Audio only:
Joe explains how many apologists from different perspectives fall into the trap of what he coins the “Counterfeit Argument.” Learn how to spot and disarm this common logical fallacy.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I want to answer a kind of argument that I hear used to argue against Catholicism, to argue against church councils and the Pope, to argue against Christianity itself, to argue against the Bible, to argue against even the existence of God. And you’ll hear this argument in different forms, sometimes by Protestants, sometimes by non-Christians, sometimes by atheists, and you might not recognize it as the same argument. So I’m going to give some examples of it from everyone from Ryan@needgod.net to Ricky Gervais and show how it’s a similar kind of argument being used.
I’m calling it the counterfeit argument. It goes a little bit like this. You believe there is a true thing. There’s a church council. There’s a Pope. There’s a book of the Bible. There’s a religion. There’s a God. But look, here’s something false that also claims to be that thing. So therefore, you’re being arbitrary and believing in one and not the other, and therefore we should reasonably reject both of them. Now, that might sound like a silly argument. Let me give you some examples of people using this argument in the wild, as it were. Starting, as I said, with Ryan from Need God, where he argues as one of his 10 reasons to reject Catholicism that, “Hey, look, there are some councils that the church accepts and some ecumenical councils that the church doesn’t think are ecumenical councils.”
CLIP:
In regards to church councils, they arbitrarily pick which councils they want to consider authoritative.
Joe:
So we’ll get more into the details of this later, but right now, just notice that he’s saying because there is this thing in 754 that we don’t recognize as an ecumenical council, sometimes called the headless council for reasons I’ll explain, and it had 338 bishops and denied Catholic teaching. Why would we reject that and yet accept the second council of Nicia less than 40 years later that only has 308 bishops? Now, this argument only works. If you think the thing that makes an ecumenical council valid is either some bishops claimed it was a council or else it becomes ecumenical if it hits a certain number of bishops. And strangely, I’ve even heard Orthodox make some version of that argument when they argue that the Fourth Council of Constantinople accepted by the Catholic Church should be rejected because they had more people come later for a body they also called the Fourth Council of Constantinople.
Now, hopefully you can see at the outset, it’s not a very strong argument to say a council’s determined simply by the number of bishops that attend, but we’ll get more into that. For now, all you need to see is that the argument goes, it’s unprincipled, it’s arbitrary to accept one council and reject the other. So this is an argument that obviously Catholics and Orthodox don’t really believe in acumenical councils. The second version of this argument is one that comes up with the papacy, particularly with a moment called the Western schism or the papal schism. And this is a regular argument used against the authority of the Pope by saying, “Hey, look, here was this time where two and then three people claim to be Pope at the same time.” I’ve responded to a version of this kind of historical argument made by Redeem Zoomer, but this came up in the Q&A session of my debate with Jacob Hansen from an LDS perspective.
I thought it was pretty interesting because a lot of that debate, as I’ve mentioned, became about the papacy rather than about the great apostasy. And one guy who got up asked a three-part question or comment making arguments about papal history. These are ones that I haven’t addressed my knowledge in depth on this channel. So I wanted to do that and apologies in advance. The audio, as many of you know, was screwed up, and this is particularly true in the Q&A period.
CLIP:
How is it that the Roman Catholic Church can claim an unbroken line of authority when there’s documented historical evidence that number one, there are gaps in that line, sometimes many years. Number two, there was a female Pope, at one time there were three Popes who excommunicated each other. Okay.
Joe:
60 second response. Good, good. Now, two thirds of his question was actually built on a false premise. There haven’t been these huge gaps of time in between Popes. The longest span of time in between Popes is under three years, about two years and nine months. And during that time, the Cardinals were actively seeking to elect a new Pope. They just didn’t agree who that Pope should be. So that doesn’t seem to disprove the papacy. There’s no exploration where it says, “Well, you’ve only got 20 days to do it, and if you don’t, then the papacy expires.” So okay, that part of the question isn’t really true. The second part, this idea of Pope Joan, this is a long debunked medieval legend. It’s very obviously untrue. You can’t point to a moment in history where there was a Pope Joan. And the whole story is kind of comically ridiculous where allegedly there’s a woman dressed as a man calling herself Pope John, and then she gives birth in the middle of a papal procession.
