The Straw Man Fallacy
Starting our look at a few logical fallacies, we have perhaps the most well known one, the “straw man” fallacy.
The straw man fallacy is misrepresenting or misunderstanding an argument. You are stating or attacking/refuting an argument that is different than the one your opponent holds. To “attack a straw man” is to attack your misunderstanding or caricature of a person’s argument, not the real one. A “man” made out of straw (scarecrow) may look superficially like a real man, but it isn’t. Attacking or beating up a straw man is easy. Beating up a real man is harder. He can fight back. That’s the metaphor apparently behind the name of the fallacy.
To refute or at least provide a good argument or evidence against someone’s argument, you must first “do your homework” and make sure you understand it and state it properly in the way the proponent has stated it or would agree with. Only then do you have a right to critique it. Those ideals are parts of proper critical thinking and arguing.
The straw man fallacy is well known. Like most fallacies, that doesn’t mean those who are familiar with it avoid committing the fallacy. It is usually done unintentionally as it is very easy to simply misunderstand an opponent’s argument. You can also be misinformed by a source you trust, or not take the time to understand an argument, especially one you are predisposed to reject (confirmation bias, etc.).
This includes professional philosophers themselves. The philosopher Edward Feser had some pointed words about this:
Every academic philosopher solemnly teaches his students never to commit the straw man fallacy. And yet relentlessly committing it oneself anyway is almost a grand tradition within certain precincts of our discipline. As readers of The Last Superstition are aware, most of what the average contemporary secular philosopher thinks he “knows” about the traditional arguments of natural theology and natural law theory is nothing but a hodgepodge of ludicrous caricatures, and the standard “objections” to these arguments, widely considered fatal, in fact have no force whatsoever. If such philosophers’ continued employment depended on demonstrating some rudimentary knowledge of (for example) the actual views of Thomas Aquinas, many of them would be selling pencils.
Edward Feser, “Straw men and terracotta armies,” March 22, 2009 blog post.
Example: Atheists and the Cosmological Argument
A common example of a straw man argument is committed by many atheists when “refuting” or attacking the cosmological argument for God’s existence. Here’s what Bertrand Russell, who many believe was the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, said about the cosmological argument in his popular book, Why I Am Not a Christian:
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, pp. 6-7
And, apparently channeling Russell, here’s the philosopher Daniel Dennett:
The Cosmological Argument… in its simplest form states that since everything must have a cause the universe must have a cause – namely God… [But this raises the question] what caused God? The reply that God is self-caused (somehow) then raises the rebuttal: If something can be self-caused, why can’t the universe as a whole be the thing that is self-caused?
Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Viking, 2006, p. 242.
Yet again, in a book described on the back cover of the fourth edition as one that “deservedly remains the most recommended introduction to philosophy on the market,” Nigel Warburton states that the “First Cause” or cosmological argument “states that absolutely everything has been caused by something else” and this leads us back to a first cause in the series, God. This he says is a self contradiction,
The First Cause Argument begins with the assumption that every single thing was caused by something else, but then it proceeds to contradict this by saying that God was the very first cause… It invites the question ‘And what caused God?’
Nigel Warburton, Philosophy The Basics, Routledge, 1992, fourth edition, 2004, p. 17.
Well, that was easy. If this is a true account of the cosmological argument, some of the greatest minds in human history who put a cosmological argument forward such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Maimonides, etc. must be really stupid. There are no good cosmological arguments for God’s existence I guess, if this the what the best theist minds can muster. Next…
Wait, not so fast. Put your critical thinking cap on. Is that really the cosmological argument? Did Aristotle, Aquinas, Maimonides, Leibniz, etc. really give such an obviously bad argument? Really? Are some of the greatest minds in history that dense? Who, exactly, said “everything must have a cause…therefore there is an uncaused cause”? (checking these books for references…) Huh, they don’t say.
Should we just take their word for it that this is an accurate representation of the cosmological argument? If so, we should never consider such obviously stupid cosmological arguments again. Or could this be a poisoning the well or straw man fallacy going on here? They don’t quote Aquinas or anyone else making this argument. Maybe they got it from someone who did. Maybe they know what they are talking about and are accurately summarizing their arguments.
Maybe not.
