I’ll start. They condemn paid ministries, but paying general authorities is good as long as it is called a stipend.

This may have been asked before, but I hear this a lot in atheist circles. When you try to show that God is the explanation for the universe to come into existence, it is often claimed that “Everything needs an explanation, but not God. Isn’t that special pleading?”

The other objections I hear is, “You believe in God. You believe the universe was created by God. You only believe this because you believe in God first”. (Post hoc)

Paragraph 3 from today’s study article

3. We are also hated because we live by God’s righteous standards. These standards contrast sharply with the word’s degraded morals. For example, many people now openly approve of grossly immoral practices similar to the ones for which God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah! (Jude 7) Because we hold to the Bible’s standards regarding such practices, many people ridicule us and call us intolerant-1 Pet.4:3, 4.

What Watchtower refuses to acknowledge.

In Uganda, 19 homeless gay, bisexual and transgender people have spent two months in prison on spurious charges of violating COVID-19 related curfew regulations. Forced out of their family homes, they had nowhere else to go, but police decided that for them, living in a shelter was a crime. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has used the pandemic to rule by decree, and has introduced legislation that would ban legal gender recognition for transgender people.

In the Philippines, LGBTQ+ people experienced humiliating punishment by village officials enforcing a curfew. And religious leaders have fueled rumors that Covid-19 is divine retribution for immoral behaviour- that leads to LGBTQ+ people being scapegoated, for example in Ukraine and Senegal.

In Japan, transgender people are forced to be sterilised to qualify for legal documents. In Poland, local municipalities declared towns LGBT-free zones. Brunei extended it’s penal code to include death by stoning for same-sex conduct and adultery. Following international outcry, the Sultan extended a moratorium on the death penalty.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of countries that criminalise LGBT people.

Afghanistan. Algeria. Antigua & Barbuda. Bangladesh. Barbados. Brunei. Burundi. Cameroon. Chad. Comoros. Cook Islands. Dominica. Egypt. Eritrea. Eswatini. Ethiopia. Ghana. Grenada. Guinea. Guyana. Indonesia. Iran. Iraq. Jamaica. Kenya. Kiribati. Kuwait. Lebanon. Liberia. Libya. Malawi. Malaysia. Maldives. Mauritania. Mauritius. Morocco. Myanmar. Namibia. Nigeria. Oman. Pakistan. Palestine. Papua New Guinea. Qatar. Saint Kitts And Nevis. Saint Lucia. Saint Vincent And The Grenadines. Samoa. Saudi Arabia. Senegal. Sierra Leone. Singapore. Solomon Islands. Somalia. South Sudan. Sri Lanka. Sudan. Syria. Tanzania. The Gambia. Togo. Tonga. Tunisia. Turkmenistan. Tuvalu. Uganda. United Arab Emirates. Uzbekistan. Yemen. Zambia. Zimbabwe.

Including 11 jurisdictions in which the death penalty is imposed or at least a possibi

I am going to try to summarise the premises of Aquinas' prime mover argument below. Please correct me if you believe I have misconstrued any of his points:

1. We can observe that there are some objects around us which are in motion.
2. Motion can be more broadly defined as the actualisation of potential. At any given instance in time, an object's potential to undergo motion can only be actualised by an extrinsic object which is already in motion.
3. Nothing can be both in a state of potentiality and actuality, hence, nothing can move itself. Potential can only be actualised by an actual actualizer.
4. We cannot have an infinite sequence of movers. This is because an essentially ordered series of causes necessitates the existence of a first cause, which imparts causal power on the later members.
5. Thus, there must be a first mover, an unactualised actualizer, which imparts movement on all other objects without being moved itself.
6. This unmoved mover, is God.

I have seen people accuse premise 2 and premise 5 of being contradictory. "Everything which is in a state of motion must be moved by something which is already moving", but at the same time, "there must be a first mover which imparts motion without being moved itself"?.

Is this a case of the special pleading fallacy? How do you reconcile these seemingly contradictory premises?

Recently I saw a few tankies make this syllogism:

Fascists support Hong Kong protestors,

∴ Hong Kong protestors are fascists

Then I go,

Neo Nazis support North Korea,

∴ North Korea is fascist.

What is wrong with this syllogism?

Introduction

Let’s look at Craig’s formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. (Therefore) The universe has a cause of its existence.

