Going Into Battle Half-cocked

August 11, 2007 · Filed Under Religion

I’ve had some stupid beliefs in my time. I think that everyone has at some point in their life. But thanks to YouTube we can observe people at different periods of their life justifying some very silly beliefs - and all on camera. Whilst looking for something to do last night, I stumbled across a YouTube posting by a guy named Shawn, also known as VenomFangX. This guy believes, with great confidence, that he’s disproved Islam, and so excitedly posted his discovery online.

I’ve posted his argument below on a flow chart (using Microsoft Office Visio 2007).

Now I feel of kind of bad about pointing out how incredibly naive this argument is. It feels less like shooting fish in a barrel than shooting a tied down and unconscious chicken in the head with a shotgun at point blank range.

Shawn first claims two things about Islam: that all prophets are considered sinless and that Jesus is considered a prophet. I pretty sure that Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam but I am not sure about the other claim. But for the sake of argument lets assume that it is true. If you look at the flow chart you can see that if the person being questioned answers ‘no’ to the question “is Jesus good?” then he will contradict one of the first claims (at least according to Shawn). In other words, if Jesus is not good, Jesus is not sinless and therefore Islamic claims to Jesus’ prophet status are false and thus Islam is false. I’m not sure that I accept that argument (what does he mean by “good”? What is “sinless”?). For the sake of argument, let’s assume though that Shawn is correct.

If the Muslim answers “yes” then Shawn will say something like “as a good person Jesus wouldn’t lie and therefore Jesus’ statements must be true”. Shawn would then proceed to quote chapter 19, verse 17 of the Gospel of Matthew which he paraphrases (I looked at several translations but could not find his exact wording in any of them) as “Why do you call me good? There are none good but God…” This is the point at which his argument fails.

First, lets assume that the Muslim agrees that the Gospel of Matthew is accurate. He can of course claim that Jesus was honest but simply mistaken. But the far more likely argument is that not everyone believes that the New Testament of the Christian Bible (nor the Old Testament) is accurate, let alone inerrant. It seems that Shawn has assumed that everyone else shares his belief that every word of the Bible is true. It’s a hidden premise in his argument. The person being questioned is likely to claim that the Gospel of Matthew is inaccurate and therefore Jesus never said that. That means that all subsequent inferences that are premised upon Matthew 19:17 being true and accurate will be unconvincing.

Shawn claimed at the beginning of the video that “today the Lord showed me something incredible”. Apparently this mindset caused him to avoid scrutinizing his own argument in sufficient detail. He comes across as a person who has given a bad argument and ‘credited’ it to God. He has held God out to be someone that inspires people to produce poor arguments. He achieved the exact opposite result to what he probably desired. Add to this his flimsy and quite aggressive assertions that Satan is behind all of Islam (and other things he disagrees with) and you end up with a convincing case for the claim that his beliefs are causing him to draw quick and flawed conclusions as well as making him come to incredibly uncharitable assessments of other people.

And one last thing. Check out the comments section. It appears that he has censored all negative remarks. Some commenters are even taking the absence of disagreement to mean that there are no plausible responses - that his opponents have simply given up. I’ll see whether my comment is approved in the next few days.

His video has had it’s rating function disabled too - right after it hit five stars.

Addition for Monday 13th August 2007

He hasn’t posted my comment. He doesn’t allow those that disagree with him to have their comments published.