Actually, if you do know what cosmological arguments by Leibniz, Aquinas, etc. actually argue, these statements about what “the” cosmological argument is doesn’t past the laugh test. They are laughably absurd. They are the exact opposite of what theists believe and what cosmological arguments argue. They argue not everything has a cause, that there must be an Uncaused First Cause in existence. That’s the whole point of a cosmological argument. They conclude that there must be an uncaused, non-contingent or necessary being in existence. And they don’t start off the argument for that conclusion by saying the opposite “everything has a cause.” They all reject the idea. In fact, if everything has a cause, God can not logically exist. “Everything has a cause” is the opposite of theism, and the opposite of what cosmological arguments argue.
To actually quote Aquinas, for one example (the rest say similar),
Now, to be caused by another does not appertain to a being inasmuch as it is being; otherwise, every being would be caused by another, so that we should have to proceed to infinity in causes — an impossibility, as was shown in Book 1 of this work. Therefore, that being which is subsisting must be uncaused. Therefore, no caused being is its own being.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Book 2, chapter 52.5
In other words, not everything has a cause; everything having or requiring a cause, Aquinas said, would be impossible. Maybe he was right here, maybe he was wrong, but what he claimed and believed to be true is clear. And it clearly wasn’t “everything must have a cause.” It was the opposite. The atheist philosophers above are simply wrong. Fundamentally wrong.
The many, many atheists who say the cosmological argument starts off claiming “everything has a cause” never give any evidence whatsoever for their version of what cosmological arguments argue.
Because there is no evidence for it.
They never quote any prominent philosopher who supposedly gave this cosmological argument.
Because there isn’t any. It’s a straw man.
Instead they simply misunderstand or make up an argument no one ever made and knock that down, claiming to have refuted “the” cosmological argument and then moving on. They don’t typically quote an actual cosmological argument and then respond to that. I assume they are doing this in ignorance, since that is what they were probably taught when they got their degree in philosophy. They’re just passing on their “knowledge” of the subject as it was taught to them. That may be all they know on the subject unless they pursue it further on their own.
To illustrate this, take the case of the philosopher Edward Feser. This straw man argument and rebuttal of it in even textbooks on philosophy is a pet peeve of his. The reason being, apparently, he is a former atheist who taught an intro to philosophy class for a couple years, using a textbook that basically used the straw man argument above. He also taught it that way, Nigel Warburton style, he said, “politely dismissive” of the arguments for God’s existence. He got bored with that and then went back and read, reflected on, and taught on what the arguments actually were (imagine that). Along the way he became convinced the actual arguments were sound and what most philosophers think they “know” of arguments for God’s existence is laughably off base. Straw men.
He said this about this straw man and what people, including many philosophers think they know about it:
Lots of people – probably most people who have an opinion on the matter – think that the cosmological argument goes like this: Everything has a cause; so the universe has a cause; so God exists. They then have no trouble at all poking holes in it. If everything has a cause, then what caused God? Why assume in the first place that everything has to have a cause? Why assume the cause is God? Etc.
Here’s the funny thing, though. People who attack this argument never tell you where they got it from. They never quote anyone defending it. There’s a reason for that. The reason is that none of the best-known proponents of the cosmological argument in the history of philosophy and theology ever gave this stupid argument. Not Plato, not Aristotle, not al-Ghazali, not Maimonides, not Aquinas, not Duns Scotus, not Leibniz, not Samuel Clarke, not Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, not Mortimer Adler, not William Lane Craig, not Richard Swinburne. And not anyone else either, as far as I know.
Edward Feser, So you think you understand the cosmological argument? July 16, 2011 blog post.
What many atheists say is the cosmological argument of their theist opponents is nothing of the sort. It is a straw man. If you have rejected “the” cosmological argument based on this straw man caricature and “refutation” of it, you haven’t really understood and rejected cosmological arguments at all. It was just a man of straw. Not the real man. You need to go back to the drawing board like Feser, do your homework as he would say, and find out what the cosmological arguments actually are before passing judgment on them, one way or the other. That is, if you believe in thinking critically and are interested in the actual truth of the matter, rather than, like many atheists apparently, taking this on faith, on authority, and without evidence.
I will write and post an article briefly describing cosmological arguments and document this straw man caricature of them by numerous atheists, how prevalent it has been for generations, and where it may have come from.
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Further Reading
William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument From Plato to Leibniz, Wipf and Stock, 1980.
Edward Feser, “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument” in Neo-Scholastic Essays, St. Augustine’s Press, 2015, chapter 6, pp. 118-146. This is a reprinting of his article from Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 37, (2013)
Edward Feser, So you think you understand the cosmological argument? July 16, 2011 blog post.
Edward Feser, Clarke on the stock caricature of First Cause arguments. July 12, 2014 blog post.
Edward Feser, Straw men and terracotta armies, March 22, 2009 blog post.