Saturday Selections – Sept 12, 2026

C.S. Lewis, Donall and Conall, Richard Dawkins, and bulverism

“Oh, you just want to control women’s bodies.” It’s a standard insult in the abortion debate, and one that attacks our motives, but not our argument (that the unborn are precious human beings, made in the Image of God, who therefore deserve the same protection all other human beings are given under the 6th Commandment – see Ex. 20:13).

C.S. Lewis addressed this logical fallacy – the “appeal to motive” – in his essay “Bulverism”:

“You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third – ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment,’ E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.”

Donall and Conall labelled Richard Dawkins’ fallacy of this sort a “non sequitor” and it does seem to be that too. He’s arguing Christians are Christians because they were born into Christian families or cultures. But if this was a valid argument, it would apply equally to Richard Dawkins. Why is he an evolutionist? Because he was given an evolutionary education. There is something true to both statements – you might well be a Christian because God gifted you a Christian family from birth, and Richard Dawkins certainly was inculcated in evolution. But the key point is that Dawkins objection doesn’t actually address whether or not Christianity is true…. the point he is pretending to address.

Stop listening to yourself, and start talking to yourself!

No one preaches to you more than you. That means your own self-talk is going to influence how you see and understand things. And if you’re telling yourself lies about how well or badly things are going on around you – or you downplay the talents God has given you, or recast the mistreatment you’ve directed at a sibling, or make much of a small slight someone sent your way – you’ll convince yourself of something that just isn’t so.

3 questions to ask about books your children want to read

1. What is the goal of the book? (And is this a good goal?)
2. Does the book achieve its goal? (Or is the execution lacking/confusing?)
3. Does this book glorify and normalize sin, or condemn it?

Surrey RCMP visit “Christian Nationalist” for hate speech complaint

We all have a few Facebook friends who say things blunter, but sometimes they just plain blunder, sharing stories that seem plausible but aren’t entirely true. They’re well-intentioned, trying to warn their friends. But if I was going to tread into the minefield they’re barging through, I’d want to do so more carefully. That said, if they were going to critique me, they’d probably say I need to bold up… and they’d have a point. And whatever their blunder, I wouldn’t the RCMP showing up on their doorstep.

But that’s what happened to Tanya Gaw, the Action4Canada.com founder, this past week. An RCMP officer invited her to come downtown so they could talk to her about some of the material she’d posted to the site, and tweeted on X. I don’t know Gaw, but looking over the website, I was struck by how bold and blunt it is, and that did have me wondering whether, like those Facebook friends, that might have led to some blunders too. Then, when I looked up a critic’s take on her, some of her positions that he was implying or ourtirght saying were hateful were positions I held too:

• opposing Barry Neufeld’s $750,000 fine for “hate”
• blaming the Tumbler Ridge shooting on transgender ideology
• in opposing BC schools homosexual indoctrination of school children, she seems to have quoted Jesus’ warning in Luke 17:2 about how “It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” I wouldn’t have done that, but I can hardly argue against the applicability of the warning. Ironically, the critic concluded his article with a millstone reference himself – apparently when Gaw does so it is hateful, but when this critic does it, it’s different.

Christians believe in free speech, though within some limits. We stand for it because we believe there is a Truth to be found, so we should be allowed to seek it out – seek God out – as freely as possible. We need to be free to work through our errors by allowing others to hear and correct us. In contrast, the secular world repeatedly ends up suppressing speech because their ideology can’t stand up to the scrutiny.

All AI are liars?

I just got way-laid by a new-to-me kind of AI lie.

I was using ChatGPT to work through why my Microsoft Word program had stopped working. Chat assured me at each diagnostic step that we were making progress. But after dozens and dozens of dead ends, I realized that my AI assistant’s constant encouragement was the reason I’d blown hours on this, instead of giving it up as futile way earlier. I knew ChatGPT’ could get things wrong, but I didn’t realize that its “you can do it” encouragement could be one of the lies it pitches.

In the short linked article Rev. Wes Bredenhof speaks to 5 other, very different AI lies he’s encountered and warns us to be watchful. One of the difficulties in figuring out how to use AI is that it isn’t a person but feels like one. With people, we can evaluate whether they are trustworthy or prone to exaggeration – we can get the measure of the man or woman. But AI is hit and miss, one moment offering up amazing results  we’d never have gotten any other way, and the next moment getting the most basic of facts completely backwards. So how can we know when it is doing which? Only by going to the sources it is referencing, which we need to do if what we’re looking at is of any importance.

Knowing God

Knowing about God isn’t the same as knowing God.