Probabilistic Rhetoric

Probabilistic Rhetoric names the discursive strategy — reconstructed by Kierkegaard and analysed in McCormick's conceptual history of everyday talk — by which Christendom's orthodox apologetics attempts to defend faith by mobilising numerical and statistical evidence: counting converts, cataloguing centuries of ecclesiastical continuity, and tallying the ranks of the clergy. The move is not merely rhetorical in the superficial sense of being persuasive; it is structurally paralogistic. By substituting sandsynlighed (probability, likelihood) for sandhed (truth), the apologetic discourse enacts what McCormick identifies as a sorites fallacy — a heap-reasoning in which the accumulation of empirical instances is taken to ground or even constitute a theological claim. The result is that Christianity, whose central paradox (the Incarnation, the eternal entering time) is precisely what resists empirical verification, is recast as a hypothesis awaiting corroboration. The paradox is dissolved rather than preserved.

At a deeper level, Probabilistic Rhetoric is a failure of signification in the strict sense: it mistakes the chain of signifiers (numbers, names, dates, institutional facts) for a quilting point that would anchor eternal truth. In Lacanian terms, the accumulation of empirical signifiers never reaches the level of the Real paradox they claim to support; instead they slide along the surface of a discourse that is, structurally, "preacher-prattle" — chatter that generates the illusion of meaning-fullness through volume and repetition rather than through a genuine encounter with the impossible kernel of the Christian message.

This concept appears in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p. 119), where McCormick reconstructs Kierkegaard's critique of Præstesnak (preacher-prattle) as a logically precise indictment rather than a merely temperamental complaint. Probabilistic Rhetoric is therefore a specification of Preacher-Prattle: it names the formal, argumentative mechanism by which prattle operates in the religious domain — the substitution of probabilistic reasoning for the paradox that constitutes genuine Christian truth. It is positioned against the cross-referenced concept of the Paradox of Christianity (the eternal-in-time structure that orthodox apologetics, by mobilising empirical evidence, inadvertently flattens into an ordinary historical hypothesis) and against Truth (sandhed), which for Kierkegaard is categorically incommensurable with probability.

The concept also illuminates the cross-referenced notion of Signification. In McCormick's argument, Probabilistic Rhetoric functions as a misapplication of signifying logic: it treats the accumulation of empirical signifiers (numbers, centuries, clerical headcounts) as though they could, in sufficient quantity, suture themselves to eternal truth — performing the quilting operation that, in Lacanian theory, requires a point de capiton rather than a sorites-like heap. The concept is thus an extension of the analysis of how Universality and the Public are constituted through numerical aggregation in modern discourse, and a critique of the presupposition that quantitative signification can bear the weight of theological truth. It stands as a single-occurrence coinage that does precise analytical work within one chapter's argument about the rhetorical pathologies of Christendom.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.119)

if one were to describe this entire orthodox apologetic endeavor in a single sentence, yet also categorically, one would have to say: Its aim is to make Christianity probable.

The phrase "make Christianity probable" is theoretically explosive because "probable" (sandsynlighed) belongs to the order of empirical hypothesis, not eternal paradox — the quote thus names the precise category error at the heart of Probabilistic Rhetoric, showing that apologetics does not merely fail to defend faith but actively betrays it by transporting Christianity from the register of truth into the register of statistical likelihood.