Philosophical Theology

Four Amish men were killed in a head-on collision with a semi-truck on State Route 67 in Indiana on February 3, 2026. The driver of the semi-truck, Bekzhan Beishekeev, a national of Kyrgyzstan, was reportedly an illegal alien at the time of the crash.  

Many have exploited this unfortunate providence by blaming Biden’s immigration policy for the fatalities. Others have reasoned equally badly but without political motivation.

The logic is: 

p1. If Biden had stricter policies, then the accident would not have occurred and four people would not have died. 

For argument sake I readily grant the counterfactual. Given a more sensible immigration policy, the accident would not have occurred. Although one is justified in believing the premise, it is no less a trivial observation as it relates to the information surrounding the accident. One way to show the irrelevance of the premise is by considering a different scenario given the same Biden policies. 

Imagine the same illegal alien being granted the same commercial driver’s license but instead of driving head-on into a van, he chased down a kidnapper who he saw abduct a child. In the end, the child was returned to her parents and the kidnapper was brought to justice. With that scenario in place, we can consider another counterfactual that incorporates the same antecedent but a different outcome. 

p2. If Biden had stricter policies, then the child would have been a victim of human trafficking. 

Any reasonable person would not use p2 to defend Biden’s immigration policies. Notwithstanding, we can justifiably claim according to the counterfactual of p2 that Biden’s policies would have been a sufficient condition for preventing an evil. (To disagree is to reject conditional logic.) So, if we’re to be intellectually honest with the facts as stated, in both cases it would be reckless to map the reason for either outcome to immigration policies. In short, policy is no sooner a reason that an illegal stops a kidnapping than it is a reason that one would have a head on collision. 

The pervasive sin of uncritical analysis:

Announcing p1 over and over again is tedious. And it certainly does not become a valid argument by virtue of repetition. Unfortunately, that’s the sort of logic we find in the news media, which has inculcated social media and households across America. Sadly, even Christian households. 

Until a relevant connection is made between the recent fatalities and Biden’s immigration policies, people who reason according to p1 are not behaving like divine image bearers with respect to the Ninth Commandment. I recognize that can be deemed irrelevant by the unbeliever but it should be a great concern for Christians. Cogency is indeed a moral issue. And although not all have the same reasoning prowess, certain positions just don’t pass the sniff test and suffer under the weight of arbitrariness and inconsistency. At the very least, rejoinders should not be dismissed but rather engaged, hopefully thoughtfully, with internal critiques and counter arguments. (I find that a lack of reasoning deftness is due more to a need of practice than a want of sheer intellect. Yet sadly, once intellectual laziness sets in and becomes a pattern of life, strong opinions end up replacing thought out conclusions. Dogmatism gets mistaken for understanding.)

Resolving the problem detected by the sniff test:

It is to reason fallaciously and engage in an instance of special pleading to blame the former administration’s immigration policies for the recent tragedy while not praising the same administration’s policies for, say, more competitive maid and landscaping services in El Paso, Texas! Neither should be done but to do the former without the latter is arbitrary and inconsistent.

What must be established is a relevant connection between the event itself and the policy that precedes it. So, for instance, an immigration policy that closes a blind eye to murderers, rapists and drug dealers is relevant to illegals who would murder, rape and sell drugs. We can also observe that an immigration policy that would allow states to issue driver’s licenses to known reckless drivers would be relevant to vehicular homicide. These examples seem rather intuitive. They pass the intellectually unsophisticated sniff test because they’re at least careful enough to provide a relevant link between (a) the history of an illegal alien and (b) the law he might break if sensible policies go unenforced. However, those sorts of examples are a far cry from the broad-brush observation that had (c) Biden cracked down on immigration, then (d) the recent tragedy would not have occurred.

Again, p1 is true: If Biden had stricter policies, then the accident would not have occurred and four people would not have died. However, the premise is technically incidental; it doesn’t source the accident to any fact about the relevant driving history of the illegal alien as it relates to immigration policy. We can just as easily note that had Biden’s immigration policy made it impossible for any thirty year old male to drive, the accident would not have occurred. Although true, it’s also trivial. In the simplest of terms, there would be no rational reason to believe that Biden’s immigration policies would have resulted in the recent traffic fatalities on Indiana’s Route 67, whereas there are plenty of good reasons to believe that murderers, rapists and drug dealers would strike again under those policies.

So, enough with the uncritical hand waving. Let’s get back to rational interchange and the art of valid argumentation.

I shared a draft of this piece with a sharp analytic philosopher before publishing it on my site. He called it a welcome corrective given the bad counterfactual reasoning of our day. He actually wrote something back that I had already elaborated upon in principle but decided to edit out for brevity sake before sending him the draft. It had to do with necessary and sufficient conditions. I have included a portion of his remarks below because the example drives home the point much more succinctly than I had, and in a much more memorable way! 

Another way to think of it is as a confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. "If S had not done A, B would not have happened." Okay, so S's doing A was a necessary condition for B. Suppose B is a really bad thing. Does that in itself make S's doing A morally wrong? Not even close. "If Boeing had not built commercial airliners, 9/11 would not have happened."