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People talk a lot about proof, specially when it comes to the reliability of the Christian faith. However, almost all of them think of only “empirical Proof” without realizing that this is not the only kind of proof used in the world of knowledge. In fact the empirical proof forms constitutes only a small part of proof, and the range of methods available and used for evidence includes at least eight important methodologies. In addition, most of them do not realize that the type of proof depends upon the type of information under consideration, with empirical subjects examined with empirical proofs and historical subjects examined with the help of historical proofs.

There is another common problem about proof. Many things which the common man (and even the learned ones) think as proof or evidence are not proof at all. This can be illustrated with the help of an incident. Few years ago an Engineering student approached me and told me that having read the Bible he received from me a few weeks ago, he had now come to argue with me that God does not exist. I welcomed him, offered a cup of tea, and asked him whether he would be presenting philosophical or scientific arguments. He promptly opted for scientific proof saying he preferred that because he was a student of science.
With amusement I awaited his arguments. He was silent for few minuets and then said he can dismantle any augments I presented for the existence of God. I had to point out that it is not I but he who came to demonstrate that God did not exist. Thus he had to take the lead.

To summarize an hour-long discourse, I kept insisting that he demonstrate what he claimed rather than asking me to speak and then refuting it. Finally he realized that he was not prepared to do what he claimed and went away with a promise to prepare better and come back. It has been two decades since then and he has not turned up.

Many people, even scientifically trained ones, entertain strange ideas about proof. They think that a thesis is proved just by stating it, comparing it, or by refuting another thesis. Proofs do not happen this way. If a person is able to refute all the proofs advance by another person (say, for the existence of God), he does not disprove the opponent’s thesis. He only disproves the opponent’s arguments. However, those may not be the only arguments or the best arguments which the opponent could have used.

Proof for any subject, (including the proof needed to disprove a claim) has to come in specific ways. In empirical matters the proof needs to be empirical and in historical matters the proof needs to be historical.
Though everyone talks of proof, most of them cannot distinguish between actual proofs and mere arguments. Not every argument is valid, let alone a proof. With this in mind, we list a sample of activities that people use as proof, but which are not accepted as proof by any legal system anywhere in the world.

a. Refuting The Opponent Does Not Prove One As Right: Arguments come up when there are two or more outlooks on a given subject, and each person tries to establish that his position is right and that of the opponent’s wrong.

The most common strategy used is to refute the arguments of the opponent. Many debaters are good at refutation, and they do an effective job of refutation, and stop there. They assume they have proved their side of the argument, and many in the audience also feel the same things, but actually they have not proved that they are right. They have only proved that the arguments presented by the opponent were wrong. More examination by a disinterested party would be required to determine if the arguments of the refuted side are weak, or whether only their presentation was week. If the latter is the case, then the basic arguments still remain unrefuted.

For example, let us assume that a person tries to defend the scientific accuracy of the Bible using faculty arguments. Obviously, a learned atheist, rationalist, or Muslim Apologist would be able to refute those arguments. But this does not mean that they have refuted the Bible. Not at all. They have only refuted certain shallow and unlearned arguments put forward by an ignorant Christian.

Muslim debaters worldwide use this tactic against the Christian world. They would arrange a debates with a Christian who enjoys great name or position, but who has never had any exposure to debates or apologetics. The learned Muslim debater easily traps this Christian. Since he is a man enjoying high position in the Christian world, everyone in the audience assumes that he is at the same time highly learned in Bible and theology. They go away with the erroneous impression that the Bible has been refuted. What has actually happened is that a certain ignorant and unprepared Christian was silenced in a heavily loaded debate.

While refuting the opponent’s arguments is a necessary part of proving one’s position, the actual proof takes place only when using the right kind of proof (mathematical, logical, empirical, historical, etc.) he proves his point to the satisfaction of objective examiners.
Just because a person is good at debating, and just because he is able to refute the arguments of his opponents, it does not automatically follow that he has proved his point.

b. Possibility Does Not Mean Proof or Even Probability: All effect have a cause, and this is a foundational axiom of all objective investigation. However, a given effect can often be caused by more that one causative factor. This creates an interesting illusion about proof.

