Evidence of the Afterlive; I'm Skeptical - Website

An update to our review of Evidence of the Afterlife; The Science of Near-Death Experiences.  As it turns out, the book is extremely light.  I've been told that most books intended for a lay audience are written around a sixth-grade level.  If that's the case, Evidence is written at a third- or fourth-grade level.

There are interesting tidbits though; for example, on the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation's website, there is a little page titled "Skeptic's Corner."  My favorite article there is Debunking the Debunkers by Jody A. Long.

The entire "debunking" is done on the basis of straw-men and ad hominem attacks.  From the opening paragraph:

On one hand you have those who consider the experience as real (usually the experiencer), and on the other hand you have the nay-Sayers (the non-experiencers) who consider the experience nothing more than brain-chemistry.  In the middle of the road, are those who seek truth – the true skeptics.

Interestingly, this statement excludes both "believers" and "unbelievers" from the category of someone who genuinely seeks truth.  She manages to insult both believers and skeptics at the same time!

The first part of the article is just silly; Long defines "skeptic" as one who "habitually questions assertions or generally accepted conclusions."  Fair enough.  She also defines "cynic" as "one who believes all men are motivated by selfishness."  She then simply paints anyone skeptical of an afterlife as being "cynical" instead of honestly "skeptical."

. . . techniques used in the Lancet commentary such as implying that the whole experience was imagined or that the experiencer was fancifully filling in the gaps. What better way to discredit an NDEr than to assume they are lying about their experience or convince others that the NDEr is of unsound of mind?

I love how we go from "the experience could have been imagined, or your mind could have filled in the gaps" straight to, "you're lying or insane."  It's just grossly dishonest to say that our skeptical response to NDEs is to simply say that the person is lying.  Memory is highly fallible, as well; nobody is saying that you have to be insane to formulate false or unreliable memories, far from it, especially memories that you are highly emotionally attached to, or that came from an altered state of consciousness!

Whenever there are some glaring facts that don’t fit into a preconceived world view, these facts are conveniently ignored.  The most ignored facts that NDE cynics gloss over are those that occur in the out-of-body phase of the NDE.  There is no way possible that brain chemistry can be argued when a person is verifiably DEAD, . . .

This is the exact opposite of true.  The out-of-body experience is one of the most (or one of the only . . .) testable hypotheses of these claims about NDEs.  Thus, it's one of the easiest methods of falsifying Long's hypothesis, as we'll see in that chapter of his book.

Inventing false explanations can best be seen by Susan Blackmore . . .  While some of these explanations may be true for some of the reports, they certainly are not true for all accounts.

Of course, there's no reason given why there has to be some NDEs that these explanations simply don't work for.  Long simply states, as a matter of fact, that not all NDEs could be a result of these naturalistic "false" explanations.  She returns to this statement several times over the course of the rest of the article.

These are all examples that Long gives of tactics and rhetoric used by "cynics" as opposed to "skeptics."   It only gets worse, though, when she talks about what would be good evidence, presented by skeptics.

In a court of law, there are rules that allow people to testify (give their oral narratives) to the truth of the matter. . . .  Therefore, much of Susan Blackmore’s arguments against NDE would fail the relevancy test. When viewed in the context of the near death experience, the explanations lack probative value because false explanations do not tend to prove or disprove NDE since they only apply to a few of the NDE accounts.  Moreover, even if false explanations were allowed as evidence, they could still be excluded because false explanations tend to cloud the real issues; and ultimately, they are a waste of time since no single explanation or group of explanations that she gives results in a total explanation for all NDEs.

Long equates a skeptic's naturalistic explanations for NDEs to a testimony given in court, which is a really spectacularly bad analogy. Even ignoring the fact that she tries to name the same issue as two separate cases against the skeptic's argument, a testimony given in court is a specific account given about a one-time event, by a witness to the event.  It's not comparable to giving a naturalistic explanation for a large number of events at all.  I suppose one could still insist that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife, and that a skeptic pointing out naturalistic explanations for NDEs is "irrelevant," but you'd be wrong.  It's pretty close to the most relevant response possible, actually.

