Thanks for the analysis! I will revisit it. I took the course 22 years ago – Intro to Logic. The book itself steers clear from Christian arguments – he makes those elsewhere.

The subtitle is “A Logic Text using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian Principles,” so his calling it Socratic Logic seems a joke to sell books. In the book he says the two logics are inductive and deductive, just as I noted; nothing about “Socratic” logic being its own logic. He says Socratic “method” combines them both.

He also means a different thing by symbolic and longform logic: those are both deductive logic, and just (as he explains) different ways of writing it down.

I haven’t read that gigantic text though so I can’t say what he says in it that would pertain to the Christian penchant for deductive bamboozlery. It looks more like an attempt to cover everything, as a textbook without an agenda. So it’s probably not the place to look for that.

Thanks. “Socratic logic” is the name of Peter Kreefts book – and he goes on at length about how its much superior to symbolic logic. Whether thats just the name of his book or his method – Im not sure. But Im pretty sure there was some difference in how they deduce (Ill have to look into this) certain syllogisms. And hes a Catholic apologist/philosophy professor and somehow he thinks his method of logic helps him (for reasons you gave and I understand those 💯).

yes, I got your point on the probabilistic approach versus syllogism. Ive been studying Bayes theorem.

To be more precise I said (with links in the original scrubbed here for ease of pasting):

And we see this across the whole of modern Christendom. It still preaches hostility to sound inductive logic, and elevates in its place completely unempirical deductive systems of logic instead, the ones most easily corrupted to sell anything as true. And even when Christians pay lip service to sound methods of inductive logic, they completely misuse them, rendering them totally unsound.

The question is not symbolic logic but syllogistic logic (like the Kalam Cosmological Argument and Catholic Thomistic Arguments a la Feser; see links in the original text for more examples), as distinct from probabilistic logic (there is no such thing as Socratic “logic,” I assume you mean “method,” which is moot here). And the problem is that Christians love deductivism, despite the fact that it is the most useless and the most easily corrupted way of trying to know anything about the world (examples in links), while denigrating (linked examples) or abusing (linked examples) inductivism. Atheists have the opposite prioritization of dependency on logics. Because that works in precisely the way the Christian order fails—that’s why science has made such outrageous progress while theology just meanders with a continual stream of occasionally fashionable nonsense that never gets anywhere.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

From now on your comments will post automatically here, without going to moderation.

This post on anti-intellectualism is spot-on. Thank you for this.

Their “god” presented as being gob-smackingly silly. Do they not read what is on the page before them? Rhetorical question: obviously not.

Are you making a dent in this wilful ignorance and stupidity; can you scratch it up even; especially when acknowledging this deliquent behaviour is a feature, and not a bug, of the whole sorry charade?

What I observe across nearly twenty years of work is a person getting nowhere fast. 🙂 If you were to turn your hand to fiction, I’d probably read it.

Certainly if it were Science Fiction:

It is 503 years After Landing/4022AD and you are STILL dealing with fudamentalist Xtian terrorists whose cult originated from Texas; you STILL have an Established Church?

I’m quite fed up with this trope of “Good News from the Vatican.” – even if the Pope is now a robot!

Bel and the Dragon is apocrypha. It isn’t in most Bibles. It’s canon only in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles. Protestants declare it heretical; so, that tells you what they think about that. But yes, that’s the closest they get.

(Notably, of course, no one in the Bible ever tests Jesus or Daniel himself like this. Or any holy man. It’s only villainous pagans who get this treatment. And that everyone is murdered, women and children even, illustrates how horrific the Bible’s moral messaging is. So it’s not generally the sort of passage they can appeal to with pride.)

As I recall without looking it up, King Cyrus of Babylon worships the god Bel, and Cyrus’ counselor Daniel tells him that Bel is no god but just a statue made out of clay and bronze. But the king says, of course he’s a god, and he has proof! Every day the king brings Bel a huge food offering and every morning the food is gone! Daniel points out that Bel is served by 70 priests, each of whom has several wives and many children — hundreds of people — and it must be them eating the food. The king says, prove it or you die! So that night the king places the food before the idol as usual, but before he seals the temple for the night, Daniel sprinkles ash on the floor. The next morning they break the seal, open the door, and find that the food is gone! The king is exultant until Daniel points out that the ash has been disturbed by countless footprints running between the altar and a secret door the priests had made. So the king has the priests killed instead of Daniel.

[By the way, that’s the same test that Sherlock Homes devised in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez, although in that story the stakes were lower, and only two people died.]

So when Daniel was faced with an extraordinary claim, he formulated a naturalistic hypothesis, tested that hypothesis with a clever experiment, and involved independent observers who could verify the result.

Still, the moral of the story seems not to be “use the scientific method” but “believe the prophet of Jehovah”.