Very often people think that if the “possibility” of certain thing taking place is shown, that it also proves that the event under consideration did take place according to the possibility that was established. This is a great fallacy, and is not a proof at all. Yet many people think that this is a substantial proof when in reality it is not even a remote proof.

For example, in the Evolution/Creation debate many who wish to end the debate ask whether God could not have created life through the process of “directed evolution”. Of course, God could have chosen evolution as a tool if that were His approach. However, this “possibility” does not automatically amount to proof. We need to have clear statements in the Bible that tell us that God did use evolution as His vehicle. As long as such statements are missing, the possibility proposed by them remains only a hypothesis.
Many things are possible at the hypothetical or even at the real level. For example, since the Lord Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of all the world and therefore the “possibility” for everyone to be saved has been created. Yet we know that if is not a probable scenario because numerous other factors also come into play. Thus showing the possibility does not automatically lead to probability. And if it does not automatically lead to probability, proof and certainty are far away.

c. Mental Experiment Is Not Proof: Humans have the special capacity to create a vivid mental picture of reality. Dreams are but one example of such mental creation of reality. Dreams, however are involuntary, while our concern her is with voluntary creation of mental images.

Writer, painters, theatrical actors etc. liberally use this human capacity of image-creation. Even technocrats and scientists use mental pictures to enhance their work. It is reported that the famous Benzene-ring in the Organic Chemistry was discovered this way. Actually scientists knew that a Benzene molecule has six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms, and that was the problem. They were unable to come up with a molecular structure which would satisfy the valances of these 12 atoms. It was then that one of them dreamt a snake swallowing its own tail. From here he extrapolated the picture and finally came up with the epoch-making structure of Benzene. Organic Chemistry would not have made a millionth of the progress had it not been for that mental picture.

Similarly, Albert Einstein, the father of Relativity Theory was very fond of mental experiments and popularized it in the Physics community. Mental experiments are frequently mentioned in MSc classes. Therefore the trained as well as the untrained often work under the notion that mental experiments can be used to prove or disprove scientific truths. This is far from reality. Fundamental truths of matter and energy can be proved only and only by experiments. That also, only by a statistically significant number of repeated experiments.

Mental experiments are good for conceiving many scenarios, but no unknown property of matter or energy can ever be discovered and proved by mental experiment alone. A laboratory component to test those deductions is always necessary. A good example of mental experiments and its pitfalls is the Aristotelian planetary system. The Greeks who developed this system did so strictly on the basis of their mental picture, and came up with the deduction that the Earth is the center of our Planetary System, and that even the Sun revolves around the Earth. Subsequent to this, they forced the astronomical data to fit into this picture rather than allowing the empirical data overrule every mental proof. Consequently, the erroneous Geocentric picture ruled for centuries, in spite of the accumulating evidences against it.

In the material world it is the empirical data which decides the truth. After all what “is” should decide what “can be” and not the other way round. This is the reason why no mental experiment in itself can prove or disprove anything.

d. An Appeal To An Authority Does Not Prove Anything: There is a famous slogan that “when the proof is weak, shout louder”. The idea, even in jest, is that suppressing the opponent’s faculties of reasoning are a standard technique used to hide the fact that one does not have rigorous proof.

Everyone knows that with sufficient effort one can find experts to support any school of thought, however bizarre that thought might be. Thus it is a standard tactic to “quote” experts when one cannot advance proof.

We have already noticed that empirical topics need experimental proof, historical topics need historical proof, and so on according to its own established and objective canons of proof. if such a proof os available, then there is no need for the “opinion” of people. If no proofs are available, then the opinion of people does not matter. Yet people keep using “opinions” because somehow or other they wish to establish their point of view, specially in areas not strictly controlled by empirical methods of proof.

