Touchstone, in the comments on this Triablogue post, has been criticizing me for being persistent in the definitions of terms. You can read the blog post and comments there, as I will not take the time to repeat them here. Instead, I want to mention why it is that I am being such a stickler for the meaning of words here.
First, I realize that being a stickler for meaning is somewhat of an alien concept to our culture. Rampant relativism has made it so words have no meaning now. I’m reminded of a Steve Taylor lyric which went:
Sally’s into knowledge
Spent her years in college
Just to find out nothing is true.
She can hardly speak now
Words are not unique now
If they can’t say anything new.
Humanist philosophy is what it’s all about.
You’re so open minded that your brains leaked out.
It’s about as apt a way of putting it as any. Our culture shuns objective meaning anywhere. After all, if you have objective truth, you have something that you’d actually have to make a stand for. But that could offend those who disagree. Better to pretend there is no objective truth at all than to offend anyone.
The problem comes into play in debates such as the one on Triablogue. It started when John Loftus played his old, tired, worn-out Problem of Evil card again (it’s the only card he’s got in his deck, so it’s unsurprising).  Loftus uses a definition of the term “evil” that he made up. That’s right, it’s not the definition that the Bible uses. However, Loftus claims that God is inconsistent with Loftus’s definition of evil, and therefore theism is internally inconsistent.
And therein is the rub. In order to be internally inconsistent, his usage would have to be identical to the usage that theism has.  Inconsistency between the Bible and Loftus is not internal inconsistency. It is only internal inconsistency if the Bible itself is inconsistent with itself.
This is elementary and ought to be obvious to all. Yet when I point this out, Touchstone accuses me of ”redefining” words (despite the fact that it is Loftus who engaged in the redefinition in the first place).  When I correct this, I am accused of being too anal about words; of being unable to empathize with what Loftus is feeling–as if Loftus’s feelings mattered to the debate.
Words do have meaning, despite what relativists claim. (Proof enough is in the fact that relativists still use words as if they have meaning in order to claim words don’t have meaning–a true internally inconsistent system.) These meanings matter. Logic depends on a correlation of the terms involved. It is a logical fallacy (called ambiguity) to use a different definition for the same word in two premises, which is exactly what Loftus engages in.
So will I stop being a stickler for words? Not in the least. These things do matter, if you want to be rational. If you want to be irrational, you can do that. March yourself off the insanity cliff. Don’t expect me to hold your hand on the way down.Â