The whole thing reads like an outlandish medieval story because it is an outlandish medieval story and no scholars take this seriously. I was sort of surprised to see someone still repeating this, but unfortunately old legends die hard. But the third thing that he mentioned is real. There was a period of time where, as I said, two and then eventually three people were claiming to be Pope. So this is a counterfeit argument. How can you claim that there is a papacy when there are also anti-popes? That’s a term we use for someone who claims to be Pope but isn’t. So there are counterfeit Popes, so doesn’t that disprove the real Pope? So the argument seems to go. Isn’t it arbitrary to believe one of these three guys is the Pope and not the other two? Now, as I said, this isn’t just a kind of argumentation used against Catholicism particularly.
You can also find versions of this used against Christianity or against theism itself. So against Christianity, there’s a version of this made against the Bible. The argument goes something like, “Hey, there are a bunch of different books out there.” And at some point, maybe according to people like Dan Brown, the author of DaVinci Code, maybe at 3:25 at the first Council of Nica, they just arbitrarily chose some books as Bible and other books not as Bible books. And so doesn’t that prove this is just arbitrary? Again, there’s counterfeit books. Doesn’t that mean that the real books don’t count?
CLIP:
The church sets its eyes on the gnostics and condemns their beliefs as heresy.
And the religion starts becoming very male and traces of the impulse towards the sacred feminine start being eradicated in various ways, including what is declared to be heretical thoughts and what is adopted as official text for the New Testament.
Especially the notion that Mary Magdalene gave birth to a daughter and that there are living descendants of Jesus himself. So Constantine had the gnostic texts destroyed, leaving only the traditional gospels now found in the Bible or so says the da Vinci code.
Joe:
Now, it’s probably worth at least mentioning none of what you just heard there was really true. Yes, there was a Counsel in 3:25. No, it didn’t determine the books of the Bible. No gnosticism wasn’t a major force by 3:25 and no, people weren’t going around worshiping Mary Magdalene. This is just simply not true. We have pretty abundant evidence from the first 300 years of Christianity. Nevertheless, you will hear people make this kind of claim. And in fact, you can even find a version of it against God himself. Like, “Hey, there are 3000 gods out there claiming to be God. So how can you possibly believe your God is a real God?” Here’s Ricky Gervais making that same counterfeit God argument on Stephen Colbert.
CLIP:
You believe in one God, I assume. In three persons, but go ahead. Okay. So you believe … Okay. But there are about 3000 to choose from that have been people believe in
Some- I’ve
Done some reading, yeah. Okay. So basically you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods, and I don’t believe in just one more.
Joe:
Right.
So the reason I’m calling this a counterfeit argument is because it’s saying, “Hey, look, there’s this thing you regard as real and this thing you regard as fake. We think this is a real council. We think that’s a fake one. We think this is a real Pope. We think that’s a fake one. We think this is a real book of the Bible. We think that’s a fake one. We think this is a true God. We think that’s a fake one.” You could do the same thing with money. Look, there are real bills out there that are authentic US currency and there are counterfeit ones. It would be absurd for someone to say, “Look, these two bills, which can’t both be real, both purport to be $100 bills, and therefore it’s arbitrary for you to believe one of them is real and one of them is fake.” No, it could be arbitrary, but it’s not necessarily.
So let’s unpack that argument because as I said, there’s a glimmer of truth here, but it’s being badly argued to false conclusions. So first, the fact that there’s a fake version of a thing does not of itself invalidate that there’s a real version of the thing. The fact that there are false religions doesn’t mean there’s not a true religion. The fact that there are false gods doesn’t mean there’s not a true God. The Bible’s actually quite clear on that, as we’re going to see in a moment. However, it would be arbitrary if we were just randomly choosing which things we thought were true, from which things we thought were false. But unfortunately, you’ll notice in all of the examples given, there’s the assumption by the non-believer, like you must just arbitrarily choose counsels. You must arbitrarily choose Popes, you must arbitrarily choose books of the Bible, you must arbitrably choose which God you worship.
