Scholarly Reflections
Koukl, Gregory. (2019). "Chapter Ten: Suicide: Views That Self-Destruct." In Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (updated and expanded). pp. 143-156.. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
In this chapter, Koukl discusses the fact that many views are self-refuting. They do not hold p to any examination before they collapse (Koukl 2019, p. 143). A self-refuting statement is easily dismissed. Koukl gives several examples, including "There are no absolutes," "you can't know anything for sure," and "Talking about God is meaningless" (Koukl 2019, p. 144). All the views which are suicidal violate the law of noncontradiction, making claims which cannot be held together. Koukl observes that many of them are funny by nature. By identifying he premise of each part of a statement we can see the pattern clearly. To deal with it, point out the contradiction. Koukl illustrates, "There is no truth," when questioned, "Is that statement true?" (Koukl 2019, p. 146).
The difficulty in dealing with self-defeating views is that the ones we accept are normally well hidden. Koukl continues by giving a number of examples of self-defeating views which are difficult to find (Koukl 2019, p. 147ff). In all, the proper test is to consider whether the exact same reason for a view can fight against the view (Koukl 2019, p. 150).