Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast, presented by Canon Press.

Yeah. Yes, God, God, God don't never change.

Welcome to the Plotcast. I'm Douglas Wilson. You are you and this is

episode 299. 299. Can you believe it? So today I want to begin by discussing something

that was just intruded into my world recently.

I of course read CS Lewis's essay Bulverism many years ago and I've read it a number of times since.

Lewis coined a particular informal fallacy and tagged it, well he coined the name for a particular informal

fallacy and he called it Bulverism and in calling it Bulverism, what he was doing was identifying the fallacy of answering someone's

position by simply explaining how it was that he came to adopt that position.

He named this after a fictional character, Ezekiel Bulver, who was a young boy who heard

his mother say to his father who had been maintaining something, some geometric proof or other.

And his mother said, oh you just say that because you are a man.

And so the little boy, Ezekiel Bulver, realized all I have to do, I don't

have to answer anybody. All I have to do is explain how they got so silly. And this fallacy intruded upon my notice again recently when we had the

council and the presbytery meetings of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical churches, which just concluded this last week.

But in the run-up to it, a controversy online erupted over some proposed memorials that are

presbytery, Knox presbytery had proposed and a memorial that another

presbytery, Huss presbytery, our international presbytery, had proposed,

all of which addressed the issues of kinism and anti-Semitism, ethnic tension and so on.

And the thing that was striking about the controversy was the absence of people trying to engage with the arguments that the were being made that were grounded in scripture and a particular worldview.

And the reaction was sheer bulverism.

You guys are considering this because this is simply performative language and your virtue signaling.

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