Long takes her courtroom analogy and runs with it, rightly acknowledging that their case for the afterlife is built entirely upon hearsay.  She rightly states that usually, hearsay is such a terrible excuse for evidence that it's inadmissible in a court of law (which is saying something, since the debate standards in a court of law are already far, far less rigorous than the standards for a scientific debate).  Amazingly, she claims that hearsay can be very good evidence:

However, even hearsay can be reliable in court.  Some of the exceptions that apply to NDE are called present sense impressions and excited utterances. The rationale of the rule is that the “element of spontaneity reduces the chance of misrepresentation to an acceptable level.”  Even more reliable is evidence obtained while a person is under the stress of the excitement caused by the event or condition, with the key being the spontaneity of the statements.

It should be obvious that this rule only applies when we're trying to get at someone's genuine impression of a situation (especially a situation that's not too complicated, where we can conclude that there's a minimal chance of them just being flat-out wrong about what happened).  Equally clear is how bad such testimony is when trying to determine the objective reality of a very amazing, complex situation.

If a man shot someone else, and was heard yelling at the time, "AAAAHHHH I SHOT HIIIIIIIIIIM . . .  SOMEONE HELP, I SHOT HIIIIIIIIM . . ." and later claimed that they didn't shoot him, then testimony of his yelling would be good evidence (for a testimonial anecdote, anyway).  Now, let's try and formulate an analogy that would actually be closer to a NDE.  If, on the other hand, a carnival ride malfunctioned and spun out of control, and someone managed to record the most terrified, hysterical person trapped on the ride (someone with a highly altered state of consciousness), and that person happened to scream something about the ride going two hundred miles an hour, would that be a good measure of the objective reality of the situation?

Here are some other choice statements:

Few NDErs have anything to gain by telling their story.  Most “skeptics” have books and reputations to defend.

Um, the Dr. Longs have books and reputations to defend.  Ziztur and I don't.  This is just a particularly bad ad hominem.

Other valid observations about anecdotal evidence is that it is mostly reliable in regards to every day things.  Over 90 percent of what we hear from others is accurate when dealing with life.  We talk to others about what they had for lunch, what is playing at the movies, or what happened on the way to work.  While some of this might be small talk, for the most part an anecdotal account, it is not deemed a false memory or hallucination. If anecdotal evidence were inherently unreliable, we would typically not believe a word anyone tells us.

I love this one.  Obvious response, right?  Extraordinary claims?  Duh?  Well, Long has an answer for that:

 I frequently hear that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. . . .  What constitutes extraordinary claims to one person may not be the same for another person.  What is extraordinary becomes a subjective term and open to interpretation.

And there we have it.  Because there's no absolute standard of an "extraordinary" claim, it's no more outrageous to insist that you have scientifically proven the afterlife than it is to state that you had the turkey at lunch today.  I don't think I need to point out why this doesn't convince me.

It is important to remember that just because something hasn’t been scientifically proven, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.  Many times, it is just a matter of developing technology to be sensitive enough to sense germs, viruses, other galaxies, microwaves, electromagnetic fields, or gravity.  There are many things that did not exist at various times in mans’ existence, yet they still existed. 

Therefore, it is more accurate to state, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to convince skeptics, but not necessarily to exist in objective reality.”

Let's clarify the old adage; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to be accepted rationally.  This is exactly like the old anti-reason, pro-faith argument:  "There was a time when claiming that the earth was round was an extraordinary claim, and there was no evidence to prove that extraordinary claim true - did that mean that the earth was flat?"

