I’ve written before about how the Bible contains a lot of flawed arguments, where the reasoning given really doesn’t logically support the conclusions. Now I’m about to list even more of those non sequiturs, but this time I’ll be focusing more on examples of specific common errors in reasoning. This post is about fallacies, as demonstrated by the Bible.

God told his people to celebrate Passover at a certain time because that was when he brought them out of Egypt. And he said they should eat unleavened bread because they hadn’t had time to make bread properly when they had to leave Egypt. Except those aren’t the real reasons, since they originally did these things just because God told them to, before they left Egypt. So this is just a rationalization (a made-up “reason” for something you had already decided before you thought of that reason).

The book of Psalms states that the fool says there is no God. A lot of people take that to mean that atheists are fools, but that does not logically follow from what the Bible says here. It doesn’t say atheists are fools, it just says fools are atheists. It’s logically possible for all fools to be atheists even if most atheists are not fools.

In Jeremiah, God thinks he’s implying that he’ll keep his promise to David,¹ but his logic does not actually imply that. God only says what would happen if day and night were abolished. Since day and night are not being abolished any time soon, this tells us nothing about what will actually happen.

Jesus says when people insult you, slander you, and persecute you, you should be glad, because that means you’re blessed. How does he justify this bizarre claim? By pointing out that that’s how the prophets of the past were treated. But his argument is missing a premise. We would at least have to know that something good happened to those prophets, before we could possibly conclude that it was desirable to be treated like them.

To try to justify his claim that divorce is wrong, Jesus quotes a couple of fragments of scripture from Genesis. He says God “made them male and female”, and “for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”. And he concludes that no one should separate what God has joined together.

But even though Jesus says “for this reason”, he’s leaving out the part where the reason was stated. What was the actual reason given in Genesis? The reason appears to be that God separated the woman from the man. Which doesn’t make any sense as a reason for them to be united, but neither does what Jesus is trying to pass off as the reason. Anyway, if you include that part that Jesus deceptively left out because it didn’t support his opinion, a more logical conclusion would be “Therefore what God has separated, let no one join together.”

Jesus lived in a culture where there was a tradition of washing your hands before eating. But his disciples didn’t follow that tradition. Doing something purely because it’s a tradition is indeed not a very good reason to do it. But if some people are washing their hands for a bad reason, that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a good reason to wash your hands. If people are giving a bad reason for something, all that tells you is that you don’t currently know of a good reason to think their conclusion is right. It doesn’t mean their conclusion is definitely wrong.

Some people reasoned that Jesus’s followers were Galilean, and Peter was Galilean, therefore Peter must be one of Jesus’s followers. And they happened to be right in this case, but their reasoning was not valid. Using the same form of reasoning will not reliably get you true conclusions.

Jesus wanted to prove that the Messiah doesn’t have to be the son of David, for some reason. (Maybe because Jesus wasn’t actually a descendant of David, but wanted to get to be the Messiah anyway.) So he quoted David calling somebody “Lord”, and pointed out that that’s not how you talk to your son. Maybe he’d have a point if there was any reason to think that David was referring to the Messiah, but there isn’t.

Jesus states that a servant is not greater than his master. Then he somehow concludes that anyone who persecutes him will also persecute his disciples, and anyone who obeys him will also obey his disciples. What additional premise would be required to make these conclusions valid? You’d have to assume that anyone who either obeys or persecutes Jesus is doing it because Jesus isn’t great enough. I think we can assume that Jesus did not intend that to be taken as a premise. So his conclusion remains unjustified.

Paul tries to summarize the commandments against harming people as “Love your neighbor as yourself”. To justify this, he says love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. But doing something that doesn’t harm people isn’t enough to not be harming people. You have to also not do things that do harm people.

Ambiguity

Pharaoh didn’t want to let all the Israelites leave Egypt, including the women and children. So he claimed that Moses had only asked him to let the men go, apparently taking advantage of an ambiguity in the word that Moses had used for “people”.