For example, people who love to dismantle the Bible (using history and archeology) often quote this or that expert to “prove” that a given statement of Bible is false or questionable. This is not the way of objective proof either ion favor or against t he Bible. For each expert on one side of the argument, another on the opposite side can be produced. Thus these opinions do not settle the matter in favor of either side.
A variation of this technique is to appeal to popularity. This comes in the form of statements like: everyone knows, everyone accepts, etc. Public acceptance does not mean anything. What they embrace with greed today, they will rabidly oppose tomorrow. Public opinion is based not upon proofs or objectivity, but upon a large number of subjective and emotional factors. Thus public opinion can never be used as a proof.

e. Proof From Silence Is Not Proof At All: This is a very important category of false proofs, and the Bible-student meets it at every step of Bible, theory, and apologetics. This means that “proof from silence” gets unusual weight, whereas it is not a proof at all.
The basic premise of “Proof from silence” is that if something is not found, then it does not exist. If I did not see a person in a particular place, he did not dome there. If something is absent in a place, or if something could not be found in a particular place, then it did not exist in that place.

Let us consider an actual example for clarifying this kind of arguments. In the early chapters of Genesis we read about Camels. Radical theologians and atheists rabidly attacked these passages for decades saying that archeologists did not discover camels that early. Thus, they alleged conveniently that, these portions in Genesis were not written art the time of Abraham or Moses, but a thousand years after the purported event when camels were domesticated for the first time.

A few decades, and the presence of domesticated camels was discovered even before the time of Abraham. So much for proof from absence of the arguments which says, “we did not find it, so it is not true”.

The same thing happened with their argument that Moses could not have written the first five books of the Old Testament because no written material from the time of Moses was ever discovered. This argument fell miserably when thousands of inscriptions from the time of Moses and before were found from Egypt and decipher. This was followed by numerous discoveries that have extended known writings almost to the time of Noah.

The mention of Hittites in the Bible was attacked in a similar manner. Since the archeologists never found any mention ever of Hittites even till the close of 1800s, the theological radicals promptly declared this a myth. Then in 1900s they discovered the Hittite empire, libraries, and even the legal code.

There are a very large number of other things about which they argued against based upon silence. All these arguments turned to be premature and hasty. However, the radical mind never allows truth to distract them from their goal to attack the Bible.
When proof or evidence is absent, the maximum that one can say is that “evidence for the existence has not that “we have no evidence so it did not exist”. Nobody allows the arguments “we have not been able to find a solution does not exist”. In the same way, argument from silence cannot be used to refute or support any viewpoint. Lack of proof is not not a proof.

f. Analogy Is Not Proof: On being questioned about proof of a matter, people often pick up something that is similar or analogous. They then explain or demonstrate this second thing, and imply that by doing so they have proved the first statement. They have done nothing of that sort.

To prove that a given statement or thesis, proof should be given for that statement and not for something analogous. A good example is the way people try to prove the Theory of Evolution by comparing it with the sprouting of a seed and its growth into a tree. While there are some similarities between evolution and growth, they are not one and the same. The analogy does not prove anything. In fact, if similarity is taken as proof dissimilarity should stand as proof for the opposite. Thus in the hands of a skillful debater, argument from analogy can become a weapon to prove anything in the world. However, sophistry is no proof.

g. Circular Reasoning Is Not Proof: Circle reasoning is a common fallacy, in everyday and also in professional life. So much so that it even has a technical name: “Tautology”.
A popular joke can be used to illustrate and explain Tautology and circular reasoning. A lawyer examines the accused.

Where is your hose? Opposite to the Insurance Office. Where is this Insurance Office? Opposite to my house. And where exactly are these two buildings situated? They are situated opposite to each other.