The answer is simple; thousands of years ago, accepting a flat earth was absolutely the logical, rational conclusion based on the available evidence.  New evidence overturned that conclusion, yes, but the only reason that we know that this particular piece of knowledge was dead wrong was exactly because of that overwhelming weight of evidence.  It's absolutely ridiculous to assume that overwhelmingly-accepted-fact-X will someday inevitably be overturned with amazing evidence to the contrary.  Here's a claim; gravity doesn't exist.  An infinite number of invisible, suspiciously humanoid imps and fairies just really enjoy pushing matter together, according to it's mass.  We don't accept this claim, while we do accept that the earth is round.

It's really clear that you shouldn't make the "extraordinary, fantastic, seemingly impossible claims can still exist in spite of no good evidence" argument.  By definition, it's an admission that you have no evidence for your position.

That fact, and thus the reason why the Longs' so-called evidence is so unconvincing to skeptics, is well summed up in Dr. Long's own words:

Consider that just because a person can’t scientifically prove something does not mean that it is false or nonexistent.  For instance, science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God or life after death.

How on earth do you make a case for scientifically proving that there is an afterlife when you admit straight out that there literally cannot be any scientific evidence for or against your claim?

Check out this link, found at the bottom of the article (but only if you feel like weeping for the state of critical thinking skills and scientific education in the world).

3H1P: Do I ever succumb to superstition?

Welcome to my first entry in Ziztur’s “3H1P” project. To quote her own description,

3H1P is a blogging project wherein three heathens (Ziztur, Flimsy and Petter) and one pastor (Keith) answer questions posed by readers of the blog and discuss various issues related to religion, philosophy, science, etc. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered by 3H1P, ask it in the comment box. We promise we'll probably get to it.

Some time back, EdW wrote:

I would love to hear about whether The 3 Heathens (which sounds like the best/worst Disney feature ever) find themselves succumbing to superstition in their lives. Personally, I have an assortment of "lucky" objects that I carry -- and I love to make bargains with the Universe, or my car. "I promise I'll get you premium gas next time if you just don't die on the way to the airport".

I guess the question would apply to P.Keith as well -- do you ever find yourself doing things that you consider superstitious and silly?

I think it's important on both sides to acknowledge that we all are perfectly capable of believing absurd things, and sometimes that's okay. My lucky objects are great conversation starters.

-EdW

I also seem to recall a question in some blog comment—though as I cannot find it, it may be that I misremember—asking whether we heathens ever doubt the correctness of our atheism. Whether the question was asked or not, I think it’s a good question that works well as a subquestion to the above. As is my wont, I will take these talking points and, rather than provide a succinct answer, extrapolate and wax philosophical about it.

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I can’t think of instances when I succumb to superstition, for the simple reason that if I am aware of it, I refuse to allow myself to do so. That does not, of course, mean that I don’t succumb, only that if I do, I do so when I’m unaware of the fact…and I expect that this does happen. After all, we are all human; we are all subject to the same cognitive biases, type I (false positive) errors, pareidolia, rampant teleology, confusing correlation with causation, and all the rest. On top of that, in our daily lives we have to deal with the cognitive limitations of being individual people and dealing with sample-of-one events rather than having the leisure to evaluate everything as a proper scientific experiment.

On top of this, there is the interesting idea I have heard bandied about that truly understanding an idea requires a thought process virtually identical to actually believing it—temporarily suspending disbelief. I do not know whether this is literally true or not, and for my purposes this is irrelevant. In my own, subjective experience, it certainly appears that truly understanding an idea requires adopting a point of view from which the positive arguments make sense. It is true that when I read some of the more well-written arguments for some fantastic thing or other, be it Christianity or naturopathy or ESP, there is a part of my brain that goes “Huh” and has to be reined in once I sit back and apply critical thinking.

(On an aside, this means that there are plenty of things I simply cannot understand, but dismiss nonetheless. I do not think this unjustified. If a belief clearly leads to particular predictions that do not hold, or relies on flawed assumptions, I can safely dismiss the whole edifice even if I do not know what it is like to mentally inhabit it. I cannot imagine what it is like to live in a universe where 2+2=5, but I don’t need to; I know it is untrue nonetheless.)