Craig supports these premises with a set of syllogisms that are proposed to substantiate the causal principle established in the first premise, and how it applies to the second premise. Rather than rejecting these defences and their parent premises, a very ubiquitous objection seen all over “Skeptic Tube” and Reddit comment sections is the charge that the argument fails in virtue of its committing the special pleading fallacy. While I think the Kalam Cosmological argument fails, it’s important to clarify that this objection seems to as well. Hopefully, the following will give you a reason to think this is the case as well and help you come up with better, more biting arguments. Here are some great alernatives:

• The multitude listed on Philosophical Disquisitions.
• The ones in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy.
• The ones from Wes Morriston.
• The contradictions pointed out by Erik Weilenberg.

Special Pleading

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a great resource) defines special pleading as

>a form of inconsistency in which the reasoner doesn’t apply his or her principles consistently. It is the fallacy of applying a general principle to various situations but not applying it to a special situation that interests the arguer even though the general principle properly applies to that special situation, too.

Things to keep in mind: special pleading is not a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy is a formal fallacy that applies to the logic of an argument or syllogism. Logical fallacies include things like quantifier shifts, denying the antecedent, affirming the consequent, and other things that apply to the logical structure of an argument. For example, take the argument that "If it rains, the street is wet. The street is wet. Therefore, it rained." This commits a logical fallacy because the logic of the argument is invalid. It does not follow from the premises that it r

With the fraction of the evidence against Joseph Smith, Mormons would call out any other person as being evil and not deserving of any trust. My family does it all the time. I have to bring up that so and so did only a fraction of what JS did.

Hi,

so the first issue I ran into when thinking about moral systems is whether or not any statement can be an axiom. For instance it is commonly accepted amongst Vegans that valuing consciousness is/can be axiomatic. But they reject the notion of valuing only human life. What justifies an axiom? Can any statement be an axiom? Can I axiomatically value only the life of humans and french bulldogs only?

The other issue I ran into is about the special pleading fallacy. To me it seems like anything can be special pleading. For instance, when I grant moral consideration for sentient beings but not for non-sentient beings, isn't that special pleading? And if it is, how can I justify calling out somebody for commiting the special pleading fallacy for when they grant moral consideration only to humans on the basis of being a human?

Note: I might not fully understand the special pleading fallacy.

I appreciate your answers in advance.

Perhaps the evidence that I think is most compelling about the truth claims of the Church is the fact that the witnesses never denied their witness of the gold plates and/or angelic visitation. We can pick apart the strength of this evidence all day, but it stands to me personally as net positive evidence for the Church's truth claims. When I place it on the scale with other evidence, I think the evidence against the Church's claims are far more convincing, but that's not my point.

My point is that even though this is positive evidence for the Church's claims, during my doubting phase I had a very difficult time using it to promote my own personal faith and belief in the Church, and that is because this evidence truthfully seems to mean absolutely nothing to faithful TBMs.

That's because if history had turned out differently in this one area, and Oliver Cowdery admitted to fraudulently producing the Book of Mormon later on in his life, the Church would demand that this evidence be ignored. Members would dance around it as unimportant, using Cowdery as an example of a Son of Perdition or (at best) likening him to Emma Smith as a detractor. There would be some reason to discount his later witness. If necessary, the entire witness statement would be taken out of the Book of Mormon and people would grow up in the Church knowing nothing about it.

I know this because this is exactly how the Church deals with any problematic event in its history.

How/why am I supposed to use any positive evidence to promote belief, when belief is not contingent on the evidence itself?

Can someone convince me that Catholics acknowledge reality in terms of describing why religious belief in supernatural concepts we cannot describe exist, how they come to exist, and why they are propagated - without even talking about Jesus or Catholicism?

In other words - if we couldn't reference the Bible - how would we explain the existence of thousands of different mutually exclusive gods and mythological creation stories - and if we just explain them by saying that people made them to be unfalsifiable - then how is it rational to pretend that another God is real?

Fun fact: I am a real LaVeyan Satanist and I once attended a Catholic wedding as a man of honor and did not burn up. We all joked about it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_of_religion

Special pleading (or claiming that something is an overwhelming exception) is a logical fallacy asking for an exception to a rule to be applied to a specific case, without proper justification of why that case deserves an exemption.

In the Thomistic cosmological argument for the existence of God, everything requires a cause. However, proponents of the argument then create a special case where God doesn't need a cause, but they can't say why in any particularly rigorous fashion.