God says it’s okay for Israelites to be sold, but not for them to be sold as slaves. Sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.

Moses claimed that the rules he was giving his people were not too difficult, by equivocating between the difficulty of following the rules, and the difficulty of finding out what the rules are.

When God made Naomi’s life bitter, she insisted that she should not be called Naomi, because that word means “pleasant”. Who else needs to change their names according to this silly reasoning? Busy Noahs, childless Abrahams, commoner Sarahs, humorless Isaacs, happy Leahs, non-judgemental Dans, uncharitable Hannahs, unpopular Davids, unreliable Ethans, old Cyruses, black-haired Rufuses, deaf Simons, unmanly Andrews, only-child Thomases, arrogant Pauls…

The Bible uses the loaded term “godless” as if it meant lacking morality, making it easier for people to make the baseless assumption that atheists can’t be good people.

Jesus claims that he has not come to abolish what’s written in the Law or the Prophets, he has come to fulfill them. Why is he lumping those things together? Seems to me you could only abolish one of those and fulfill the other, not do the same thing to both.

Okay, maybe you could “fulfill” the law by obeying the law, but is something as mundane as that really what Jesus is declaring he’s come to earth to do? And how would you abolish a prophecy? Can you do that? Is that why so many of the prophecies have gone unfulfilled? Because somebody has been “abolishing” them?

Jesus argues against worrying by asking if worrying can make your life any longer. He’s implying that the answer is no, but depending on what you mean by “worrying”, it could be yes. If “worrying” just means a stressful feeling, then no, that’s probably not going to help. But if “worrying” involves doing something about your problems, as opposed to ignoring them, then “worrying” certainly can help you live longer than you would otherwise.

Jesus tries to prove that dead people have been resurrected, by quoting God saying “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”. But the present tense word “am” is referring to God; it says nothing about the status of those other guys.

Jesus claims that the Sabbath was made for man, and he concludes that that means this particular man (himself) has authority over the Sabbath. If the Sabbath was made for humans in general, a more defensible conclusion would be that all humans get to make the rules regarding the Sabbath. Or alternatively, a more relevant direction to take the argument would be to simply say that it doesn’t make sense to punish people for rejecting something that was made for their benefit. There’s no need to bring the question of Jesus’s authority into this.

Paul accuses his followers of being “worldly” and “mere human beings”, as if those were bad things. It sounds like he’s trying to trick them into accepting his negative descriptions of them by describing them with words that are normal or positive, and then trying to somehow attach negative connotations to those descriptions.

In Romans 4, Paul seems to conflate different concepts a bit. He doesn’t distinguish between works and work, crediting righteousness and forgiving, or lawbreaking and immorality.

Usually, the Bible correctly describes idols as nothing but inanimate objects (while incorrectly assuming that pagans think the idols are the gods they represent). Compared to that, Paul’s claim that pagan gods are really demons almost seems like a distinction without a difference.

Paul makes a very stupid argument that when God made a promise to Abraham about his descendants, he must have been talking about Jesus, because he used the word “seed”, not “seeds”. And Paul can’t even be consistent about this: In the same chapter, he claims that all Christians are “Abraham’s seed”. So he admits that “seed” can be a plural word.

Whoever wrote Hebrews tries to twist the Old Testament scriptures into supporting his beliefs: He equates two obviously completely different cases and different meanings of “good news” and a promise of entering “God’s rest”, and then another obviously completely different case and meaning of “God’s rest”, and acts like it’s all about the same thing.

The Bible contains a lot of attempts to quote earlier parts of the Bible. Most of the time, those quotes are either misinterpreted, misquoted, or don’t even appear in the earlier scriptures at all.