So on any given day, I—hard-nosed skeptic extraordinaire—may very briefly belief in Christianity, Islam, telepathy, and who knows what. I may wish I didn’t, but such is the case: Especially with Christianity; after all I grew up Christian, if not very hardcore, and I was at least ten years old by the time I realised that the painful “crisis of faith” I had suffered, complete with prayers for “a sign”, was really the anguish of cognitive dissonance as I strove to believe in something unbelievable.

Perhaps you, gentle reader, have also experienced the phenomenon of agreeing with a writer or a speaker so long as you are reading, or listening, to his or her words—only to emerge from the spell and start questioning? My tendency to do this is probably why I prefer reading to listening when it comes to (purported) fact, as I find it easier to pause and critically analyse something when I’m reading it than if I’m swept along by the pace of the spoken word (this is why I read blogs but do not listen to podcasts).

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Ironically, one of the best responses to this temporary vacillating comes from C.S. Lewis and his Mere Christianity—I generally disliked it, but I found this part inspiring:

Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then—and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

In this sense—and only in this specific sense—it is with faith in my convictions of the rational approach to the universe that I meet these momentary weaknesses. Faith-1 is bad; faith-2 is a good thing, and we need it to counter the non-rational vacillations of our primate brains.

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To draw on a concrete example, I went for my flu shots back in the fall. (I was lucky enough to get both the seasonal and H1N1 shot, even though I did not qualify as a member of any of the H1N1 priority groups at the time: The clinic had prepared too many doses that morning, and the doctor offered them to non-qualifying patients rather than having to throw them out at the end of the day.) I read a lot about vaccination, and about anti-vaccination shenanigans. I am among those who regard vaccinations as the second greatest medical invention or discovery of all time (right behind the medical importance of hygiene). I consider the anti-vaccination movement dangerously misguided at best, and am happy to refer you here to ponder its consequences.

And yet, actually walking into the clinic to get those shots was not psychologically trivial. In part this is no doubt because I’m not a big fan of needles, but I also had a small encyclopedia of anti-vaccination claims floating in my mind, accompanied by fears ranging from the ludicrous—think squalene, aluminium adjuvants, antifreeze, mercury causing autism—to the disproportionate, such as the (in fact extremely minute) risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a very rare side effect of flu vaccination. I would be lying if I said that I went in without any hesitation.

But I know better than to just listen to my fears. I have faith-2 in the safety of vaccines, in the fact that while there are a few tiny risks, the odds that it will save my life from disease (and protect people around me whom I might otherwise infect) are vastly greater than those risks; and some of the risks aren’t real at all. So I went in, got my shots, took a low-key day of reading, coffee, and puttering around with my computer as I suffered the common side effect of mild ache and fever the next day, and went back to life as usual the day after that. (I did not contract Guillain-Barré syndrome, I did not become autistic, and in general suffered no side effects.)

This is not the only example I could give. I try to apply the same sort of critical thinking whenever I am faced with a choice and feel a gut instinct that does not seem well supported by evidence. It happens that my response to a difficult choice is to look up statistics and do my best to mathematically assess statistical probabilities rather than attempt to tackle emotionally laden issues head-on. (Did you know, for instance, that some 20% of the population carries HSV-2, the virus that causes ‘genital’ herpes, but 80% of them don’t know it? This means that about 17% of everyone who is not aware of carrying HSV-2 actually does, and if you have protected sex with a person of unknown HSV-2 status, you run—very approximately—a 0.42% annual risk of contracting the virus if you are male, twice that if female. HSV-2 is not tested for in standard STI screening panels.)

I’m told I’m uncommonly rational about such things—which I take as a great compliment, even if it’s a bit disturbing to think that most people do not try their best to rationally evaluate risks and probabilities. To me, it seems irresponsible not to try. Of course, I’m sure that I often fall short—but as I said in the beginning, I don’t allow myself to fall short when I’m aware of the problem.

