Kenntin MacNeil brought this hilarious video to my attention. Ray Comfort and Eric Hovind (www.drdino.com and www.creationminute.com) strive to ask the “real questions.” Young people want the facts they want real answers, according to Mr. Hovind. But the problem is for the remaining twelve minutes Comfort and Hovind fling mistruths about as if they were rose petals, and these men were little flower girls at a celebrity wedding. Adorable.
More seriously, Kenntin and I know their ideas are flawed and their science is bad, but how do you argue against this? My thought is this is a good time to introduce logical fallacies. If you are already strong at recognizing these violations of logic then please point out a few in the comment section along with the corresponding time on the video. If you aren’t familiar with logical fallacies you can read a bit about them here and then come back and try you hand at applying them to the video in the comments as well. Don’t worry you won’t make a fool of yourself- Comfort and Hovind have beaten you to that honor! My goal is to create a user-friendly list of fallacies that we can publish here at SocraticMama, so I am blatantly asking for your help (If you don’t have time this is a great activity for the teenager in the house). The kiddos need to know how to debate this kind of malarkey. Thank you.
Love, Mama
Here’s a little help to get us going.
All that to say, you can’t begin an argument by appealing to the Bible. The Bible is an authority. The argument must stand on its own merit whether or not the Bible agrees with you. Careful! We do the same thing when we appeal to secular authorities. It is not logical to say “Sam Harris thinks that….” Sam may be wrong (probably not, but it could happen). A much better technique is to point to verifiable data such as Mr. Harris’s research. Leave his name out altogether to avoid making this error.
Wikipedia does state: “However, if not using a deductive argument, a logical fallacy is only asserted when the source is not a legitimate expert on the topic at hand, or their conclusion(s) are in direct opposition to other expert consensus.” But, I say appeals to authority are best avoided if you can. Otherwise you get into a situation where you are arguing about who is right- The Bible vs. Sam Harris. That is absurd. If you stick to the data you will strengthen your position.
Wow! I had no idea how many fallacies there are. The two I have seen most frequently from the religious are 1) onus probandi and 2) false dichotomy. The first is the notion that I must disprove your belief in god, creationism, the transubstantiation, etc, rather than the burden leaving the burden of proof where it should be: on the one making the claims. The other refutes that hideous CS Lewis argument: liar, lunatic or lord. It forces the argument into those categories. What about poet, mythical creation, confused person, schizophrenic, etc. It is also appears in the form of “I can’t possibly imagine it any other way.”. So there are only two possibilities. Either it makes sense to me and is true, or if I can’t understand it (fill in evolution, anthropogenic climate change, psychiatry, etc) then it must be false. Check out BASE http://debate.org.uk/topics/history/bib-qur/bibarch.htm
Very well said! I am so glad you are here.
Now we have three for our list. Anyone else?
Iatros & 1993 & Sigmund ~ Hmmm… Hi DC
Bingo. About time he came out to play! Isn’t he great?
First one that comes to mind is the straw man: evolutionists do not say that something can come from nothing, though Hovind says they do. No, that’s what creationists believe. They say a deity spoke the magic words and *poof!* there it was. Evolution deals with how complexity can come about from simplicity.
Another example of a straw man argument is his misrepresentation of punctuated equilibrium. It is not an attempt to account for a lack of transitional fossils (we have thousands of them, and we don’t need to account for the absence of something we have plenty of) but a challenge to the idea that evolution proceeds at a slow, regular pace. Dawkins thinks evolution is more or less uniform while Gould thought evolution went in spurts. Neither of them thought dinosaurs suddenly turned into birds. This is absurd, as Hovind says. That’s why evolutionists don’t believe it.
Second, they’re saying the universe must have had a designer because it is so complex. But as Dawkins likes to point out, a mind capable of designing a complex universe is going to be more complex than the universe it designed. So we have to ask: this designer is even more complex than the universe, so who designed the designer? The implicit fallacy here is that of special pleading: Hovind will require that the universe have a designer, but not that the designer have a designer.
Third, there is the false dichotomy (which latros93 named). Hovind states that, if evolution were to be shown to be false, the only alternative is the Bible. But the failure of one naturalistic explanation to account for a phenomenon is not sufficient to demonstrate that the answer is a supernatural explanation (much less the particular supernatural explanation given in the Bible; who knows, the correct cosmology may be the one presented in Hinduism). Lamarckian evolution, though a naturalistic explanation, was shown to be false, and it was succeeded by another naturalistic explanation: Darwinian evolution.
Fourth, Hovind points to Ida, which was hailed in the press as a “missing link”, though it wasn’t. Scientists hate when people use the phrase “missing link”, and it wasn’t the scientists that were making a huge production over Ida: it was the non-scientist science journalists, who have to invoke hyperbole in order to get readers. So Hovind assumed that, because the press was saying Ida was a “missing link”, scientists thought she was. This is a logical leap called a non sequitur, meaning that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Of course, since scientists did not believe Ida was a missing link, this is another straw man, too.
