Ever think that the fallacy is yours? Think about it for a bit.
Earlier I stated that I would take no offense, and I see no reason why anyone should take offense, at having logical fallacies pointed out, but your post is not a helpful example of that because you don’t bother to say which statement of mine is fallacious.
That being said, I have an idea on what you might be thinking of, and so in the interests of ensuring logical accuracy, I shall perform an analysis of my prior argument:
In my last post, I argued, or intended to argue*, that:
You’re saying baptism is forbidden on the basis of our Lord not mentioning it in the context of “suffer the little ones to come unto me,” because you believe that the statements of Christ are applicable in a non-Chronological manner, so the Great Commission somehow doesn’t apply to them despite Christ having said all. This is both a non-sequitur and an argument from silence.
If we take your pretext about the non-temporal nature of Christ’s remarks and separate it from the argument from silence, your hermeneutic, interpreted according to strict logic, would support the Baptism of Infants, since infants are included in all, and furthermore Christ specifically said to suffer the infants to come under him.
I am not aware of any logical fallacy in that statement, especially an argument from fallacy, since it is built around two affirmative statements of Christ - suffer the children to come unto me and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
However, perhaps you take the view that my interpretation of “the baptism of all nations” to include children is an argument from silence since Christ does not explicitly mention children in that statement, which is the aforementioned guess - although I can’t be certain, because rather than showing me the argument that you believed was fallacious, you simply made an allusion to a fallacy, which is, to reiterate, not helpful.
That being said, I would respond by saying that it is positively not an argument from silence, for this reason: interpreting it as an argument from silence would require denying that
all means
all, which is a contradiction, and therefore fallacious, or denying that children belong to the nations, which is also a contradiction, both in terms of international Law and in terms of Scriptural principles, wherein nationality absolutely was inherited in the case of the Jews and other nations, but could be changed, for example, by converting to Judaism as in the case of St. Ruth, and later, in a spiritual sense, by converting to Christianity, since scripture uses the word nation to refer to ethnic groups sharing a common ancestry, for example the Ishmaelites are described as a great nation, promised to Ishmael.
So unless your argument refers to something else, then no, I don’t believe in this case I’ve made an argument from silence, but if I do engage in a logical fallacy such as appeal to unqualified authority, argument from silence, begging the question, appeal to ignorance, et cetera, and someone can clearly articulate that (and ideally show me what my arguments would imply with the fallacy removed) I will genuinely appreciate it, since my goal is to operate within logic since Christ our True God is the Logos, He is Reason, the son of the Father, with whom He reigns together with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, united by love eternal**. But please do so explicitly, since in this case I was forced to guess at what you might have been referring to, and its entirely possible you were referring to something else.
* If the actual text differed from my intended argument, which I constructed from memory and not in reference to the original text, and the actual text of my original argument somehow differed in a material way so as to introduce a fallacy not presented in this recapitulation, feel free to show me that.
** This does not mean I’ll change my doctrinal affiliation, but rather, that I will (a) double check the doctrine in question and (b) ensure that I am presenting it in a non-fallacious manner, if I am able to verify the logical claim. Part of the reason I am attracted to Orthodoxy is because of the logic of the early Church Fathers. I also have high respect for many theologians outside of Orthodoxy because of the logic of their positions, such as the Lutherans of the period of Lutheran orthodoxy around the time of JS Bach, the Calvinist systematic theologians such as Karl Barth, and the Scholastic theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