Nothing is gained or added to knowledge by this verbal exchange. This is an easy and illustrative example. Circular Reasoning was used by the Jewish High Priests against the Lord Jesus. They brought Jesus to the Roman judge for condemnation. Since the Roman jurisprudence laid down a strict procedure, the judge to follow the path of:

Accusation -> Cross Examination -> Crime Proved -> Conviction -> Punishment

But this time they wished to the “Punishment” to follow arrest. The argument was:
We arrested him, so punish him. But why punish him. Because he is a criminal. How can you say he is a criminal. The very fact that we arrested him proves he is a criminal, and so on. But when the judge examined Him procedurally, he had to declare, “I find no guilt in Him”.

Circular reasoning, like the proof from silence can be used to prove anything in this world. Worse, the vocabulary and presentation can often be iso convoluted that even trained people may not be able to detect the error. A good example is the “Geological Layer”.
Biology textbooks frequently mention what they call the Geological layer. They claim that in many places one can find geological layers, with fossils embedded in them. They also claim that the lowest layers contain fossils of very simple creatures, and that as one goes up the layers, one discovers fossils of increasing complexity, exactly as predicted by the theory of evolution. On reading this in biology textbooks, everyone goes away with the impression that the Geologists were able to “discover” numerous geological layers, based upon which the biologist make their claim. Fair enough. This is what they really claim.
If the same reader takes a little time to pick up an introductory textbook of Geology, he will find the geological layer mentioned there. But, to the surprise of the more observant reader, he will also find that there is no “real” multi-layer structure anywhere in the world. On the contrary, he will discover that, there are many places with a smaller number of layers, which they use to create a theological multi-layer structure (which does not physically exist in any place in the world). What is most shocking is that they create this multi-layer structure, not on the basis of geological data, but on the basis of zoological data, based upon evaluations.

Here is the complete picture: the evolutionist says that geological layer show a gradation of fossil-complexity. But the geologist says the composite he prepares is based upon what the biologist dictates. In other words, both the biologist prepares a multi-layer chart of what he expects. The geologist takes this up and prepares a multi-layer composite. Then the Biologist goes ahead and claims geology proves his theory.

Neither of them has done an “absolute calibration” or standardization of the scales. On the contrary they have been perpetrating a seemingly empirical system, which is based not upon empirical data but upon a theoretical expectation. Circular reasoning of tautology is more common in the world of reason than what anyone expects. Those who oppose the Christian faith also use it liberally. However claiming that “they are opposite to each other” does not prove anything.

h. A Theory Does Not Represent A Proof: Theory is an essential component of of science and also of all the field of learning. So much so that researchers try to find a perfect match between theory and empirical observations.

However, a theory is of value only after it corresponds with the reality. Till then it remains only an unproved and unestablished hypothetical construct. Thus a theory is not a proof. It only represents a possibility according to whosoever proposed it. What’s more, is only one out of numerous possibilities. Out of all these possibilities, only one can be right. At times none of the proposed theories will be right and all of them will have to discarded.
Though theories are only unestablished hypotheses, people often present them as proof or fact. However, they cannot be used that way. Coming to Christian Apologetics, theories should not be allowed in any debate against the Bible. Nor should they ever be used to support the Bible in any way.

i. Anecdotal Evidence Or Hearsay Is Not Proof: There is never any shortage of people who try to establish their arguments with quotes and stories which are of no value for proof. We also all have out pet ideas. And also pet statements to support. For example, when talking about a certain debater, people would say, “he presented three points, and ended with three questions, and the opponent fled the scene”. Once this statement is repeated a few times, almost everyone think that is truth.

Similarly, when it comes to establishing a pet doctrine, say the Tongues, everyone will have a found story about a grand uncle or aunt who spontaneously broke into other-languages. Then everybody argues over the genuineness of that story, forgetting that doctrines are not established that way. Doctrines are deduced and made sure with the help of a strict Bible-based procedure.

Just narrating favorable stories, incidents, or quotations do not amount to proof. Each category of truth has its own canon for establishing truth, and nothing else is admissible there.

j. Slogans Are Not Proof: Slogans are compact catch phrases that quickly grab attention and lead people to immediate action. Evaluation and assessment of the assertions, which is a essential activity, is often blanked out.

