy. This is when an attack is made on the person making an argument, and that attack presumes to make the argument itself invalid. I see this a lot in Christianity. People are often turned off of the church because its members say one thing and do another. Philosophically speaking, hypocritical or inconsistent actions do not discount the credibility of the argument, but in the church, it matters that the words and the actions match up. Certainly no one is going to be able to have a perfect record in any given area; we all struggle with our sexuality in one way or another, so taking the moral high ground should never be the goal or the method of the debate on homosexuality. On one hand, we cannot claim that because Bob is a sinner, Bob cannot tell me not to sin; on the other hand, Bob should be aware of his sin and honest about it, because it does matter.

Just some thoughts about logic and faith I wanted to throw out there...