Circular Reasoning

Type

Formal

AKA

Begging the Question, Petitio Principii (assuming the beginning), Circular Logic

Description

The conclusion is included in the premise, so the argument goes in a circle without proving anything.

Examples

"I'm trustworthy because I always tell the truth."
"The Bible is true because it says so in the Bible."

Linked from

Argument from Fulfilled Prophecy

The messianic "prophecies" are not predictions, and the fulfilments were written by people who had read them. Isaiah 7:14's "young woman" (almah) is a sign given to King Ahaz about a child in his own lifetime; "virgin" is the Greek transla…

Argument from Martyrdom

Even granted, martyrdom proves sincerity, and sincerity is not truth. The hijackers of 11 September 2001 died for their beliefs; so did the members of Heaven's Gate, the dead of Jonestown, Muslims who deny the Resurrection, and Joseph Smit…

Argument from Prophetic Character

The missing options are the same: sincere but mistaken, and later idealisation. A man can be honest and wrong about who is speaking to him. The experience in the cave on Mount Hira, with its terror, its sense of a presence, and its compell…

Eyewitness Testimony Argument

We have no eyewitness testimony. The gospels are anonymous; the names were attached in the second century. They are written in literary Greek, decades after the events, by authors who were not Galilean fishermen, and Matthew and Luke copy…

Inimitability of the Quran

Circularity. The doctrine of i'jaz was developed in the ninth and tenth centuries by theologians who began from the Qur'an's divinity and sought a reason for it. The premise that the book is inimitable is a conclusion from the belief, pres…

Lewis's Trilemma

The argument assumes the reliability of the gospels. It needs the sayings to be his, so it is a dependant of the Historical Reliability of the New Testament and fails with it (Circular Reasoning).

Ontological Argument

This is begging the question with extra steps (Circular Reasoning). The conclusion is smuggled into the definition.

Preservation of the Quran

The promise in 15:9. The verse in which God promises to guard the Qur'an is in the Qur'an. A book that certifies its own preservation is doing what every book could do, and the argument that relies on it is Circular Reasoning.

Religious Apologetics

The arguments share a family of errors: Equivocation on key terms ("cause", "nothing", "greater", "objective", "preserved", "law", "information"), special pleading that exempts God from the rule just used to establish him, the Appeal to Ig…

Transcendental Argument

The argument is circular. It presupposes the Christian God in order to argue for the Christian God, and its proponents openly admit this, holding that all reasoning is circular at bottom. But if all reasoning is circular, the argument give…

Presuppositionalism

The argument it rests on is the Transcendental Argument, which I address there. In short: it is circular by its own admission, its central premise (that only the Christian God can ground logic) is never argued for, and the demand that one…

Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists -Surrounded - Jubilee

It fails to define what is meant by "god," allowing for equivocation between the idea or claim of God's existence and the entity of God. By rejecting the former, atheists are not thereby committed to holding a coherent view of the latter.…

Special Pleading

It is closely related to Circular Reasoning (the exemption is justified by the conclusion) and the No True Scotsman fallacy (the rule is redefined to exclude the counter-example).

Münchhausen trilemma

Circular reasoning: A belief is ultimately justified by referring back to itself.