Slogans are powerful tools in the hands of advertisers, politicians, propagandists, and mind-manipulators. Obviously, slogans are used more for suppressing human reason than for a reasoned argument. Yet they are frequently used by clever debaters for winning arguments without using the due process of reasoning. Unfortunately, the public is duped into thinking that this clever debaters won because he has better argument using which he has established the points in his argument. Actually nothing of that sort has taken place.

In the famous “Monkey Trial” in the USA, the Bishop Wilberforce in jest asked whether his opponent Huxely was descended from a monkey on his father’s side or mother’s side. Sensing his opportunity, Huxely gave his famous slogan that “It is better to descended from a monkey rather than from a dishonest theologian”. The slogan deeply hurt the reputation and standing of Bishop Wilberforce, not because of its objectivity but because it was a powerful slogan at that juncture.

The anti Christian movement is good at coining bad-name associations and mind-numbing slogans. However, anything proved that way is totally invalid ands should not be accepted either to refute or to support the Bible

Christian apologists should be careful to spot and analyze slogans because they are powerful tools in the hands of manipulators. Unless these slogans are detected and analyzed in time, they can inflict much damage against the faith.

k. Philosophical Justification Is Not Proof: Philosophy is the result of man’s quest to understand nature using his speculation, logic, and all the information available from all the branches of knowledge. Since there is a very high component of non empirical thinking in philosophy, the more the thinkers, the more are the schools of thought that develop. Many of them look plausible when expounded by proponents, but looks can be deceptive in Philosophy.

Since there is wide variety of philosophical thought available, anyone can any time pick up a suitable philosophy and argue for his case. His reasoning will look plausible, but be has not proved his point. Philosophical possibility or explanation is not proof. For example, when it comes to explaining difficult concepts from the bible, many people immediately fall upon philosophy for offering an explanation. Similarly, many radical thinkers use philosophy to refute Biblical doctrines. neither of them is correct, not sufficient as a proof.

Bible-doctrines are to be explained using statements from the Bible itself. For example, if someone wishes to explain (or refute) the doctrines of predestination of trinity, he must go strictly by the statements of the Bible.

Philosophical speculation can always be used to defend or explain predestination, trinity, the presence of evil, the problem of pain and creation/evolution. It can also be used to refute the very same ideas. There is little objectivity and often there is no empirical component. As a consequence, philosophical speculation cannot be used as a proof in empirical, social and historical subject.

l. A Model Is Not A Proof: A model is picture (verbal or mathematical) with the help of which researchers study complex phenomena or invisible entities. For example, the atom has never been seen. Yet we know many properties of atoms and subatomic particles, and would like to know the subatomic particles, and would like to know the precise way in which the subatomic particles are ordered in an atom. many Models have been proposed, of which the planetary model in which electrons revolve around a nucleus is known to all.
There is a range of models in science starting from the most simple to the incredibly complex ones. The weather forecast is a good example where they input the available data into a complex mathematical model that resides on super computers. Using this they are able to come up with useful deductions most of the time.

There are even models of human languages using which they try to study language-style and other complex phenomena. The Theory of Evolution is also a model, and there is a corresponding Creation Model. Model-making is an essential part of scientific investigation, and each day the process of model-making is becoming increasingly refined. As a consequence, people often confuse the model with the reality. This is a false perception.

While models are being increasingly used in science, and while they are also becoming increasingly accurate a model still remains a hypothetical and theoretical construct. Thus presenting a good model is not equal to presenting proof. A good example is the claim made by some people in the 1960s and 1970s that their computer-analysis have proved that St. Paul has authored only four of the fourteen epistles attributed to him. Many people took this to be a strong proof, only to be told later that the deduction was based upon a totally inadequate and faulty model of language. When the same test was given to standard and well-known books, it indicated that their authors did nor write them.

Scientific Models are important tools for research and study. However, they have certain sphere in which they are useful and valid. And use beyond that result in invalid results. Presenting a good model is not equal to offering a proof. That is not the purpose of scientific models.