The disturbing question is, how often do I face a hard choice and go with my gut reaction without first questioning it? I don’t know.

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My model for dealing with gut feelings is, of course, Carl Sagan. As he memorably recounted in The Demon-Haunted World,

I’m frequently asked, Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence? I give the standard arguments—there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be asonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.

Often, I’m asked next, What do you really think?

I say, I just told you what I really think.

Yes, but what’s your gut feeling?

But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thiniing with anything besides my brain, tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

Strawman for climategate?

I've got one (1) week of my internship left and then I graduate! This means that I will have more time to blog. It also means I will be looking for some type of gainful employment. That aside…

The other day I was listening to the local Christian radio station. Someone on air was talking about "Climategate", the incident in which climate scientists' emails were hacks and posted on the internet, revealing that scientists use words like "trick" and "hide" and that those words can be usurped as the smoking gun that global warming is a myth.

On this program, the radio personality (unfortunately, I forget who) actually made the argument that there was no way humans could fuck up the earth because god made the earth for us to use, and we can't expect to be such a powerful force as to muck up god's great planet. Therefore, global warming is a myth invented by power-hungry scientists who are trying to elevate themselves to godly levels because they crave power and the ability to control others.

…

Yes, they actually made that argument. Here I was thinking that said argument was nothing more than an absurd strawman invented by critical thinkers to mock believers. Apparently I was giving some people too much credit.

Life does not begin at conception

One of the primary claims of the anti-abortion brigade is that “life begins at conception”, and because it is wrong to take a life, therefore it is wrong to abort a fetus (and perhaps wrong even to prevent a zygote from implanting by use of a UTI). However, this claim is not merely wrong, but ludicrously wrong.

Let me make an aside here. If you are of a religious bent, and if you believe in the existance of a soul, and if you believe that this soul is created, implanted, magicked into being, or otherwise attached to a developing human at some particular point in development, then of course that provides a logical point whereafter abortion may be seen as a crime against said soul. I think you are dead wrong about the existance of souls, but granted that premise, this objection to anti-abortionism does not apply to you. To you, all I have to say is this: Remember that your arguments are inherently non-secular and cannot carry force in a secular judicial system; and please remember that your arguments hold no force with those of us who are not religious.

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With that out of the way, let’s restate the obvoius: Life does not begin at conception. Conception, in us sexually reproducing animals, consists of the fusion of gametes—the sperm fertilises the ovum. But, and this should be painfully obvious to everyone, the gametes are alive. You are the product of a living spermatozoon and a living ovum. Fertilisation did not mark the creation of life, only the fusion of two living cells into a single living cell.

This fusion is certainly a defining moment in your life. Barring mutation so unlikely that I expect it can be discounted, and excepting rare conditions like chimerism and mosaicism, it is the last event that defines your genetic makeup, when the chromosomes you inherit from your parents merge. It is, in a very real sense, a defining moment. It is not, however, the defining moment, because there are many. Even after fusion, not every zygote goes on to successfully implant, and early pregnancies often terminate spontaneously. The biologist Lewis Wolpert famously said that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”.

But before conception, a startling number of things had to happen in order to make you who you are. Before the fertilisation event was to matter at all, the specifics of meiosis in the germ line of each of your parents played as big a role in determining your genetic specifics as did the fertilisation itself: Meiosis, the process where a germ line cell divides into (haploid) gametes with half the chromosomal complement of a normal cell, is when the genetic contribution of each parent is determined. And of course any number of things had to happen very specifically in order to make you who you are, on this basis: Your parents had to have sex at just the right time when the spermatozoon and ovum each carrying half of your genes were alive and active. If they’d waited until next month, things would have been different…

