God or Not?

The ambiguity of BELIEFS and BELIEVING

Posted on July 31st, 2008 by admin.
Categories: Ranting.

On Jul 31, 1:57 pm, Stoned wrote:
> Often times we hear people repeat over and over again how much they
> “Believe” in God, but when I look at the context in which the word is
> used I see a serious flaw of meaning.

It’s called an equivocation.

From Wikipedia:

Equivocation is the use in a syllogism (a logical chain of reasoning)
of a term several times, but giving the term a different meaning each
time. For example:

A feather is light.
What is light cannot be dark.
Therefore, a feather cannot be dark.

In this use of equivocation, the word “light” is first used as the
opposite of “heavy”, but then used as a synonym of “bright” (the
fallacy usually becomes obvious as soon as one tries to translate this
argument into another language). Because the “middle term” of this
syllogism is not one term, but two separate ones masquerading as one
(all feathers are indeed “not heavy”, but is not true that all
feathers are “bright”), equivocation is actually a kind of the fallacy
of four terms.

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