Often there’s an implicit analogy to buildings, the quintessential symbol of humanity, when talking about logic. Logic can, at least in my reality, be viewed as a set of operations which are used to make inferences based on assumptions (e.g., if A, then C) and assertions (A is true, B is false), we hope, the real world, with which we can make deductions that, once again, we hope mirror the real world.
If one or more of your assumptions are wrong, then your inferences, your arguments, may be entirely in accordance with your operations, i.e., your rules of argument, but your results are simply wrong.
In fact, the rules of argument are rarely at issue in logician’s circles; it’s all about the assumptions. Or so a logician once told a group of us on social media back in the early 1990s.
Why bring this up? Erick Erickson persists in sending his emails, and I am drawn to them like watching train accidents. Some of what he has to say is valid and even interesting, although I am not his target audience – in fact, that may be why I find it interesting. And then there’s yesterday’s mailing, entitled COVID-19 and the Mark of the Beast. This caught my attention:
If COVID-19 were wiping out children instead of grandparents, many of the same people now demanding we fully reopen and refusing a vaccine would be beating down the door to get one. A virus that takes children would be viewed far differently than one that kills an elderly person in a nursing home.
Throughout history, there have been anti-Christs and marks of beasts. It is arguably not a one-time thing even if the precursors are just shadows of the real and final anti-Christ. I have a pastor friend who argues the rainbow flag is just the latest incarnation as increasingly a refusal to celebrate LGBT issues can ruin a person or small business. I know a guy who persuasively argued the hammer and sickle of communism is the mark.
I would argue that instead of obsessing about marks of beasts and whether a government might exercise long-established precedent to make sure you and I don’t spread viruses that can kill and overwhelm hospitals, we should instead focus on what we truly know is true. If we put our trust in Jesus, we are saved.
Anyone can be persuasive when arguing using invalid assumptions – such as that there is a God. So Erickson is half-persuaded by such an argument? Maybe rather than looking for holes in the logic, maybe it’s time to look at your assumptions.
Make no mistake, Erickson dismisses the entire Mark of the Beast silliness as a waste of time, if historically interesting in that it reflects the era. But rather than rebuffing his the friend obsessed with the hammer and sickle, he hides in a different bit of the mythology.
I suspect he’ll always be uncomfortable swimming about in his pea-soup of bad assumptions.