And none of those things are true, certainly not necessarily true. Now, maybe there are Christians out there who are just arbitrarily saying, “I guess I’m going to be a Christian today.” But I think any Christian would tell you that they have reasons for why they believe in the God revealed in the Bible and not some false God. But this idea that our belief in God, the Bible, the Pope councils is arbitrary is just an assumption. And it’s an assumption that isn’t rooted in reality. It is a false assumption. There are good reasons for believing in, say, Pope Leo and not the various other people on earth who might claim to be Pope. There’s good reasons for believing Matthew, Mark, Luke and John belong in the Bible and various other books that claim to don’t. There’s good reasons to believe that the God revealed in the Bible is the true God and other gods are false gods.
These are not arbitrary. You just don’t accept the reasons we believe in one and not the other. So let’s get into that a little bit. First, does a counterfeit God invalidate the true God? No Christian should accept the counterfeit argument. And one of the reasons is because as we’ve seen from the Ricky Gervais clip, if you accept that kind of thinking, you would seemingly have to reject the existence of the true God. As St. Paul points out, there are many gods and many Lords in the sense of so- called gods and so- called Lords, but there’s only one true God. So you can’t say because there are false claimants that therefore the true claimant isn’t true. It simply doesn’t follow logically at all. There’s plenty of reasons to say we believe in this one God and not 3000 other claimant gods that are contrary to the one God.
If this one God is who he says he is, and if he’s revealed that there is one God, that monotheism is true, then we logically can reject those other things as obviously not also true gods. That’s not arbitrary. One thing the counterfeit argument gets right, and we’re going to return to this, is two contraries can’t both be true. You can’t say the answer is both five and not five in the same manner, because that’s just a contradiction. And so if God reveals himself as the one God, you can’t say, “Yes, I believe that, but I also believe there’s not just one God. There are a bunch of other gods.” Unless you mean God’s in a different sense in that second, since we’re going to leave all of the nuances. If you mean the same thing in both X and not X, you violate what’s called the principle of non-contradiction.
And this is so basic. It is axiomatic. You can’t prove the principle of non-contradiction because this is as foundational as logic gets. I believe it was Averois, the Muslim and Aristotelian who said, “If someone denies this principle, you should set them on fire until they admit that they’re not, not on fire.” Obviously, don’t do that, please. I’m not YouTube, I’m not encouraging that. But the point is, this is so rudimentary that obviously you can’t believe there’s one God and also not that there’s one God. All right. What about councils? This was the first example brought up by Ryan. Is it arbitrary to believe in the second council of Nicia and not this false council, which I referred to as the headless council?
The reason it’s called the Headless Council, Father Herbert Scott talks about the history of this false council in his book, The Eastern Churches and the Papacy. You can find plenty of things about this. I don’t think this is going to be controversial at all. Even though a lot of bishops came because the emperor ordered it, the leaders in terms of the patriarchs of the church, the Pope, but also the patriarch of Antioch, the patriarch of Alexandria and the patriarch of Jerusalem all refused to come because he was trying to force the church to accept heresy. So yeah, he got a bunch of bishops in the east, particularly to sign onto these heretical documents and to deny the good of icons, but the pope never accepted this. And in fact, the other patriarchs of the church, Save Constantinople didn’t accept this either. And it’s worth noting that the emperor who called this was a harsh persecutor of the church, doing things like gathering monks who wouldn’t go along with the destruction of icons and parading them through the hippodrome with a woman on each of their arm.
Like that sort of thing that a persecutor of the church got a lot of bishops to go along with the persecution of the church and we reject that while accepting the Second Ecumenical Council of Niceia. That’s not arbitrary. Now, there is a good point that Ryan is raising. How do we know which bodies of bishops constitute councils and which ones don’t? This is actually a point that I made in my video on why I’m not Eastern Orthodox, because I think the Catholic Church has a better answer to that. Papal acceptance is required. So when the Pope says, “No, that body, the emperor called, we don’t accept that as an ecumenical council and we don’t care how many bishops went to it. ” That’s a clear, non-arbitrary principle. If you don’t accept that principle, then you should have some other clear non-arbitrary principle. And the ones I’ve suggested elsewhere that are often raised by Eastern Orthodox that either all the patriarchs have to accept or else some vague acceptance by the church collectively, they don’t work and you’ll have to watch that video to see why they don’t work.