Hovind also argues that there are dinosaurs in the Congo (based on… stories from natives, apparently?) and argues that this is evidence that dinosaurs were present in the Garden of Eden a few thousand years ago. This is another non sequitur, of course. The conclusion in no way follows from the premise. At the same time, it’s also an example of the base rate fallacy: ignoring the prior probability given by previous evidence. Even if there is a dinosaur in the Congo and even if that were somehow evidence for the existence of the Garden of Eden, all the other knowledge we have about dinosaurs still points to the idea that they evolved slowly over time and went extinct 65 million years ago. This means all we’d really have to do were we to discover a living group of dinosaurs is update our belief “all dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago” to “almost all dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.”
Wow. I ran through my lunch break on this and didn’t even get halfway through the video. Will finish later tonight!
Excellent! I really enjoyed reading that. I’m sure I speak for others, too. Thank you, Josh.
This may be a contrarian view, but I think starting with a set logical fallacies may not be the best way to teach critical thinking. I’ve noticed that very often in on-line discussions the names of the logical fallacies are invoked with too little thought about what they actually mean. “Straw man,” in particular, is used like a talisman to protect bad arguments from criticism.
I think it’s preferable, especially for a young person, to state in his or her own words why an idea is fallacious. If, in time, the student notices that many bad arguments are bad in the same way, then so much the better. Starting with pre-defined logical fallacies risks making the student’s thoughts rigid and formalized where they should be flexible. The question is not “Which, if any, precepts of logic are violated?” The questions are “Is this a valid argument?” and “Why or why not?” After all, whenever we build something foolproof, someone builds a greater fool.
Just my two cents. I really enjoyed reading everyone’s posts (Josh’s in particular. Thanks for commenting!).
Thanks so much for this comment, Randolf. You really gave me cause to think. Naturally, because I’m stubborn, I’m sticking to my guns on this one! I do think you make a really good point- evidenced by the way I’ve been thinking about your post ever since I read it! I’m going to let your points roll about in my head for a while. However, from a practical standpoint, as a former teacher, it is kinda nice to have the logical fallacies as guideposts for instruction. At least everyone is on the same footing at the start. (Am i making sense!??!)
As ever, you are making perfect sense. I’ve not really made up my own mind about this. Writing my ideas down sometimes help me settle issues for myself, but this time it has only served to muddy the water. Certainly, I can see how using the logical fallacies would serve as a useful teaching framework, but I can’t quite shake my original concerns. Such is life.
What I think is most important, and where I think we all agree, is that it is important to state in plain terms what makes a bad argument bad. Once we’ve done that we’re free to call Eric Hovind names without the risk of making ad hominem arguments.
I’m with Randolf [unfortunate initials BTW
] ~ they have indeed become a talisman & a barrier to clear thinking. It is the people who have not had training in clear thinking who are the first to wield the fallacy mallet when a surgical excision with a few well chosen words would have thrown more light.
The use of fallacy card is often about a display of knowledge with the implication that it’s backed up with something solid.
I can’t believe you have turned on me, Mr. Fisher! LOL Well, all in good fun. What I’m attempting to do is teach critical thinking skills. If the logical fallacies are not the best direction then we are free to throw them aside. I must admit there are too many of them to remember them all. So, what makes a poor argument? Can we work on a deffiniton? Something tangible, not just “you know it when you see it.” I’m quite serious about getting to the root of this.
To clarify. I would like to use this site to actively teach critical / skeptical thinking. What is the best way to go about that? What resources can we assemble? Nothing hypothetical or philosophical.
Happily, I don’t think most Americans will get it right off. It took me fifteen minutes. Randolf Carter, incidentally, is a pseudonym, borrowed from a recurring H.P. Lovecraft character. (;,;) == Cthulhu Smiley
I knocked a cob-web loose and remembered that Francis Bacon raised this same concern I did, albeit four centuries earlier, more comprehensively and with greater eloquence, when he wrote about the “Idols which Beset Man’s Mind”. Specifically, I’m worried about idols of the market-place, where words and the ideas they represent become estranged.
I’ll amend my original comment to say that I think learning why thinking can turn bad (i.e. the idols which beset our minds) is a more fundamental lesson than how thinking has turned bad (i.e. logical fallacies). Which is not at all to say either is unimportant (both are critical), but I do believe one should precede the other.
Perhaps I’ll start a Francis Bacon thread in one of the groups. I could call it, “Mmmm… Bacon…” (read in the voice of Homer Simpson)
My first thoughts after watching the video were, ‘well.that’s 12 minutes of my life that is gone forever.’ But, it’s a good reminder to see those two IDiots in action. Cringeable!
I can’t really add anything to the fallacy aspect pf the thread but Rabbi David Wolpe sometime lst year described SIN as an acronym for Self Infliced Nonsense.
Richard Dawkins simply stated the ‘ignorance is curable but stupidity isn’t’.
You weren’t going to use those 12 minutes anyway!
Duh!.Everyone has 20/20 hindsight!!
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