One response to this argument, beyond pointing out the fallacy, would be to point out that nature itself could have existed eternally in some form just as they say God had existed eternally before creating nature. One who has applied this argument is Carl Sagan, though he wasn't the first to do so.

That being said, such a special pleading when discussing a "First Cause" may have some degree of merit; as any computer scientist will tell you, the root of a nested hierarchy may need to be handled as a special case anyway, although said computer scientist can probably also add that there are plenty of directed acyclic graphs that have multiple roots.

My view is that, strictly speaking, it would be special pleading if an exception is only claimed possible for God, but not when one can also imagine a case for something else as equally much a of 'brute fact' of reality i.e. something permanent in nature; the principal base difference between the two claims being that we know that nature exists through first hand observation or empirical means and, to science anyway, everything so far known looks wholly the result of natural processes. What does everyone else think?

This week, I’ll be going over the special pleading and black swan fallacies. While the black swan fallacy wasn’t requested, it is tied closely to the special pleading fallacy.

There are multiple fallacies that are tied closely together, and some can occur within the same argument or lead one to the other. What I’d like to do is show examples of these fallacies and, when applicable show when an argument DOESN’T commit a fallacy. A fallacy is when one uses a tool of logic incorrectly. So just because something might appear similar to a fallacy doesn’t necessarily mean that a fallacy was committed.

Black Swan Fallacy: this occurs when an individual makes a claim, usually a universal one, about a subject that is later shown to be false and the individual continues to insist that their claim is correct.

The famous example is: All swans are white. “Well here is a swan that is black,” Sorry, swans must be white, therefore that’s not a swan.

What makes this a fallacy is due to the refusal of the individual to accept new information. Largely due to their attribution of an accidental or non-essential quality to the subject and refusing to acknowledge their error.

Another example of this could be “all triangles are blue.” Well, we know that this will lead to that fallacy because triangles don’t have to be blue.

But if I said, “all triangles have three sides.” Here’s a four sided triangle. “That’s not a triangle because a triangle has three sides.”

Why is this not a fallacy? because in this case, the evidence being presented is false. If something has four sides, it’s not a triangle, but a rectangle. As a rectangle can be demonstrated as having inner angles whose sun equals 360 and a triangle has the sum of its inner angles 180.

Special pleading fallacy: this is often done when presented with an example that would otherwise cause an individual to commit a black swan fallacy. More specifically, it’s when one, upon being presented with something that counters their claim, asserts that it’s merely an exception to their rule without giving justification or clarifying the rule to show why that contradiction isn’t a part of the rule in the first place.

In order to make my point, I’m going to use, in this situation, atheist and theistic examples of this fallacy and then the same statement without that fallacy

Theistic fallacy: “everything needs a cause therefore there is a god who caused everything.” Well, what caused god? “Nothing, god doesn’t need a cause.”

Prefatory note: Last week there were multiple threads gathering objections to Thomas Aquinas’ First Way, the argument from motion. Seeing the volume of responses, I took the opportunity to catalogue all the top-level objections and categorize them. I categorized 123 objections into 16 different kinds. Of the 16 kinds, 1 objection accounted for 26% of the total, and that was the objection that the First Way commits the fallacy of special pleading. However, almost all of the special pleading responses amounted to no more than simply stating that the argument committed the fallacy, with not much in the way of how or why. In order to advance the conversation, I would like to closely analyze the objection of special pleading and question whether it merits its popularity, hopefully fostering a deeper discussion into its effectiveness.

Here is the First Way as presented in Thomas’ Summa Theologiae (ST 1.2.3):

>The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is

I guess this is more of a PSA, but I suppose we could have a debate on the title proposition.

Often an objection raised to cosmological arguments is that they are special pleading. Questions like "if everything has a cause, what caused God" are meant to illustrate that these are special pleading arguments.

That fact is that they simply are not. Take the Unmoved Mover argument, Aquinas' 1st way. The argument states that everything which is moved is moved by another (or that nothing can move itself). With some other premises and a bit of reasoning, it concludes that there must exist something which moves other things while itself being unmoved. Then we say "that thing is what we call God," and the reason that we call it God is that it is the ultimate thing in a chain of motion from act to potency. If anything is deserving of the title God, it is the ultimate thing in such chains.

To then object that this is special pleading because we assumed that everything needs a mover, but allowed without explanation that God needs no mover, is absurd. The argument aims to prove that there is an unmoved mover. It doesn't need to assume that there is something unmoved, and in fact makes no such assumption. Rather that is its conclusion.