But either way, the point here is simply it’s not arbitrary to believe in two Nicia while disbelieving in anti-councils. What about Popes? Well, obviously the same thing is true here. So in the example, we’re told like, “Oh, well, one group of Cardinals elected the Pope and then another group elected another Pope.” Well, no. Just like if you got married to one woman and then a few weeks later got married to another woman, you didn’t get married to the second woman. If the first election is valid, you have a Pope, there can’t be two Popes. There can’t be a valid election while there’s a reigning Pope. If the Pope didn’t die or resign, you can’t replace him. The office isn’t open. This isn’t particularly difficult to grasp, I think. Likewise, with books of the Bible, I’ve talked about this in my book, the early church was a Catholic church.
There are good reasons to accept why the books in the New Testament, I looked specifically there at Matthew Mark, Luke and John, why those books are in the Bible and other books aren’t. Leave in aside the fact that books like the nostic texts were never accepted within mainstream Christianity. There were legitimately books that were accepted by some Christians. And so here we would believe in something like the authority of the Holy Spirit guiding the church to accept the right books. That’s not arbitrary. That’s based on the idea that revelation, which is what scripture is, is God revealing himself and that this only makes sense if the Holy Spirit is in control of revealing the Father, the son, and the Spirit himself. And so if the church can’t know which books are scripture, there’s not much revelation happening there. There’s not much unveiling. Revelation is unveiling.
So either God is showing us which things we should and shouldn’t accept as scripture or he’s not. Believing that he is isn’t arbitrary. It’s based on the kind of promises made in scripture that God has revealed himself in many and various ways by the prophets. It’s based on even an argument from reason that God has put in our hearts the desire to know and love him and we can’t know him without him revealing himself to us. So that’s not arbitrary. That’s reasonable. Much more could be said on all of those particular issues. My point is just to say the counterfeit argument against these things. This is not a good argument against councils or popes or books of the Bible or God. It simply isn’t, but it does get one thing right or really two things right. The first thing that it gets right is, as I said, you can’t affirm two contraries.
So Jesus says, “I’m the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, but by me. ” You can’t say both that’s true and the opposite of that is true. One or the other must be true. And so here’s the thing with the counterfeit. If there’s two contraries, meaning not just two different things, but two incompatible things, it could be that they’re both false. It can’t be that they’re both true. So my point is they’re not automatically both false. One can be true and one can be false. But people pointing out, well, look, these two bodies, one that says icon veneration bad, one says icon veneration good can’t both be right. They’re right. There’s an answer there and it’s not they’re both right. One of them is right and one of them is wrong. One of them is of true counsel, one of them isn’t.
Likewise, there can’t be two bishops of Rome at the same time reigning as Pope. And likewise, there can’t be contrary scripture saying narcissism bad, nostalism good and have them both be divinely inspired. That’s just a contradiction. So the counterfeiters are right. That contradiction obviously doesn’t exist, but they’re right about something else too. And this is a subtler thing and it’s this.
Counterfeits do undermine the authority of the truth. They don’t disprove the truth, but they make the truth harder to accept. If you live in a society that has a lot of counterfeit money out there, you’re going to be a lot more hesitant to accept real currency. If you live in a society that has a lot of bad theology, you’re going to be less likely to accept true theology. Even if you reject the bad theology as bad, you start to become so suspicious saying, “Well, every other person who’s come along preaching theology has been preaching crazy stuff that you’re less likely to believe the true stuff.” And one concrete way that you see this is actually in the effects of the so- called papal schism. Now, this is a point in which Redeem Zoomer and Benedict the 16th actually make a very similar point. One of the effects of the papal schism is it undermines the papacy.
