The Logic Problem

There is a kind of confidence that has nothing behind it. All hat, no cattle.

Someone makes a bold assertion. You ask a reasonable follow-up question. They say the same thing again, more slowly, as if the problem were your hearing. No new evidence. No argument. Just repetition carrying the weight of certainty it has not earned.

Most of us have been that person too.

The logic problem here is old. Bare assertion is offering a claim as if the claim itself were the evidence, and it is one of the most familiar errors in informal reasoning. It often travels with a related move: treating “most experts say so” as if that settled the matter, without ever showing why they say so. But logic problems rarely stay in the category of logic. They tend to have a basement, a hidden floor beneath the argument where something else is going on. And what lives in the basement is usually something the heart has already decided before the argument began.

Proverbs 18.17 shows this clearly: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” The text describes a courtroom procedure, but it reveals a temptation: the desire to seem right, to land first, to occupy the ground before anyone checks the foundation.

That desire is not primarily an intellectual problem. It is a worship problem.

In Worship

In John 5.44, Jesus is speaking to men who had studied the Scriptures their entire lives: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” The obstacle to honest inquiry was not a lack of information. It was a misplaced love. They needed something from each other more than they needed the truth, and that need quietly organized everything, including what they were willing to see and what they were not. Every one of us has what Tim Keller called “functional saviors” in his book Counterfeit Gods,¹ things we trust for identity, worth, and security, that are not God. Academic credibility is one of the most powerful functional saviors available to educated people. The need to be seen as serious, as current, as standing with the informed consensus can quietly become the thing a person’s sense of self depends on. When that happens, the argument is no longer really about evidence. It is about belonging.

This is the basement beneath the assertion fallacy, the functional saviors and misplaced loves that quietly steer our thinking, and it surfaces with some regularity in contemporary public-facing biblical scholarship.

In Scholarship

Dan McClellan is one of the most visible online voices in biblical studies, and I have appreciated his work for several years, especially when he stays close to his discipline and helps non-specialists understand the textual and historical issues more clearly. At times, however, he invokes scholarly consensus in a way that functions rhetorically as a substitute for walking audiences through the underlying argument.² That is worth pressing, because consensus is a sociological fact about what a guild presently believes, not the evidence itself. It may summarize where the evidence has led many scholars, but it cannot replace the reasoning that got them there.

The documentary hypothesis, once treated as settled, has been substantially revised. Minimalist positions on the patriarchal narratives, dominant for a generation, have softened under archaeological pressure. Consensus shifts because evidence is weighed and re-weighed over time. That is why consensus, by itself, is not the evidence. It is a downstream product of evidence, not a substitute for it.

Bart Ehrman is more precise on this point. He has written explicitly that “scholarly consensus is NOT EVIDENCE” and that his aim is to foreground the reasoning behind the consensus rather than treat agreement as proof.³ That is the right instinct, and it is worth crediting. But even when the formal distinction is acknowledged in one place, phrases like “most scholars think” and “virtually all historians agree” can still do a lot of social work in popular-level argument. They can position the reader to feel as if they are choosing between agreement and embarrassment, without presenting the argument itself. The rhetorical effect can outrun the formal intention.⁴

For non-specialists, there is a place for modest deference to expertise. Most of us simply cannot rerun every technical argument from scratch. But healthy deference treats expert consensus as an invitation (there are good reasons here; let’s look at them) not as a conversation-stopper that shames questions into silence.

In Ourselves

Before you settle too comfortably into the critique, it is worth asking whether conservative readers do this too. We do.

“Our scholars agree.” “The traditional interpretation has always held.” “No faithful reader of the text believes.” The structure is identical. The functional savior is just a different community, a different need for belonging, a different set of people whose approval quietly organizes the conclusion before the argument starts.

Among the disciples I am associated with, appeals to “what the early church practiced”on questions of worship and church organization have sometimes functioned the same way: invoking antiquity as a conversation-stopper rather than examining what the historical record actually shows and why it matters.⁵ The pedigree becomes the argument, as if being old or ours were enough to settle the question. The method is identical to what we are critiquing elsewhere.

Jesus’ question in John 5.44 does not have a conservative exemption. The desire to receive glory from one another is a human condition, not a progressive pathology. This is a recurrent temptation in public-facing scholarship across ideological lines, and honest inquiry is costly for everyone, because everyone has something invested in what they find.

This is where a restoration principle earns its keep, not as a tribal slogan but as a genuine epistemological discipline. “Where is it written?” is not anti-intellectual obscurantism. It is the right question, because it returns every discussion to the ground on which all claims must eventually stand. The same instinct that leads us back to Scripture when someone invokes tradition should lead us to ask for the argument when someone invokes consensus. Show me the ground.

What Freedom Looks Like

The formation Jesus calls us to in John 5.44 is not primarily about getting better at debates. It is about becoming people who are free enough from the need for human approval that we can actually see. People who do not need to be right so badly that we stop being honest. People whose identity is secure enough in Christ that losing an argument does not feel like losing ourselves.

That kind of freedom is not a debate technique. It is what Dallas Willard called the renovation of the heart. It is the deep, Spirit-led reworking of what we love and what we fear, so that the inmost person is actually different, not just better managed.

When that freedom is present, conversations change. You can ask the follow-up question without aggression, because you are not defending territory. You can say “I don’t know” without shame. You can hear a strong argument against a position you have held and actually consider it, because your worth is not riding on the outcome. In a small but real way, you are being conformed to the One who refused to chase human glory and trusted the Father to vindicate him in his time, the crucified and risen Christ.

And when someone offers you a confident assertion without the argument behind it, you can simply ask, with genuine curiosity rather than contempt: what is the reasoning behind that?

That question, asked in charity and held with patience, is what honest inquiry looks like. It is also, quietly, what it looks like to seek the glory that comes from God alone.

~PW 🌮🛶

1. Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods (Dutton, 2009). Keller argues that the heart’s tendency to trust created things for what only God can provide is the root form of idolatry. ↩︎
2. Daniel O. McClellan, “Responding to James White (Part 6),” danielomcclellan.wordpress.com, May 16, 2011. McClellan argues there that subsequent scholarship is not obligated to restate the full case from the ground up in every discussion once a conclusion is widely established, a reasonable point about scholarly economy that can nonetheless produce the rhetorical pattern described here. ↩︎
3. Bart Ehrman, “On Scholarly Consensus,” ehrmanblog.org. Ehrman states directly that consensus is not evidence and insists the reasoning behind consensus should be foregrounded. His clarification is genuine and worth acknowledging. ↩︎
4. On the distinction between reasonable deference to expertise and treating authority as proof, see the standard treatments of argumentum ad verecundiam in informal logic. The fallacy is not in citing experts but in substituting their agreement for the demonstration itself. ↩︎
5. This pattern appears across both progressive and conservative streams within the restoration movement. The discipline of asking for the actual argument, not just the historical claim, is one the movement itself has modeled at its best. ↩︎