Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Frank Turek’s Fallacious Stance On Hypocrisy

Frank Turek has a specific response whenever non-Christians are repulsed by hypocrisy among Christians--he says that everyone is a hypocrite, so there's room in Christendom for one more.  One can easily find this claim on YouTube; unfortunately, I came upon a video where he said this years ago.  This diagnosis may sound appealing to some listeners, but is it true?  Are all people hypocrites, and, if they are, is it impossible for them to shed their hypocrisy?

It's not surprising, though frustrating to rational people, that people like Turek do not get challenged for their obvious fallacies when they utter phrases like this.  After all, it's easy to see why people might like not challenging him here: they can both thoughtlessly agree with a popular apologist and convince themselves that any actual hypocrisy in their lives is an inescapable thing that they cannot defeat.  They don't call out the blatant fallacy of composition, non sequitur, and instance of begging the question in Turek's soundbite-like response, and they can even feel better for it.

Just because one person is a hypocrite doesn't mean that all people are.  To assume anything about the moral character of all people based upon the failings of a handful fallaciously extrapolates from part of humanity to all of humanity.  Besides, since there is no instance where someone sins by logical necessity--meaning that they could not have avoided sinning--moral perfection can be achieved by Christians [1].  No one has to sin.  Even if all people were hypocrites, none of them have to remain in their hypocrisy at all.

Frank Turek, like most Christian apologists, uses extensive sophistry at times (his moral epistemology is shit too; it's mostly an emotion-based appeal to conscience).  The fact that his mistaken belief about hypocrisy is so compact and easy to sell to audiences does not make it correct, though the slow-minded can be deceived by easily-repeatable phrases.  Hypocrisy is not something all people are necessarily guilty of because there is no sin that all people have to commit.  Absolute consistency--both intellectually and morally--is by no means impossible, and all it takes to realize this is a logical analysis of consistency.

Christian apologists can be some of the most amusing pseudo-intellectuals of the modern era.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/05/sinlessness-is-logically-possible.html

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