Making up fallacies

I recently came across a presuppositional apologist making reference to "the crackers in the pantry fallacy". I looked it up and it's a made up fallacy which doesn't refer to any fallacious reasoning, and iif anything appears to be fallacious in itself. I was wondering, is there a fallacy for making up fallacies in lieu of a valid argument, and/or which fallacies are employed?

It originates in a debate in 1985 between (presupp) Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein, where the former makes the following argument:

'We might ask, "Is there a box of crackers in the pantry?" And we know how we would go about answering that question. But that is a far, far cry from the way we go about answering questions determining the reality of say, barometric pressure, quasars, gravitational attraction, elasticity, radio activity, natural laws, names, grammar, numbers, the university itself that you're now at, past events, categories, future contingencies, laws of thought, political obligations, individual identity over time, causation, memories, dreams, or even love or beauty. In such cases, one does not do anything like walk to the pantry and look inside for the crackers. There are thousands of existence or factual questions, and they are not at all answered in the same way in each case.'

I'm not sure if he himself claimed that this was a fallacy, but is referred to as such in the scripts which presupps read out whilst pretending to be having a discussion.

Funny, I heard that as well (on Dogma Debate, Atheist Experience, or Talk Heathen perhaps). Anyway, all informal fallacies are "made up" in the sense that someone has identified a common problem with reasoning within an common argument and gave it a name. Heck, I have "made up" dozens. The problem arises when there is no such error in reasoning in the "fallacy." For example, I have had people say that I am guilty of what they have called "The Science Fallacy" by relying on scientific data :) It is usually after I call them out on an appeal to faith or similar fallacy--it is the equivalent of "Yeah, well YOU'RE a poo-poo face!"

Regarding "the crackers in the pantry fallacy," from my understanding, the implication is that if one assumes any question in life can be answered in the same way as knowing if if there are crackers in the pantry or not, then they are not reasoning properly. This is true as how we go about finding out the answer depends on the question asked. However, I would wager that in virtually all cases this "fallacy" is based on a strawman , as very few people would suggest that any of life's tough questions are as simple to answer as walking in a pantry and looking around. So unless someone comes along with another meaning of this fallacy that explains it in a different way, it is not a fallacy, at least not in my book (figuratively and literally).

Yeah, I don't see the necessity of giving the so-called "Crackers in the Pantry" a unique title or category of fallaciousness even though it is every bit of a Strawman as Dr. Bo points out. The claim is that methods of investigation vary according to the subject under scrutiny, and that somehow the exhaustive methodology applied to studying barometric pressure, quasars, gravitational attraction, elasticity, radio activity, natural laws, names, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum is much more sophisticated than simply determining whether there are indeed crackers in the pantry. Presumably, the crackers in this pre-suppositionalist's analogy is G-d.

The deception here is in the falsely equivalent assertion that the relatively high probability of there actually being a box of crackers in the pantry is on par with or equal to the very scant probability of there actually be a Creator God interacting mysteriously within, or outside of, The Laws of Physics.

Stein makes the argument that if x exists, then x is, in principle, verifiable to the senses or subject to experimentation. This argument is what Bahnsen calls "The crackers in the pantry fallacy" because according to Bahnsen there are things that do not fall into that category.

Non-theists such as atheistic Platonists would agree with Bahnsen in the sense that they consider abstract objects (such as numbers) as existing as cookies, so you cannot get to know these entities with the same method that you would apply with the cookies in the pantry.

Of course, I think the problem lies in the theory of existence, because when someone postulates the following:

If x exists, then x is verifiable to the senses or subject to experimentation.

I would blame him for begging the question, since "exists" in the antecedent is the same as "verifiable to the senses or subject to experimentation" in the consequent so that this postulate is nothing more than a tautology.

Hey, Props to Denken for making a further clarification of ways to deal with a strawman, "The crackers in the pantry fallacy" by adding Bahnsen's comment, "there are things that do not fall into that category," Bahnsen appropriately distinguishes apriori from a posteriori proof. Just go get the damn crackers, please.

It’s not a fallacy. The only way one can know anything is by either direct observation or experimentation.

Theoretically deciding what one believes to be true about say quasars, does in no way lend any credence to that persons belief about quasars. In such a case one is using perhaps indirect evidence and assumptions, but all based upon other theoretical a-priori belief. None of which itself is actually based upon any experimental or hands on data.

The fallacy would be in trying to reason to oneself that his assumption based upon theoretical beliefs are as valid as opening the cabinet and being able to directly verify by experimentation that said box of crackers are real and contain actual crackers.

Does this mean quasars are not real? No. Does it mean they are what they theoretically are believed to be? No. Unless directly verified they could be many things of which the possibility they are not what it is thought they are is a distinct possibility.