But this is only the beginning (or the end, depending on your view). Those haploid cells, after all, were alive, each of them a living cell from one of your parents, whence they were produced by meiosis from diploid germ line cells. Each of those cells was the unlikely product of very specific meiosis, reproductive timing, and fertilisation by the (most likely four) people who were their parents…and the same goes for all of their parents…and that lineage goes back, centuries, millennia, millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. You are the product of a lineage of living cells that stretches back to the very dawn of sexual reproduction. Looking back further, you’re still the product of living cells, though the processes are different and lateral gene transfer makes the family tree a bit harder to draw…but ultimately, you are the scion of a family of cells—living cell to living cell to living cell—reaching back some 3.6 billion years—3,600,000,000 years—at a ballpark estimate.

That is when life began, and that is, in a sense, when your life began, too: It started then, and it hasn’t died since. Every single intermediary between you and the first primordial, primitive, living cell that serves as ancestor to all life on earth was alive. It started then, and in a sense, you’re just a heavily modified offshoot—3,600,000,000 years down the living line.

I find this an awesome fact to contemplate.

What, then, is so magical about conception? Nothing, really. It’s a defining moment in making you who you are, but it’s really just one of billions upon billions of defining moments. Causing the death of a zygote does exactly as much in preventing a particular potential person from coming about as does causing the death of a spermatozoon (e.g. by masturbating, by ejaculating outside a woman, by using a condom, or by doing nothing and letting the spermatozoon die and get reabsorbed into the body); as does wasting the life of an ovum (by menstruating, in the luteal or ischemic phase). But removing the possibility of a specific human being is even more ubiquitous; after all, every human alive represents millions of potential people lost, as the ones produced by the spermatozoa who lost the race would undoubtedly have been different.

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My own opinions on abortion are not very well-defined. I am, of course, pro-choice, but since I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make a hard choice, I’ve never needed to figure out exactly what I think the hard lines are. What I do think, however, is that it is in no way wrong to destroy human tissue, while it is definitely wrong to destroy a moral human person.

The question, then, is what constitutes moral personhood. I will not pretend to have a clearcut answer. If I had to sit down and develop one, it would combine concepts like having thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, and desires; taking part in emotional relationships (a reciprocal relationship); interacting (in some way) with people; acting as a moral agent, rather than merely being acted upon as a ‘moral object’.

It seems abundantly clear to me that no lump of human tissue can possibly meet my criteria unless it has a mind, which requires a working brain. After the brain works in some sense, I believe there is a window, a grey area, where I would in all likelihood agree that abortion may very well be morally acceptable—but this is beside the point I wish to make here, which is that until brain activity begins, I regard it as “no context”: Abortion prior to this is absolutely acceptable. (This may be around week 25 or so of a pregnancy; research shows that sustained EEG activity first appears in bursts around week 20, become sustained around week 22, and bilaterally synchronous around weeks 26–27.)

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Once the position is taken that an early abortion does not, in fact, destroy a moral person, we are back to the notion of destroying “potential” persons. The problem is that we destroy potential persons all the time, no matter what we do. If we have sex, we destroy lots of potential persons (since most of the potential ones will never be, even if we do have children); whenever we don’t have sex even though we could, we are passively murdering potential persons, because we aren’t making children at all.

Modern biotechnology allows us to stretch this argument to a reductio ad absurdum without leaving the realm of the possible. In recent experiments (documented in some very nice articles in Nature), scientists have induced pluripotency in mouse cells and produced viable mice (fully viable, as some of them went on to reproduce). While cloning humans is likely to be much more difficult than cloning mice even on purely technical considerations, and it may well be impossible right now, it seems obvious that the technology is if not in our grasp, then certainly close to it, to produce viable humans from induced pluripotent stem cells. Taking things just a bit further, it may become possible to extract genetic material and inject it into pluripotent cells and so produce clones from any cell with intact genetic material.