It doesn’t undermine the papacy because all three Popes were false. It undermines the papacy because when the papacy isn’t one, this leads to chaos and confusion because you have false Popes out there and a lot of people don’t know who the real Pope is and it’s like not knowing which bills are real and which bills are counterfeit. So here’s Redeem Zoomer’s take and then we’ll look at Benedicts.
CLIP:
Both sides excommunicated everyone not loyal to them. That meant every single Catholic lived under ex communication by one Pope or another, and nobody could be really sure if they were saved or not. The Council of Pisa tried to resolve it, but they just said both Popes were invalid and elected a third one. Even after the Council of Constance finally did resolve it, the damage was done and many people desired a reformation of the whole system.
Joe:
And Benedict, while still Cardinal Ratzinger, says something very similar that for nearly half a century, the church is split between these two or three, what are called obediences as to which Pope they followed. And they were mutual excommunication. So every Catholic lived under an excommunication by either the real Pope or by an anti-Pope and nobody seemed to be able to say who was who, like which one was real and which one was fake. And this creates this enormous crisis of confidence. And Risinger argues that this undermines the way people viewed the church as an institution that’s a pledge of salvation and started to think we had to be saved apart from the church. So he suggests that it’s only within this, what he calls profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness, that we’ve been rattled in our trust in the church, that we can understand Luther because this is how you go from Luther viewing the church not as a guarantor of salvation, but as an adversary to salvation.
A hundred years earlier, Martin Luther would probably not have succeeded. There’s a lot of things that are the printing press, scandals in the church, et cetera. But the biggest scandal here is arguably this Western schism. Now, I think there’s a takeaway here that all of us should be mindful of, and that’s that we should be very heedful of John 17. Remember, Jesus at the Last Supper and his prayer for us, his future disciples, he knows all the scandal, all the corruption, all the chaos, and his prayers that we will be one even as he and the Father are won. And he explains why. He prays that the world may believe that thou has sent me because Jesus knows if there’s more than one body out there, a true church and a bunch of churches and denominations claiming to be the church, that’s going to undermine belief in the gospel.
If you’ve got one body saying, “This is what the gospel is, ” and another body saying, “This is what the gospel is, ” and maybe dozens or more, hundreds of other bodies saying, “This is what we think the gospel is. ” And then one body saying, “Here’s what the essential doctrines are. ” And another one saying, “Nope, the essential doctrines are this instead where Christians don’t just disagree about what position we should hold on this or that doctrine. They disagree about whether the doctrine is essential to salvation or not. ” These are big vexing problems. And I would suggest that these are reasons why the Catholic church exists because it’s like this. It seems to me in the final analysis, there are three options. One, God created one visible church with clear dogmas that’s easy to find. And I think if option number one is true, the Catholic church seems like quite obviously the one church.
Two, he created some means where Christians of good faith, if they read the Bible, will all come to the same conclusions on what the essential doctrines are and what position to take on those essential doctrines. Now, I think one need only to talk to good faith Protestants to see number two is clearly not correct. Or three, he didn’t give us a means to be one while insisting that we need to be one. Now, that also seems to me to be incorrect and in fact, almost cruelly impossible to demand that we all agree while making it impossible for us to agree because we don’t have the tools needed to know if we’re coming to the right conclusions. If you don’t have a church capable of speaking infallibly on what it is scripture is saying, it doesn’t seem, based on 500 years of Protestant history and even going beyond that to earlier Christian history, it doesn’t seem possible for well-meaning Christians to reliably come to the same answer on all the major dividing doctrines.
Now, you might be really convinced that your read of scripture is correct, but you should have at least the humility and self-awareness to realize your neighbor who’s no less sincere than you and doesn’t seem more obviously wicked than you has just as devoutly, just as sincerely concluded some opposing set of conclusions. So unless we’re in a situation where we can’t tell real from counterfeit dogma, real from counterfeit doctrine, real from counterfeit Christianity, then it seems to me that the end result of recognizing what it is true, that the counterfeit argument is getting right, is that we have good reason to believe that there is one true church and it’s not going to be tremendously difficult to find. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.