by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 11, 2006, all rights reserved. 207 views
"[We are in the Great Tribulation because] [n]ever before in the history of the church have we seen such an emphasis on signs and wonders."
- Harold Camping, Has the Era of the Church Age Come to an End?
I stuck this one in my files after reading Camping's booklet several years ago. Camping had been arguing from the book of Revelation that the chief sign of the false prophet St. John spoke of was that he would perform "lying signs and wonders."
Camping reasons that with the rise of the charismatic church, the faith movement, and healing doctrines, we have this unprecedented emphasis on miracles. Satan is pulling off all these signs (Camping dwells particularly on the idea of being "slain in the Spirit"), thus signifying that we're in the Great Tribulation.
But stop here and let me tell a story. This story takes place in the Middle Ages, in a monestary in northern Europe. Brother Haroldus Campingus, Camping's illustrious ancestor, looks with dismay on the priests claiming to perform miracles. He hears reports of holy relics, mysterious voices, and wonderful healings. Haroldus shakes his head sadly as he looks at the book of Revelation. Clearly, he says to himself, we're in the Great Tribulation. Never before in church history have we seen such an emphasis on signs and wonders.
The moral of this medieval messge is that unless we know the future, we don't know that this really is the peak of "miraculous activity." Camping is forced to argue, in essence, that this is the Trib because of all these bloody miracles are at a peak. And how do we know they're really at a peak? Because they can't go any higher; this is the Trib. Yeah.
Camping's fallacy might also be phrased as affirming the consequent. This fallacy involves a failure to recognize the limits of conditional statements. In other words, say our friend Will tells us, "If I trip, I'll definitely scrape my knee" or T –> S. Let's assume this to be a true statement. Now, we can deduce certain things from it. We can tell our friend, "You didn't scrape your knee; so you must not have tripped." Symbolically, this would be ~S –> ~T.
But imagine that instead Will showed up with a big strawberry on his knee. Trying our skills in logic, we deduce, "Your knee's scraped, Will; you must have tripped." At which point Will says, "No. I had a run-in with a dog." We just committed the fallacy of "affirming the consequent" by saying that since trip implies scrape, scrape implies trip. But it doesn't work that way. To get back to Camping, let's grant him that being in the Trib implies signs and wonders. Even so, it isn't valid to say that signs and wonders imply Trib.
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