Is awareness of the fallacy in the argument a prerequisite of sophistry?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this post, I use the following two terms interchangably: sophistry and intellectual dishonesty. I would define both as using a fallacious argument in order to prove your point or “come out as right” in a debate. Please let me know if they are actually distinct concepts. So, over the years, I have called quite a few arguments in which I have detected fallacious logic “intellectually dishonest”, and I’m wondering if I was completely fair in using this term. For as fallacious as said arguments were, I don’t always know if the people using them truly believed them or if, on some level they knew their arguments to be fallacious. In order to qualify as sophistry / intellectual dishonesty, does the person making the argument have to be aware of the fallacy in their argument? Or else, do we separate the person from the argument? Or what if it’s somewhere in between (e.g. a person believes in the logic because of a confirmation bias? Or because they are a narcissist and always believe that they’re right?)

Let me give some examples of arguments I’ve found ridiculously unconvincing; all of them come from religion. As a former Orthodox Christian who is now an atheist, I have long accused Christianity and its teachings of being justified by intellectually dishonest arguments that often amount to “preaching to the choir”. Here are two of these arguments, along with what I see as rather obvious fallacies:

  1. “God doesn’t send anyone to Hell. He wants everyone to be saved. If you end up in Hell, it’s your fault for sinning and the Devil’s for tempting you. God’s commandments are not meant to restrict your freedom. God has given them to you for your benefit. Not obeying God’s commandments may be likened to a patient refusing to take medicine prescribed by a doctor or a drowning person being thrown a lifeline and refusing to grab it.”

Flaws in the logic: Lots. First of all, none of this is clearly stated in the Bible, certainly not in the New Testament, which is replete with references to God as someone who will actively separate the righteous from the damned, of sinners being thrown into “the outer darkness where the worm does not die and there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”, of God / Jesus standing in judgment over men; never is God depicted as a benevolent doctor administring medicine to ill souls. On the contrary, Jesus’ parables are full of comparisons of God to a master punishing a lazy slave, a king who has rebellious subjects killed, or one of the same giving a wedding feast for his son and throwing a man who wasn’t wearing wedding clothes into said “outer darkness”, I.E., Hell. It is so obvious that, according to the New Testament, people are in Hell due to God’s agency. Next, depicting God as a benevolent friend of men and denying him any responsibility for people suffering in Hell completely ignores the fact that, according to standard Christian teaching, 1) He is almighty; therefore he could save people, whether or not they followed his commandments in many other ways, for example, by taking away the existence of souls who would otherwise be destined for Hell, or by anesthetizing them so they don’t feel Hell, or in any other way. 2) Even if God’s commandments were meant as “medicine for sick souls” rather than as forcing people to obey on pain of going to Hell, God is still the one who wills (and thus forces) you to exist in a world where you have this unappealing choice of following his commandments or risk eternal suffering. He doesn’t give you the choice not to enter this world. He created humans knowing that many of them would end up in Hell. He doesn’t give them any escape option other than to follow his many onerous commandments. Ergo, it’s not that God CAN’T save everyone. Going by what the Bible explicitly says, he simply CHOOSES not to.

  1. "You don’t really understand what the Bible says. The meaning of that passage is not literal. It is figurative. You need to seek for the truth between the lines. Alternate version: that has a mystic meaning. You are not spiritually mature enough to understand it. Or else: you can’t just read that and understand it. You need to consult the Church Fathers and the writings of enlightened theologians and holy men to understand the meaning.

Flaws in the logic: What is your evidence that I can’t take the words in the sense in which they were written? OK, some things need to be understood in the language or context of the time they were written in, but what is to say that, if something is written in the Bible, it can’t be taken at face value? Aren’t you starting with an assumption (insert whatever point your denomination teaches as truth or dogma) and then appealing to those authorities who will give the text a bent that agrees with it rather than reading what the text actually says? For instance, in the Old Testament, God is clearly stated to hate the sinner. This contradicts the idea of God as being by his very nature all-loving. Yet there is some saint or someone who wrote that we should understand that as “a kind of spiritual hatred”, thus not hatred as you and I understand it. Clearly he is just adapting the words to fit his perception of God.

Would you agree that these arguments are examples of intellectual dishonesty or of sophistry? And does it matter if those that advance them genuinely believe them / settle for them?

2

My understanding of the meaning of “intellectually dishonest” seems to mean a different thing than what you’ve laid out here. Intellectual dishonesty, to my understanding, is refusing to engage in critical thinking or examine your own beliefs for inconsistencies.

I don’t consider this a logical fallacy, but for lack of a better term, a moral one. It’s willful ignorance.

To elaborate on that further, I think it’s especially dishonest to claim to be attacking someone’s argument out of a love of reason, when in fact one won’t look at one’s own rationale with a critical lens.

3

And often the arguments and positions being pushed by people being willfully ignorant were crafted by other people, and they are just repeating them without examining them. So it’s quite possible for an argument to be both deliberately dishonest and for the people using it to not realize it.

4

That’s a good point. I wonder if the OP is overestimating the average person’s logic and critical thinking skills.

It’s not sophistry if they’re presenting an argument that they themselves find convincing. They may not be knowledgeable enough or adept enough at critical thinking to see the flaws in the arguments they are presenting (or possibly in the muddled way they are presenting them).

5

And the OP is focusing on religion, which isn’t logical at all. It’s based on how people feel.

I have a good friend I consider generally an excellent critical thinker, an intellectual, and very thoughtful in how he expresses himself. But he is a Presbyterian minister, and sometimes he expresses beliefs that are so out of left field I find myself thinking, “I actually forgot you believe in magic.”

I don’t consider him intellectually dishonest because I don’t consider religious arguments logical ones. I really don’t mean that in a disparaging way, I have plenty of beliefs that aren’t based on logic, like the transformative power of love, but some things are just outside the realm of logic.

Makes me think of all those proofs of God’s existence I had to lay out when I was a philosophy student (I remember nothing.) In the Battle between Rationalism and Empiricism it seemed like the ultimate validation was if you could prove God. But if you look at the proofs, they are hardly ironclad. That’s intellectual dishonesty.

6

Or simply may not want to. There’s more than one sort of intellectual dishonesty; there’s deliberately, consciously lying and making false arguments to be sure. But there’s also making claims that you carefully avoid thinking about too hard because you want them to be true and don’t want to risk discovering you’re wrong.

7

Based on debating a large number of people from different sides on different topics, I think it’s pretty rare for anyone to deliberately use arguments they don’t believe in. People hold beliefs for mostly social reasons, and either they are unable to see the logical flaws in their arguments, or they are able to rationalise them to their own satisfaction. I suspect our minds evolved to work in this self-serving way because it’s easier to convince other people of something if you really believe it yourself.

8

Well, there was this study.

When I realized that people spreading misinformation don’t care at all whether what they’re saying is true, that explained a lot to me, and I will stop trying to reason with such people and simply disengage.