Arguing Logically: Qualifying Claims and On Why “There are no absolutes” is NOT an Absolute Statement
It seems like I may be flogging a dead horse here, but it’s
come up again, even after I recently blogged about this very same topic. So I
thought I would take the time to write a thorough refutation which puts down
the horse once and for all.
Needless to say, it amazes me that theists and religious
apologists continually contend that “There are no absolutes” is, in itself, and
absolute claim. This is false.
I would say it is obviously
false, but rhetorical flourishes like this often place one in danger of
sounding overly arrogant. After all, it’s not actually the theists fault that
they don’t understand basic high school level grammar. But I suppose it is
their fault for not correcting the mistake once it has been pointed out to them
in clear and intelligible language.
So, the pressing concern here is why exactly is the
statement “There are no absolutes” not an absolute claim?
Simple. The statement has not been qualified as an absolute
claim. In other words, it’s a general statement about absolutes. It’s not
an absolute claim about there being no absolutes.
In the context of an absolute claim we would first need to
identify the conditional sentence. Do the conditions, arising from the
surrounding grammatical context, require us to qualify the statement as an
absolute statement? Is it written as a clause? Or is it something else? In
order to claim it is an absolute statement, we need to qualify whether or not the
surrounding context requires the sentence “There are no absolutes” to mean that
there are absolutely (always) no
absolutes, or whether there are only sometimes
no absolutes, or whether there are never no absolutes.
Now, what does qualifying
a claim actually mean? Well, qualifying a claim demands that we ask
ourselves whether the claim can 1) be true in some cases, 2) be true at some
times or under certain circumstances, or 3) be true for some groups or
individuals and not other groups or individuals. According to authors of The Norton Field Guide to Writing, “Qualifying
your claim shows that you’re reasonable and also makes your topic more
manageable by limiting it.”[1]
As the sentence is, “There are no absolutes” is merely a general
statement about there not being absolutes. Nothing has been done yet to qualify
the claim. As such, the “There are no absolutes” needs to be qualified for us
to say there are “sometimes no absolutes”
or “rarely no absolutes” or “always no absolutes” or “never no absolutes,” &c., &c.
I find the theist and religious apologist’s claim that “There
are no absolutes” to be an absolute claim and thus self defeating, even though
it’s not, to be a suitable example of an error we are all prone to make if we’re
not taking the time to qualify our claims. When the theist or religious
apologists makes the argument that “There are no absolutes” to be an absolute
sentence, they are, in point of fact, making the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc by assuming
that because the sentence has the phrase “no absolutes” that it qualifies this
statement as true for all absolutes all of the time.
This realization is entirely devastating to the the theist’s
claim that “There are no absolutes” is self defeating because it is an absolute
claim, first of all because they have not qualified it as an absolute claim,
and so the assumption that it is somehow an absolute claim does not follow.
Secondly, it is falsely assumed that it always follows that there are no
absolutes; falsely assumed because this condition of always is merely assumed after the fact but not because it has been
in any sense qualified, hence the post
hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy is revealed.
Suffice to say, without any context to identify the
conditional sentence, we cannot qualify the sentence “There are no absolutes”
as sometimes, rarely, always, or never no absolutes. Without this
qualification, the assumption that the sentence “There are no absolutes” itself
qualifies as an absolute statement is false. It is a general statement about absolutes, not itself an absolute
statement minus any conditions to qualify it as such.
[1] For more on arguing
logically and qualifying a claim, see The
Norton Field Guide to Writing, part 4 strategies, Arguing Logically: Claims, Reasons, and Evidence, pp. 283-299.
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