Personal definitions

In one of Isaiah’s prophecies, God decides to make up his own personal definition of the word “fasting“, using it to mean something other than fasting. And then he complains that the people who are fasting aren’t fasting, because they’re not doing a bunch of other things he’d like them to do, that have nothing to do with fasting. Why not just say what you mean? It would probably be easier to get people to do what you want, if you were more clear about what you want them to do.

Directing his disciples’ attention to an actual child who is in their presence, Jesus condemns “anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble”. Huh? Is he talking about children, or is he talking about believers? Those aren’t the same thing. Why is he acting like those are the same thing?

Jesus told people they could have eternal life if they followed him, but apparently when he says “eternal life”, he means something other than eternal life. Jesus seems to be making up his own personal definitions for the terms he uses, to deceive people into giving up everything for him when he’s not even planning to actually give them what he says he’ll give them.

Paul makes up his own personal definitions too, pretending that words mean something other than what they’re normally used to mean. How else could he claim that righteousness isn’t about what you do? Making up your own nonstandard way to use a word is a common way to trick people who feel a certain way about what the word normally means into feeling the same way about whatever you’re using it to mean.

This train wreck of thought is another example of Paul using a personal definition: First, he makes an obvious statement, pretends it’s a principle found in the law, and tries to prove it using an example that’s not actually an example of what he said. Then he makes up a new way to interpret “dying” that doesn’t involve actually dying, so he can conclude that the obvious statement he made means that people don’t have to follow the law. (And then he insists that he’s not saying you don’t have to follow the law…)

Also from Paul, here’s a particularly ridiculous example of a No True Scotsman fallacy: No True Me. Paul wants to be a good person, therefore whenever he does something evil, that must not have really been him doing it!

The author of Hebrews does an absurdly blatant example of the personal definition thing: He quotes a psalm that has nothing to do with whatever point he’s trying to make, that says how you should respond if you were to hear God’s voice today. And so he concludes that passages about God giving his people rest must not be referring to something that has already happened, because here’s God speaking of another day. A certain day in the future that he has chosen and called “Today”.

But actually no, God did not say anything about a day in the future. He said today. There is absolutely no reason to think that means some time in the future. That’s not what today means.

Peter tries to deny that God is slow to keep his promises, by claiming that to God, there’s no difference between a day and a thousand years. But how God perceives things is irrelevant when he’s making promises to humans. To a human, a day and a thousand years are obviously very different. It would be extremely dishonest to promise a human to do something in a day when you weren’t planning to do it for a thousand years.

In 1 John, it says No True Christian would ever turn against Christianity, and proves it by saying that all the Christians who had turned against Christianity must not have ever really been Christians, because true Christians never would have turned against Christianity.

False causes

For some reason, most people in the Bible don’t seem to be able to accept the concept that anything ever happens without it being the result of someone deciding to make it happen. Ironically, the only person in the Bible who admits that nature does things on its own is God. Everyone else thinks it’s God doing everything.

Even when something bad happens, they’ll assume God did it. Like when Jacob blamed his wife’s infertility on God. (I suppose he would have blamed Satan, but Satan hadn’t really been invented yet.) But somehow they never conclude that God is anything less than completely good.

The Bible claims that whenever the Israelites were oppressed and whenever they were free, it was always because God was punishing them or rewarding them. But why would God protect them only during the times when they had a human protector? Even though they continued to disobey God during those times? God does not appear to be the true cause of these events.

Abimelek, the first king of Israel, would have died from the rock a woman dropped on his head. But he had his armor-bearer kill him with a sword instead, thinking that this way no one could say a woman killed him. It didn’t work. If his head had been in better shape at the time, maybe he would have considered that events don’t have just one cause.

Killing him with the sword doesn’t change the fact that he wouldn’t have died if the woman hadn’t dropped the rock. So he should have expected people to consider the rock to be the cause of his death, and so he shouldn’t have gotten himself killed with a sword, when that wouldn’t do him any good. Not that not doing that would do him much good, either…

There’s a psalm that says with God watching over you, the moon won’t harm you at night, as if God was the reason for that. How much does the moon normally harm you?