Once the technology exists for doing this, the loss of any viable genetic material is, in a sense, the destruction of a potential human life. Scratching your head, cutting your hair or your nails, losing scrapings of epithelial material from your mouth, bleeding…every such act will prevent humans from being who might otherwise have been.

Unless you are willing to condemn this as murder, then any argument that boils down to “You are destroying potential life!” loses all force.

Fallacies and lies in the gay marriage debate

Opponents of gay rights often object to gay marriage on the basis that it is “not traditional”—“traditional marriage”, they say, never included same-sex unions; therefore, to allow such would be to subvert what marriage is about.

Skipping quickly past the most obvious flaws in this argument—viz., first, that “traditional” and “non-traditional” do not necessarily correlate to “good” and “bad” at all; and second, that a non-traditional marriage is still a marriage—it is still a flimsy argument, for a series of reasons. Since I seem to repeat myself in comment threads, I will summarize my arguments here for future reference.

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The most oft-raised objection is that the tradition of marriage has changed over time, thus appeals to tradition are vague and empty. For instance, going back a few decades or centuries we will find changes in

• whether people were encouraged or even allowed to choose their own spouses
• whether marriages could be dissolved by divorce
• whether women held equal power (legally) with their husbands
• whether the spouses could have different ethnic, cultural, and/or religious backgrounds
• and so on and so forth.

Some people misunderstand this argument and object that “same-sex unions were never part of the tradition!”—which is true, but completely misses the point. The point is that the tradition has always been plastic and has evolved over the decades and centuries, and rules have been changed or dropped—generally, it seems, as a delayed reaction to humanistic improvements in our culture. It is certainly true that “the spouses must be of different sexes” has always been one of those rules, but if other rules can be dropped, why can’t that one?

You may be reaching for the reply button to tell me that, wait!, there is a good reason!—that same-sex unions cannot “naturally” produce children, for instance. However, this is a red herring. If you must resort to any such argument, you are no longer arguing that gay marriage is wrong because it is non-traditional, but rather that it is wrong and non-traditional. If you want “It’s not traditional!” to be a reason against gay marriage, then you must be consistent. However, virtually nobody actually argues in favour of other, discarded aspects of the tradition. Therefore, “It’s not traditional!” is not really a motivation at all, but a rhetorical argument disingenuously wielded for want of better arguments.

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While we are at it, let’s dismiss the motivation that same-sex marriages are invalid because they cannot result in children. First, this is simply untrue—lesbian couples can have children with the help of artificial insemination, or a male friend; gay male couples can have children with the aid of a surrogate mother; any gender configuration can raise children if they are adopted. Second, the people who argue that gay marriages should not be allowed because they do not result in children by “natural” means never seem to have the slightest urge to apply this criterion consistently, which would mean forbidding marriages

• where the woman is post-menopausal
• where the man is sterile or completely impotent
• where the woman is infertile
• where the man has had a vasectomy, or the woman a tubal ligation
• where the spouses are biologically capable of having children, but have no desire or intention to do so, and use contraceptives to ensure it will not happen.

If your criterion is that “marriage is for procreation”, then you should oppose these types of marriage every bit as firmly as you oppose same-sex marriage. If you don’t, then whatever your real reason is, it clearly isn’t the procreation angle.

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Finally, something that is often overlooked is that defenders of “traditional” marriage tend to speak as though there were only one tradition (their own, of course). But this is not so, and while we may live in a culture evolved from and dominated by Judeo-Christian tradition, it’s not the only one around. The tradition of male-male eros in ancient Greece is well-known; in modern times, it is fairly clear that so-called Boston marriages often (though far from always) were, in effect, lesbian partnerships.

Around the world, there have been many cultures and traditions that allow, encourage, or celebrate same-sex relationships. Anthropologists have found several dozen African populations with female-female marriages, as well as male-male unions; North American indigenous cultures have recognised various fluid gender identities; pre-modern China had several examples of same-sex marriages.

