(June 1, 2013 at 8:13 am)Tiberius Wrote: True, though as fallible beings there is no way of knowing whether any other being is infallible, so the point is kinda moot. This is why I don't find the "because God said so" type arguments convincing. Even if everything in the Bible was entirely accurate, and we could verify everything God supposedly said, we can't make any conclusions about his infallibility. I can equally write a book which contains nothing but truths, but it doesn't make me infallible.
Likewise, even if God were to manifest himself in front of us, and answer our questions 100% accurately, our inability to see into the future means we can't ever say that this seemingly infallible being will always be correct. Additionally, we have limits on our verification abilities. If God was to say "there is a small creature named Jeff on a planet 1,000 light years away", we are (at this point in time) incapable of verifying whether the statement is true.
All you can say about God's infallible nature is that it is an assumption. If it's an assumption, you can appeal to it all you want in your argument, but it doesn't mean your argument is necessarily correct. It's only correct if the assumption turns out to be true.
That is a fair enough point, but when you have two people in a discussion who axiomatically both agree scripture is infallible (which is a Christian doctrine), neither of them is committing a fallacious appeal to authority when they appeal to scripture. Now things get a bit more tricky when one person doesn’t agree that scripture is infallible. My point was just that making an appeal to the authority of scripture is not automatically a fallacious appeal to authority.