I am trying to learn to identify circular reasoning. Circular reasoning is defined as “a logical fallacy where the conclusion of an argument is used as one of the premises to support itself.” So I’ve come up with a statement that I think would be an example of this, but would someone please chime in and let me know if I’m getting it right?
“The Bible is inerrant, because it is the Word of God and God cannot lie.” The reason I think this is an example of CR is because it is using Bible verses to qualify the argument of inerrancy. So it’s using itself to qualify the statement.
Is this correct? Or could someone give me a better example? I’m particularly interested in the circular reasoning that happens when inerrancy believers try to reconcile and harmonize tensions throughout the Bible. There is a phenomenon that people will make up a less probable solution to force the tensions to work, because that is better than having to admit it doesn’t work. There seems to be something circular going on there. “I have to believe xyz, because it is true.”
“The Bible is inerrant, because it is the Word of God and God cannot lie.”
That is only circular if your only reason for thinking the Bible is the Word of God or for thinking God cannot lie is that the Bible says so.
If you have extra-biblical reasons for thinking God cannot lie and that the Bible is God’s words, then it is not circular.
An example of circular reasoning might look like this:
Thesis: all grues are black.
Reason: I know this because I have exhaustively considered all the species of grue, and each of them is black.
Objection: What about this class of blue grue?
Reply: It isn’t technically a grue because it isn’t black.
In real life, circular reasoning usually involves several steps which obscure the fundamentally circular nature of the argument.
Another example might be Anslem’s ontological argument for God, which could be accused of defining ‘God’ in such a way that his existence is implicitly smuggled into the definition.
Welcome Micah.
The classic formulation is the question placed by a prosecutor in court to the accused.
“When did you stop being your wife?”
This is a form of circular argument known as “question begging”. The question assumes what it is trying to prove.
The other example that comes to mind came out of the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the US. In the debates leading up to the decision I heard a minister say that he opposed same sex marriage because “marriage is between a man and a woman”. Perfectly circular because defining marriage is what the debate was about.
I realized, even as I typed it out, that Anslem’s argument was probably a poor example . . . illustrating the obscure with the far more obscure (and controverted).
Perhaps a better example would be:
I accept that the Church is infallible because the Scriptures say (at least on one interpretation) that the Church is divinely instituted and the pillar of truth. In turn I accept that the Scriptures are inerrant because the Church teaches me that they are.
That last example is, I think, a bit too transparently circular to find defended in real life, but it is probably a clearer example.
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