Concept

Gish Gallop

Intro

A Gish gallop is a debate tactic. One person fires off claim after claim, so many and so fast that nobody could answer them all in the time allowed. Then, when the other side cannot answer everything, the galloper acts as if the unanswered claims were never refuted.

The trick works because of a simple imbalance. It takes ten seconds to make a false claim and five minutes to show why it is false. Throw out twenty claims in two minutes and your opponent would need an hour to answer them properly.

The name comes from Duane Gish, a creationist debater known for this rapid-fire style. The term was coined in 1994 by Eugenie Scott, who led the National Center for Science Education. Gish did not invent the tactic. People have done it for as long as there have been debates.

You will meet it from skeptics who reel off a long list of "Bible contradictions" or "reasons Christianity is false." You may also be tempted to do it yourself. Christians can gallop too.

How to answer it:

1. Name it. Tell the audience calmly that a long list is not the same as a strong case.
2. Ask for the best one. "Which of these is your strongest point? Let's settle that one first."
3. Take one and finish it. Answer a single claim thoroughly, and do not move on until it is settled.
4. Sample the list. If you show that two or three of the claims fall apart, the audience has a reason to doubt the rest.

One fair warning. Making many arguments is not the same as galloping. A cumulative case, where many lines of evidence point the same way, is a good form of reasoning. It only becomes a gallop when the speed and number of claims are used to stop any of them from being checked.

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In full

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical strategy rather than a formal fallacy: the arguer presents an excessive number of claims, of uneven or poor quality, in a format that makes point-by-point rebuttal impossible, and then treats the unrebutted remainder as conceded. It exploits the time constraints of live debate and the asymmetry between the cost of asserting and the cost of refuting. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie C. Scott, then director of the National Center for Science Education, after the creationist Duane T. Gish (1921-2013) of the Institute for Creation Research, whom she called the technique's "most avid practitioner." Her essay is usually cited as "Debates and the Globetrotters," published on the Talk Origins Archive.

The underlying asymmetry has its own informal name, Brandolini's law, formulated by the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini in 2013: the energy needed to refute nonsense is "an order of magnitude bigger" than the energy needed to produce it. The ratio is a rule of thumb, not a measurement, but it names the mechanism the gallop depends on.

The gallop commits or invites several recognized fallacies at once. The silent inference from "not rebutted in this debate" to "unrebuttable" is an Argument from Ignorance. Volume standing in for weight resembles Appeal to Popularity applied to arguments rather than people. Individual items are often straw men or equivocations that cannot be unpacked in the time available.

How to spot it (diagnostic)

1. Count against the clock. More distinct claims than could be examined in the time the other side has.
2. Breadth with no depth. Each claim is stated, not argued; no claim gets more than a sentence or two.
3. Topic-hopping. The claims come from unrelated fields (textual criticism, cosmology, ethics, history) with no connecting argument.
4. The victory lap. The arguer later points to whatever was not answered as if it had been conceded.
5. No priority. Asked which point is strongest, the arguer will not choose.

Common apologetic deployment

Against Christians

The most common forms are the long list of alleged "Bible contradictions," the rapid survey of "pagan parallels" to Jesus (see Zeitgeist - Pagan Parallels), and the closing statement that stacks ten new charges the Christian has no time to answer.

By Christians

Christians gallop too: a stream of fulfilled-prophecy claims, scientific "proofs," or quotations from scholars, delivered too fast to be checked, with no attention to which ones are actually strong. It is unfair to the opponent and it hurts the case, because one weak item exposed can discredit the rest. A Christian should argue the way Scripture tells him to answer, "with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15, ASV), and that includes giving an opponent a real chance to respond.

How to rebut it

1. Name the tactic, briefly and without heat

Tell the audience what is happening: the number of claims is being used in place of their strength. Do it once, plainly, and then return to substance. A rebuttal that is all complaint looks like evasion.

2. Ask for the strongest point

"You've raised a lot. Which one is your best? Let's look at that one properly." If the galloper picks one, the debate is back on solid ground. If he refuses, the audience sees it.

3. Take one claim and finish it

Pick one, often the most confident or the weakest, and dismantle it completely before moving on. This is the approach journalist Mehdi Hasan recommends: pick one, stay on it, and name the tactic.

4. Sample and extrapolate

Answer two or three claims chosen fairly from across the list. If each falls apart on inspection, say so: the audience now has evidence about the quality of the whole list.

5. Prepare in advance

Most gallops reuse the same stock lists. Knowing the standard answers in advance (the codex's defeater pages are built for this) means each item can be answered in a sentence and a reference.

False-fallacy examples

• A cumulative case is not a gallop. The Cumulative Case for Christian Theism presents many independent lines of evidence, but each is argued, weighed and open to challenge. Many arguments become a gallop only when their number is used to prevent examination.
• A long written piece is not a gallop. A book or article with fifty points can be checked at leisure. The tactic depends on live time pressure.
• Answering many points quickly is not galloping. A debater who rebuts six claims in six sentences, each with a source, is answering, not galloping.

When it's actually fallacious

When the arguer (a) offers more claims than the format allows to be examined, (b) declines to prioritize them, and (c) treats anything left unanswered as conceded. The fallacy lives in step (c), the inference from "not answered here" to "cannot be answered."

See also

• Fallacies, the master catalog.
• Debate Logic Toolkit, the valid moves for live debate.
• Argument from Ignorance, the inference the gallop relies on.
• Straw Man and Equivocation, what often hides inside individual items.
• Define the God You Deny (Debate Traps), other live-debate traps and how to handle them.
• Cumulative Case for Christian Theism, the legitimate many-arguments case.