When some inconsequential person named Hadad said he wanted to go back from Egypt to his own country, the Pharaoh assumed it must be because he thought Egypt was lacking in some way. It was actually because his worst enemies were dead, so now there was nothing keeping him from living in the country he’d been forced to flee from.

Solomon claims that humans trying to build a house, guard a city, or work hard to make a living have no chance of succeeding by themselves. Those things will only happen if God makes them happen. If that’s true, humans should stop pointlessly trying to do those things, and just let God do them for us. But of course that’s not really what we should do, because those things would never get done if we didn’t do them, which means Solomon is wrong.

Solomon notes that people blame God for their misfortunes that were actually caused by their own foolishness. But for some reason he never acknowledges that it’s equally wrong to give God credit for the good things humans do.

The Bible says some foreign kings attacked Judah because the people of Judah weren’t faithful enough to the God of Israel. Yeah, that’s definitely why those pagan kings did that.

When some Canaanites came to attack Judah, King Jehoshaphat made an even more inexplicably obviously wrong guess about their motivations. He thought they must be doing it to repay the Israelites for not having destroyed them when Israel first settled in Canaan. What does he even mean by “repaying”? Rewarding Israel, by waging war against them? Or punishing them because they were disappointed not to have been wiped out, when nobody but Jehoshaphat thinks those people should have been wiped out??

Someone reported to the last king of Judah that Jeremiah had been thrown into a cistern, “where he will starve to death when there is no longer any bread in the city“. Just like he would do if he wasn’t in a cistern. Why are they acting like Jeremiah is going to starve because he’s in a cistern?

In Ezekiel 33, God describes some hypothetical scenarios where people end up dying. That outcome has multiple causes, but God ignores some of the important causes when assigning blame. God’s own actions are a major cause of death in these scenarios, but God wants to put all the blame on somebody else.

Hosea wonders why death isn’t bringing plagues and the grave isn’t bringing destruction. He sounds confused about what causes what. God is confused about death too. God seems to think that if your ancestors are dead, it must be because of something they did wrong.

Daniel says the reason God gave him the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams wasn’t about how wise Daniel was. It was because God wanted Nebuchadnezzar to understand his dreams. But that doesn’t explain why he sent the explanation through Daniel. And it’s not like there can only be one reason. If Daniel’s going to deny that the first one is a reason for God doing this, he should provide another reason (in addition to the one about understanding) that explains why Daniel is involved.

Spurious correlations

Abraham’s servant decided that the first young woman who agreed to give him some water and also offered to give his camels some water must be the one God had chosen to marry Abraham’s son. That sounds like an awfully commonplace occurrence, but this weak evidence was enough to fully convince Rebekah’s father that God wanted him to let this stranger take his daughter away right now.

Judah didn’t want to let his last son marry the same woman his first two sons had married, because God had killed both of them. But Judah seems to be noticing the wrong correlation here and mistakenly assuming it’s the cause. I’m pretty sure God is supposed to have killed the first two sons because of other things they did, not because they married Tamar. Preventing someone from marrying Tamar isn’t going to stop God from killing him.

God said that in order to prove that he had sent Moses, he would give the Israelites this sign: After Moses brought them out of Egypt, they would worship God on the same mountain where God had first spoken to Moses. Looks like God is even worse than Abraham’s servant at picking signs. This is not only a mundane event that could easily happen without God being involved. It’s also something that can’t happen until well after the Israelites have already been convinced to go along with Moses, at which point there will be no need to give the sign at all.

Jonathan decided that if the Philistines challenged him to come and fight, that would be a sign that God would help him defeat them. That’s definitely not an extraordinary enough sign to justify that conclusion. He really should have gotten more solid evidence before risking his life.

