Top Ten Flawed Arguments Used Against Latter-day Saints

Let’s talk about the top 10 flawed arguments or logical fallacies I see being used against Latter-day Saints. I want you to get familiar with them for 2 reasons: 1, so you can respectfully call ‘em out when you see them (if you feel so inclined), and 2, so you can be careful not to use them, yourself, whether you are a Latter-day Saint or not.

Coming in at number 10, we’ve got Poisoning the Well. This fallacy occurs when someone uses emotionally charged words in order to bias or prime an audience against something before even discussing the actual issues. For example, lots of people like to claim that the Church of Jesus Christ is a cult. Culturally, this is an ugly term that generally evokes pretty ugly feelings. Nobody wants to be associated with cults. But throwing this term around is a great way to poison the well. When Christianity was a minority religion, Pagans poisoned the well by claiming that Christians were cannibals—a rather dramatic misrepresentation of the sacramental bread and wine that represented the flesh and blood of Christ. It’s also a straw man fallacy, but we’ll get to that later in the video.

Number 9: The Bandwagon Fallacy, or Appeal to Popularity: According to this fallacy, because a certain viewpoint is popular, it must therefore be true. For example: “Biblical Christianity is Billions and Mormons are 10M. I’ll take the Billions for a ticket to Heaven.” By this same faulty logic, you could claim that Christianity must be false because most people throughout the world are not Christian. But thankfully, truth is not determined by popularity.

Number 8: the Gish Gallop. Gish Gallops are very easy to spot. They can occur in both verbal and written debates, but the goal of this technique is simply to overwhelm your opponent with a rapid series of arguments or claims. Many of the arguments may be weak, misleading, or even false, but the sheer volume of them makes them seem convincing. The Gish Gallop creates the illusion of having a strong case because making claims is much easier than refuting claims. It’s easier to throw 100 eggs than it is to clean up 100 eggs.

I see gish gallops all the time in comments sections. Here’s a DM I got recently — it’s a shorter gish gallop, but it’s just a list of claims intended to overwhelm. I think they’ve all got great responses, but it would take a very long time to respond to each point, and if I were to try, he’d probably just respond with a new list of claims. The idea with a Gish Gallop is to throw as many darts at the wall as you can and hope that something sticks. But just because you can come up with lots of arguments doesn’t mean you’re right.

To read the entire article and to watch the video: keystonelds