The same goes for Aquinas' 2nd way. Everything that begins to exist has an efficient cause. Or the less precise Kalam: everything which begins to exist has a cause. These arguments aim to prove that there is something which did not begin to exist. They do not make that assumption up front. And the arguments themselves are meant to be the support for the claim that there is something which did not begin to exist.

When I see someone on this sub claim that one of these is an instance of special pleading, it honestly makes me not want to waste my time debating that person. It communicates to me that that person is not thinking for himself or herself, and just repeating tired old debunked objections to theistic arguments. It communicates that they haven't even bothered to make an effort to understand what special pleading is, or, if they have, that they haven't bothered to think critically about applying it to these arguments. It smacks of intellectual dishonesty, or at least laziness, and I don't feel inclined to debate with dishonest people.

On Special Pleading

[Further Reading: Other shitty objections to cosmological arguments](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/07/so-you-think-you

What is special pleading and does this video provide examples of it? If not, is there an official term or any other fallacy that is being committed here by the use of the skeptometer? I love apologetics but have some trouble fully understanding all these philosophical terms and their application.

Let’s use the Muslim logic for a second (the next paragraph is just fiction):

“Currently as we speak, Uyghur Muslims in China are facing a lot of discrimination by the Chinese police, but is it justified? The Uyghur Muslims in China may discredit the non-Religious Ideology as they disagree with it, and most of them would want to exchange it with an Islamic system, and the discrimination towards the Uyghur is there to defend the right of the Chinese people to remain as non-believers, and to defend the Atheistic ideology of the public, that’s why all Uyghurs fall under capital punishment in China, and only them, some Hindus also do the same thing to protect the afterlife of the Hindu citizen.”

Does this make any sense to anyone? Hopefully not, no one should ever discriminate against another group based on their religion, and to all Muslims, the moment that you say that apostates should be killed, you should also agree with China if they want to discriminate against Muslims, you should also allow India to execute Zakir Naik if they want, if you don’t, you are simply committing a special pleading fallacy, Dear Muslims, no one here wants to see you killed because of your beliefs, and I stand against all discrimination against Uyghur or Indian Muslims, please understand the words coming out of your mouth if you think a group of people should be killed, and let’s all try to end such barbarism, if you live in the UK, please check out this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/comments/iay6df/lets_rally_around_apostate_prophets_call_to/

https://donotlink.it/Yrk9V

>"GRA:That's a funny line,but actually,what Trump is reading are the tea leaves--which he sees as Hollywood giving recognition to a foreign film over an American film.The Oscars have always rewarded AMERICAN filmmaking--foreign films have their own sub-category.It shouldn't have happened. Trump has it right again."

Except he doesn't: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/21/trump-parasite-texas/%3foutputType=amp

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign-language_films_nominated_for_Academy_Awards#Best_Picture

Please show the rule where it says "Americans Only".

This assumes that Americans are always number one. It is selfish.

This is special pleading to make America number 1. Saying that no one can be better than us in anything. Just so we can feel good?

The special pleading is an informal fallacy wherein one cites something as an exception to a general or universal principle (without justifying the special exception).

We can all accept this fallacy is legitimately fallacious. However, often people forget the parenthetical clause “without justifying the special exception.”

When discussing the Thomistic Proof people will commonly claim that the conclusion that there must exist an unactualized actualizer/uncaused cause violates the special pleading fallacy. They suggest that because mundane things require cause the suggestion than an unactualized actualizer is uncaused is fallacious. However, this would not fit the special pleading fallacy.

1. There is justification, and so the simple accusation is not appropriate. The argument should instead shift to whether or not the justification is solid. Simply saying it’s special pleading and dismissing it is abusive.

2. The idea that this would even fit the special pleading fallacy is erroneous. The existence of to genera, one that contains a single member, and one that contains many members does not mean the affirmative is claiming an exception to exist. It merely means that one genus has more members than the other. The Thomistic proof says that things that come into being require cause, so that sets up two possible genera, those things which come into being and those that don’t. Simply setting up this logical distinction is not a special pleading fallacy by any stretch of the imagination.

When people erroneously claim that something is special pleading without actually understanding the argument being made this creates a toxic environment that shuts down debate. It is intellectually lazy.