Solomon says pride comes before a downfall, and humility comes before honor. The true interpretation of this is trivial: Your pride levels are likely to go up or down along with your circumstances as they change over time, so of course whenever your situation happens to go down it will be preceded by high pride, and vice versa. And the meaningful interpretation is false: You can’t reliably predict that someone’s situation is about to get better or worse based on how proud they are right now. Or based on how well they’re doing right now, for that matter.

When the kings of Aram defeated King Ahaz, he noticed that the kings of Aram were successful, and also that they were sacrificing to certain gods. So Ahaz tried sacrificing to the same gods. It didn’t make him successful.

Similarly, David called to God and then survived his enemies, and he interpreted that as God saving him. Isaiah predicted that people would think the fact that they hadn’t died meant that trusting in God had worked. And the Israelite women living in Egypt told Jeremiah they were going to start making offerings to the Queen of Heaven again, because the last time they stopped doing that, they stopped having enough food.

When Nehemiah’s enemies were coming to kill the Jews and stop the wall of Jerusalem from being rebuilt, Nehemiah prayed to God and posted armed guards at all the vulnerable places. Guess who got all the credit for keeping the city safe.

Just world

The world isn’t fair. People don’t always get what they’ve earned. But the people in the Bible, and the people writing the Bible, tend to assume that the world is morally fair. They think everything that happens to you is a fitting repayment for what you’ve done, because they think the world is run by a just God.² Naturally, this assumption often leads them to false conclusions.

Leah thought giving her husband a son would make him finally love her (even though he was never interested in her, and had been tricked into marrying her). It never actually worked out that way for her, but she was still sure he would love her now when she had her third son. And when she had her sixth.

Joseph’s brothers were told that one of them would be held captive in Egypt, while the others would be forced to go and take their father’s last son away from him, or else they wouldn’t be allowed any more food. Then when they were on the way home, they found that they seemed to be being framed for stealing from the Egyptian authorities.

The brothers thought all this was happening to them because God was punishing them for what they had done to Joseph. But it was actually because Joseph was secretly there, playing pranks on them. (Joseph, by the way, believed that God was making sure everything would work out right in the end, and therefore his brothers had done nothing wrong by selling him as a slave.)

David said he was okay with whatever might happen to him, because he figured whatever God did to him would be what he deserved, even though he didn’t know what he deserved. He thought if he was upright enough, his integrity would protect him. When his health declined, he thought God must be punishing him for something, even though God pretty much thought David could do no wrong.

David advised people to avoid saying bad things if they wanted to have a good long life, as if there was some kind of connection between those things. He though God always provided the blameless with plenty, even during famines and disasters.

Asaph observed that the wicked were actually doing quite well, while his own life just kept getting worse despite his innocence. He started to wonder why he should bother being good if it wasn’t going to do him any good. He eventually resolved this mental conflict by ignoring the evidence, and baselessly concluding that the wicked would in some way be worse off than the righteous in the end. Another psalm mocks people for supposedly not knowing that all those prosperous evildoers are going to die, but it ignores the fact that the good people will too.

In the book of Malachi, we see one of the consequences of having a false belief in a just world: The people were so used to thinking that way, they thought being personally repaid for their own actions was the only reason to do good and not evil. God complains that now that his people have realized the world doesn’t work that way, they think there’s no reason to do good.

This problem would not have happened if God had encouraged people to focus on the real natural consequences that their actions have for everyone, instead of basing his moral teachings on selfishness and a false belief in a just world.

Mordecai told Esther she would die if she didn’t get her husband the king of Persia to stop Haman from destroying the Jews. But not just because she was one of the Jews. For some reason, Mordecai thought the rest of the Jews would be saved either way, but Esther would only live if she did the right thing.

Ezra thought the reason bad things were happening to the Jews was that they were disobeying God by marrying Canaanites.

Jesus claims that nobody needs to worry about having food and clothing. All they need to do is seek God’s kingdom through righteousness, and then they will definitely have all the food and clothing they need.

