There's a good example of how not to argue provided by a recent attack on Dr. James R. White. This attack and bad arguing methodology were provided here.
The reason why I wanted to comment on this is that this underscores a specific problem I have in the way some people argue by example.
Douglas Beaumont attempts to machine gun logical concepts—many of which only bloat the article—in order to try to demonstrate that Dr. White is wrong on his interpretation of John 6:44.
Dr. White will no doubt provide a response to this. The approach I wanted to take was to show how the logic from Beaumont is great, except completely ignorant.
To illustrate this let's take Beaumont's example of blue cars,
White commits a classic fallacy known as Illicit Conversion. This occurs when a universal truth is asserted of a subject, but then the universal qualifier gets switched to the predicate. For example, the statement“All of my cars are blue cars”cannot be logically converted to“All blue cars are my cars.”
Beaumont's example is correct and indeed is an example of Illicit Conversion. The only problem is that his example has nothing to do with John 6:44 nor Dr. White's interpretation.
In order for Beaumont's example to be relevant, he needs to state it as such, "All of the cars that I have driven belong to me". Which can be converted to, "all of the cars that belong to me I have driven".
John 6:44 isn't a false conversion because it isn't false that the one drawn is the same as the one who comes.
This is clear from the text of John 6, notice:
- Everyone given to Christ will come (John 6:37)
- No one can come unless drawn by the Father (John 6:44)
- Therefore everyone who is drawn will come
Not only is this deductively valid, Biblically/exegetically true but the statement, "All those who are drawn are ones who come" is truly converted as, "All those who come are the ones drawn".