- Faith
The other sense of faith, trust grounded in a track record ("I have faith in my surgeon"), is ordinary inductive confidence. It is not what religions ask for, and sliding between the two senses is equivocation.
- God
"God is love" or "God is the ground of being". These are either metaphors or equivocations that borrow the emotional weight of the classical definition while abandoning its content.
- New Age Beliefs
Quantum. "Quantum" in New Age writing means "magic, but with a word from physics". The observer effect does not mean that consciousness creates reality; it means that measuring a particle disturbs it. Deepak Chopra has made a career from s…
- Pantheism
The noun is the problem. "God" carries two thousand years of connotation: a person, an authority, a listener, a judge. To apply the word to the universe is to invite all of that back in through the vocabulary, and to hand the apologist a c…
- Argument from Abstract Objects
A truth being about something is not a truth being thought by someone. That two and two would make four with no one to count is a fact about any possible collection of things, not a report that someone has always been doing the sum. The ar…
- Argument from Biological Information
"Information" is an Equivocation. In Claude Shannon's sense, information is a measure of improbability in a sequence, and mutation produces it freely; rain on a roof has Shannon information. In the semantic sense, information is a message…
- Argument from Contingency
Aquinas's version contains a quantifier shift. From "each contingent thing at some time does not exist" he concludes "at some time nothing exists". That is a non-sequitur: every member of a club may at some point be absent without the club…
- Argument from Divine Simplicity
Simplicity as a virtue is being equivocated with simplicity as a lack of parts. The sense in which a hypothesis should be simple (Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony) is that it posits few independent things. A being with infinite knowl…
- Argument from the Laws of Nature
"Law" is an Equivocation. A law of nature is a description of how things behave, not a rule they consult. The lawgiver version trades on the legal sense of the word, in which a law is a command, and then imports the commander. Nothing in p…
- Argument from Universal Religious Belief
The content is not universal, and the universal part is not God. The beliefs range from ancestor spirits to an impersonal Tao, from thousands of local deities to the explicitly non-theistic core of Buddhism. What is shared is the projectio…
- Kalam Cosmological Argument
The premises are only inductively supported. Premise 1 is a generalisation from our experience of things within the universe rearranging pre-existing matter. We have never observed anything "begin to exist" from nothing, so we have no basi…
- Moral Argument - Argument from Objective moral values
Premise 2 is usually defended by appeal to intuition: "surely you believe torturing children for fun is objectively wrong." I believe it is wrong. I believe it with complete conviction. The strength of my conviction is evidence of how I am…
- Preservation of the Quran
Preservation proves preservation. Grant, for argument's sake, that the text is letter-perfect from 632. That would show that Muslims copied carefully, which they did, and nothing about whether what they copied was true. The Iliad is well p…
- 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…
- Spirituality
Where the claim creeps in. The trouble starts with the explanation. "Energy", "vibration" and "frequency" are borrowed from physics and used to mean nothing in particular (Equivocation). "The universe wants", "everything happens for a reas…
- Abortion
Equivocation (on "life" and "person")
- Ignosticism
Equivocation
- Love
The theological argument trades on an equivocation between what love is physically constituted by and what love means within human life. These are different questions, requiring different kinds of explanation.
- 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.…
- Aristotle
He appears here in three ways. His unmoved mover is the ancestor of every cosmological argument, including the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the First Cause Argument, and Thomas Aquinas built the Five Ways on him. His virtue ethics, in w…
- Language Games
Equivocation