At one point, Jesus almost sounds like he gets that the world isn’t just. He points out that some people who had recently gotten killed weren’t worse sinners than anyone else. But then he concludes that if you don’t repent, you’ll perish too. Which would only make sense if people were dying because they sinned.

Another time, Jesus’s disciples asked him if a blind man was blind because he was being punished for his sin. Jesus admitted that it had nothing to do with justice, and God had made that guy blind just to give Jesus an opportunity to show off.

When a snake bit Paul, the islanders of Malta concluded that he must be an escaped murderer that Justice would not allow to live. When some of Paul’s followers got sick and died, Paul concluded that it must be because they had offended God by not having the right thoughts during ritual meals.

Job and Solomon on justice

Job’s friends insisted that if Job was really a good person, he would have nothing to worry about, because they thought bad things only ever happened to bad people. They thought wicked people were never happy for long. They were sure God would never pervert justice, so if bad things were happening to Job, it must be because Job was a bad person. And if all his kids had all gotten killed, it must be because they had done something wrong too.

Job’s friends imagined all kinds of bad things Job must have done to explain what was happening to him. They told him all he needed to do to stop bad things from happening to him was to stop being bad.

As we know from the first two chapters of Job’s story, as well as from God’s statement at the end, Job’s three friends were completely wrong about all that. What they said about God was not true. God had decided to do bad things to Job, knowing that Job had never done anything wrong to deserve it.

But even Job continued to believe that if he actually had been wicked, that would have caused misfortune for him. Though he pointed out that if his friends’ just world assumption was true, they would have a lot more to worry about than he would.

As for himself, Job didn’t know what he might have done wrong, but he wished God would stop keeping track of his sin. That might have been a reasonable response under the assumption of a just God, but God not caring whether Job had sinned or not was actually the reason Job was suffering in the first place.

As cynical as he may be, even Solomon seems pretty convinced that the world is fair. He thinks whether you seek good or evil, that’s what you’ll get. He thinks the righteous get what they want, but the wicked only get what they fear, not what they hope for. You don’t even have to wait for the afterlife. He thinks the righteous get what they deserve on earth, and the sinners even more so. He thinks you can put curses on people, but only if they deserve it. By living a righteous life, you will attain a splendorous crown of… gray hair?

Solomon apparently thinks prosperity is the fruit of righteousness. He thinks everyone who even tries to be righteous finds life, prosperity and honor. He’s sure the wicked won’t go unpunished, and that only the generous people will prosper, not the corrupt people. He says God is generous to generous people and curses stingy people.

Solomon dismisses the wealth of the wicked as deceptive and unreliable compared to the “reward” of the righteous. He thinks you’ll never be able to keep money that you didn’t earn honestly. He thinks sinners will lose their wealth to the righteous, who will be able to pass on their wealth to future generations.

Solomon thinks if you’re a troublemaker you’ll instantly bring disaster on yourself, but you don’t need to worry about ruin as long as you’re not wicked. He thinks wicked people and liars have short lives, because if you pursue evil you’ll find death, but God never lets the righteous go hungry or die. He thinks storms kill the wicked people but spare the righteous people. He thinks you can preserve your own life by avoiding doing evil.

Solomon thinks only wicked people ever get overthrown or forced to leave their land, because the righteous can’t be uprooted, while the wicked can’t even be established. He thinks being righteous makes your life easy and safe, while being wicked will only cause your downfall. He thinks the righteous get rescued, and only the wicked remain in trouble. He thinks the wicked have plenty of trouble, while the righteous are only rewarded and never harmed. He thinks attempts to harm good people always backfire and only harm bad people.

Solomon thinks you benefit yourself by being kind, and you bring ruin on yourself by being cruel. And he claims that sinful men “ambush only themselves“. So he’s not just making an unjustified just world assumption, he’s also denying the existence of the real victims.

Continue reading Fallacious reasoning in the Bible →