Holy books are full of the extraordinary. Occurrences like miraculous revivification, supernatural healing, verbally articulate animals, prophecy, and distortions in physical laws of nature are common place and addressed, at times, nonchalantly. These events by their very nature, obviously, cannot be proven or understood using natural forms of logic or reasoning. If they could, they would not be supernatural. Unsurprisingly, claims of massive miraculous events (like parting seas and the walking dead) have followed an inverse relationship to the advancement of the sciences. (i.e. the more we understand the natural world, the less we can ascribe to the supernatural.)

However, if one is to believe *any* supernatural event great or small from a holy text, one must also accept all other claims of the supernatural as at least plausible to avoid the fallacy of Special Pleading. To put it simply: If supernatural events are outside the bounds of natural logic and/or reason and some accounts of supernatural are true, then all claims of the supernatural (even if they logically conflict with one another) are plausible. If you accept the first premise, but deny the conclusion, you are guilty of special pleading.

If you've been watching the Good Place, you know it's a show about the afterlife and as the show is coming to an end, Spoilers Ahead, how the main character deal with issues dealing with the afterlife is kind of interesting. In the most recent episode it becomes obvious that Heaven isn't being run well for various reasons and the characters deal with it in an interesting way. In one of the discussions over on the sub I talked about the fact that the reason they're having issues is because there's no God on the show yet. But that in the Christian view of the afterlife because God's there the problem would not exist. I was accused of special pleading, mainly that we can just make God be whatever we want him to be to deal with the issue. How do we respond to that? Link if you pm me.

All Cosmological Arguments require the idea that something can't come from nothing. Sometimes this is called the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Sometimes this is worded as a contingent vs. necessary being. Irregardless, this is just word salad. The basic logic they are trying to apply is that something cannot come from nothing, except for god. God is the one thing/being that could come from nothing, or perhaps its the one thing that has always existed. They then posit that since we exist, God has to exist.

Now the special pleading is obvious, but it gets far worse when they begin to add the desired attributes to God. They claim that god must be powerful, thinking that logically it must have taken a lot of power to make us which is a complete non-sequitur. If it takes a lot of power to create us, then it must have taken a lot of power to create god, and therefore even more power to create the thing that created god, so on and so forth. It makes much more logical sense that we are created from a significantly less powerful being and we evolved from there.

The same principle applies to all of the other features that Christians would like to transpose onto God. They claim that God must have an all powerful knowledge, but that's a claim that should not be believed without evidence. Likewise that he is good... or anything else. You simply cannot make such claims off of the single piece of evidence that we have, our existence.

Atheist: "How do you know that a creator exists?"

Theist: "Because something cannot come from nothing"

Atheist: "So where did God come from?"

Theist: "Nothing"

They make up a thousand purity rules that we have to live by or receive condemnation, but hold JS to a lower standard than the worst Mormon of today.

Most civilized humans would agree that sentient robot abuse would be immoral.

So the argument from Q advocates generally goes that Luke and Matthew could not have used each other because they wrote differing and contradictory nativity and resurrection narratives. This assumes that if one gospel writer had knowledge of an earlier gospel narrative they would not contradict it by writing their own. But is this assumption really tenable considering that:

1. Scholarly opinion has been moving towards Johannine knowledge of the synoptics, considering the several strong parallels to Mark throughout the Gospel of John. The fact that John compiles his own narrative in no way proves that he never had knowledge of Mark.
2. The extracanonical gospels such as the Gospel of Peter obviously contain differing narratives to the synoptics they were aware of. The author of Peter creates an entirely different passion and resurrection narrative to Mark despite copying material from Mark in several other places.

So why does the argument that "Luke would never have written a different genealogy if he knew Matthew" make sense when "the author of the Gospel of Peter would never have put Herod in charge of the trial of Jesus if he knew Mark" does not work, or "John never would have had the crucifixion on a different day to Mark if he knew the synoptics" is no longer being generally accepted?

Isn't it just special pleading to say that the only way Matthew and Luke could have written different episodes is because they were unaware of each other when we don't say the Gospel of Thomas must have been working from a Q source because it's different to the synoptics?

Mormons would highly condemn any other person with the behaviors of past leaders. But JS, BY, et all get a special pass.

I've been a religious debater for almost a year, and I still haven't been given an evidenced-based, logical reason on why God doesn't need a creator. And the funny thing is those people assert "ALL" things need a creator

By saying everything has a cause, but then saying God doesn't have a cause, is that not special pleading?