Logical Fallacies

I often refer to the podcast put out by The New England Skeptical Society and I am about to again. They have a list of 20 logical fallacies that people commit when arguing a point or points. The full list can be found here:

http://www.theskepticsguide.org/resources/logicalfallacies.aspx

I want to talk about a few and how they relate to my situation here in Utah because I hear them A LOT!

When debating with a creationist (ex: A Mormon) there are a couple things you need to remember. It would seem easy to pin them into a logical corner, and in fact it is if you know what you're doing. However, you can get caught off guard quite easily if you're not prepared. For instance, you might assume that someone who believes in a lot of whimsical things should be easy to debate against. With no basis in fact they have no ground to stand on, they can't possibly win a debate right? WRONG! In reality, the very fact that what they say doesn't have to be grounded with evidence and logic makes their end of the debate very open ended! This makes them very effective arguers against those who don't have their archive of logical fallacies ready to go. Some people are very slick with words and can debate almost anything effectively against an unprepared skeptic.

The first concept I want to throw out isn't so much a logical fallacy as a debate tactic used to keep you chasing them. It's called "The Gish Gallop"; This term was coined by those that attempted to debate with creationism professor Duane Gish. To borrow a line from Wikipedia "The Gish Gallop is an informal name for a rhetorical technique in debates that involves drowning the opponent in half-truths, lies, straw men, and bullshit to such a degree that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood that has been raised." More on straw men later. Gish epitomized the process of dumping so much crap in one debate that the opponent cannot possibly counter every point in the time alotted. When a skeptic has made the judgment call that it is time to debate a creationist they must be prepared for this tactic and have a counter ready.

The best counter for this debate style is to sum it all up with one "Those are all topics for another debate, we are here to discuss....X" then continue on with your original points. If they attempt to gallop away again just keep bringing them back by focusing on the original topic. Make it clear that all the muck they just dropped is not the focus of this conversation. Most of the time the things they bring up as part of the Gish Gallop are non-sequiturs to the debate at hand. A non-sequitur is the first logical fallacy I want to discuss following the Gish Gallop.

Non-Sequitur is an argument in which the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. An example would be a co-worker that accosted me in the break room a couple days ago when she found out I was an Atheist. She has a very effective gallop style when she argues. This person is in effect a waste of time to argue with because she does not even let you finish a sentence before she jumps in with another logical fallacy. However, the Non-Sequitur she threw at me was "How are you going to get married? Who is going to marry you?" (meaning a pastor) This is actually a few logical fallacies in one, but the Non-Sequitur comes from trying to force a logical connection between believing in a god and getting married where there is in fact no connection at all. She was basically saying that I should believe in her god because otherwise I cannot get married, which is both a non-sequitur and a false premise. To finish the story, I simply got up and walked away as I usually do when I deem a person a waste of my time. Don't get caught up arguing with true believers that don't already have a stage from which to get attention. By arguing with those that toil in obscurity you are doing more harm than good because you are giving them attention they do not deserve.

The next logical fallacy I want to discuss is one that I loathe. It is the false dichotomy fallacy. False dichotomy is the fallacy of arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. My grandfather is a very stubborn person that will argue to the death; essentially another waste of time to argue with, but he is partly responsible for my fascination with skepticism. I have tried my whole life to understand how a person like my grandfather can argue so stubbornly with literally no factual ground to stand on. The day he discovered I questioned the existence of his god he began to argue with me non-stop. He would send me emails trying to convince me why he was right and why god must exist.
My position at the time was agnosticism, meaning that I considered god and all of religion to be not only unknown, but unknowable within the realm of science and our reality. He told me that I cannot take that stance and that I either had to believe in his god or disbelieve in his god, but not be a "fence-sitter" as he called it. He took the position that there is no such thing as middle ground. At the time I did not know how to respond, but today I know now that what he did was commit a logical fallacy. Stating that there were only two choices arbitrarily was a false dichotomy. Today I am still an agnostic, but also an atheist. There is enough evidence to convince me personally that god is a human creation designed to fill in the gaps for which we do not yet have answers. Humans tend to chase knowledge and when we ask questions that cannot yet be answered many people tend to fill in the answers with their own ideologies. However, my stance on religion in general is a topic for another blog.

Speaking of the "god of the gaps" mentality, the next fallacy I would like to bring up is the ad ignorantiam fallacy. The argument from ignorance is basically the premise that something is true because we don't know that it isn't true. Both my father and grandfather have used this one on me a few times. My father argues for some energy force that connects us all to one-another and the universe itself. When I debated him on this he stated that "you don't know there isn't one" and therefor it must exist. He also asked me to explain how sometimes when you are in a room facing away from the door you tend to know when someone has come into the room, despite not having any obvious evidence that someone has entered. It is an argument from ignorance to assume the existence of a whimsical force connecting us simply because we cannot prove there isn't one. That is the act of shifting the burden of proof. It's like saying prove to me there are not invisible unicorns floating around outside when in fact the burden of proof should be on the individual who is positing the idea in the first place. We should not have to prove the existence of invisible unicorns floating around, the individual making the claim should first have to provide compelling evidence that they do exist. Only then can we develop tests for this theory and attempt to disprove it as many ways as we can think of. If it stands the trial of many peer-reviewed scientific tests and still cannot be dis-proven, only then can it be declared a solid theory.
The other part of asking me how we know when people are behind us is also an argument from ignorance. He is assuming that we are not perceptive enough to notice the subtle shifts in the air in the room, or the drapes shifting ever so slightly, or the very faint sounds feet make as they crunch the carpet behind you. We have to apply Occam's razor to these whimsical theories. Occam's razor says that of two theories that come to the same result, the simpler of the two tends to be more correct. So us being perceptive beings and picking up on subtle pressure changes in the room is far simpler than the existence of a magic energy that connects people together. That is not to say the simpler theory has to be correct, just more correct than the second more complex theory, especially when it tries to explain an unkown phenomenon with another unknown phenomenon.

One common argument you will hear from creationists and similar debaters is "Expain to me how...." followed by something that science has not currently explained. For example "Explain to me how the universe was created." Since you cannot answer that question they immediately follow it with accusations that science doesn't know everything and you cannot explain everything with science, therefor God did it. This is the fallacy of confusing unexplained with unexplainable. Just because we cannot currently explain how the universe was created does not mean it is unexplainable. There is somewhat of a false dichotomy in here as well because people assume that we either have to explain it with current science or else God must have done it. The other fallacy in this argument is the jump from "we don't know how it happened" to "God did it." From there they usually move on to "prove God does not exist" which is another argument from ignorance. They are right when they say science cannot explain everything, but they are wrong in assuming that means all of science is wrong. That is actually the Straw Man logical fallacy I mentioned earlier. They are creating a point to argue against that is similar, but not the same as the point the person at the other end of the debate was trying to make. Creationists will often point out that all of science is wrong because it cannot explain a certain thing. That's like saying Einstein was stupid because he never learned how to tie his shoes. There are certain questions that simply do not fall within the realm of science. All belief claims fall into this category and are fundamentally NOT SCIENCE.

Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of a being so powerful he can literally do anything. That's not how science works. Science operates within a framework that it assumes is valid through testing. Science delivers the goods by predicting future outcomes of theories before testing and then being proven correct through vigorous testing. Science changes based on new discoveries and new evidence. So far, everything science knows has held up, because that is fundamentally how science works. So the claim that, "yeah evolution makes sense because God wanted it to look that way" is essentially not a scientific claim. Science is much simpler than most people think it is; it is just a logical method to go about learning new things about our reality. You create a theory for how something works, then you test it and try to disprove your own theory as many ways as possible. Only when your theory has not been proven wrong throughout a significant number of well-designed tests can it them be accepted by the rest of the world as a factual theory. Always remember that science never creates a 100% unbreakable fact. If a theory fails to withstand one test, even after thousands of successful tests, then theory can be proven wrong.

Another fallacy is the argument from final consequences. This one is a doozy, to use a scientific term. This invokes confirmation bias which basically says that it happened therefor it was meant to happen. To use an example from The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, many nurses believe the ER is busier on nights when there is a full moon. Then, every time they see a full moon and notice they are busy that night they invoke confirmation bias and assume the full moon is causing the busy state of the ER. They remember the times when both those facts aligned, but forget the nights when they were busy and there was not a full moon.
Another example is that the odds of conditions being just right and allowing life to form are so great that this could not have happened naturally, something had to create us and everything is pre-ordained in this manner. That is the argument from final consequences because we are indeed here and the conditions are just right. It is like saying that you were destined to win the lottery because you won the lottery. From a mathematical standpoint, someone had to win. There was no way around it. Just because you were the one that won doesn't mean some magic was invoked to help you win it. Most people can't believe it when something quite improbable happens to them; they often invoke God or other whimsical influences as the cause of this improbable happenstance. It is important to note the difference between improbable and impossible. Improbable simply means that it's not likely to happen TO YOU, but improbability still implies that it very well could and likely will happen TO SOMEONE. If a hundred years went by and nobody won the lottery that entire time, that would be stranger than even one person winning it twice during their lifetime. The same can be said for life. With the vastness of the universe, it would be far stranger if life didn't exist at all. Our situation may be improbable, but it most definitely was not impossible.

These are all the logical fallacies that I wanted to cover in this blog. Visit the link I provided and study up on them all. I assure you that you will encounter each of them. I am even beginning to point them out to myself each and every day when I am talking with other people. It really is amazing how many logical fallacies people commit every day of their lives. I even catch myself committing them now and then.

- Alex