Thus, to say that “Same-sex marriage is not traditional!” comes with the implicit assumption of confining yourself to one or a particular set of cultures. It’s highly traditional in some parts of the world—it just so happens that these traditions are not the dominant ones in the Western world.

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On a lighter note, I recently came across one of the worst arguments I have ever heard in this debate:

To call a homosexual union a "marriage" is to equate it to "traditional marriage," which it is not. Again, this has nothing to do with discrimination, but changing the institution and definition of marriage and violating the first amendment right of freedom of religion. This includes religious expression.

This is so perversely wrong that it’s actually funny. Marriage, as it is currently defined in the United States, is constrained by the rules of the Judeo-Christian cultural background of the European settlers who invaded North America. To allow gay marriage would obviously not infringe on the right of Christians to marry people of the opposite sex. It might offend them, and they might for various absurd reasons feel that it devalues them, but it does nothing to prevent them from engaging in exactly the same religious rituals and religious ceremonies that they already do. It would not affect their rights—only the rights of the same-sex couples who would now be allowed to marry.

If anything (and this is what makes it so perverse), the current laws could be construed as a First Amendment violation! After all, by forbidding same-sex unions, the government is promoting one religion’s view of marriage (the Christian one) over the views of certain other religions (e.g. some African and indigenous North American ones). The current state of things has one religious tradition entrenched in the law—which is precisely what the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was written to prevent. (I’m not saying that a strong case could necessarily be made that “marriage for heteros only” is an Establishment violation, but if we are to talk violation, it is clearly the case that the status quo favours Christianity, rather than that a change would infringe on anybody’s religious rights.)

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A great deal more could be said on this subject. This is not a piece of advocacy—I’m sure it’s clear that I do advocate recognising same-sex marriages every bit as much as hetero-sex marriages—but the aim here is to discuss some common fallacies and counterfactual claims that have been repeatedly issued in the course of debate. The next time these arise, I will simply provide a link to this post and say, “Here, go see why you are wrong”.

Making fun of Catholics

I just thought I would let you guys know that attacking Catholics is not really clever, witty or funny.

So says Greg Crave, vice chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, in his opinion piece published in the Australian National Times.

This is another one of those opinion pieces that are so deliciously ironic and hypocritical that I hardly feel observant to point it out, but point it out I must.

Sir Crave's piece starts out with the bold headline: "A plague of atheists has descended, and Catholics are the target" with the subheadline, "Attacking Christians is not really clever, witty or funny" and then proceeds to write a piece that appears to be an attempt to attack atheists in a way that is clever, witty and funny.

He begins by saying:

From time immemorial, this world has been troubled by plagues. From bogong moths in Canberra to frogs in biblical Egypt, unwelcome and unlovely creatures have the awkward habit of turning up in bulk.

Just now, we are facing one of our largest and least appealing infestations. … we are beset by atheists.

Wow. Atheists – fellow human beings who lack belief in god – are one of the largest and least appealing plague infestations of unwelcome and unlovely creatures. I guess it is not clever, witty or funny to insult Christians, but it is clever, witty and funny to compare atheists to plague infestations.

Let's think about this. Atheists who are vice chancellors for universities do not write opinion pieces in national newspapers claiming that it is not witty to attack atheists (who have been attacked since the dawn of religion) and that Catholics are the largest and most unappealing plague infestation of unwelcome and unlovely creatures.

There are idiots in every camp, and if an atheist behaved this badly, I would call that atheist out on his hypocritical xenophobic, bigoted hate speech immediately.

Crave goes on to explain that "traditional" atheists "tended to be quiet blokes called Algie with ancillary interests in nudist ceremonies, who were perfectly happy as long as you pretended to accept a pamphlet in Flinders Lane.

Apparently, the good atheists are the ones who keep their godless mouths shut about their godlessness. I am not Australian so I don't know what the references to Algie and Flinders Lane are, nor do I get the reference to nudist ceremonies. Crave apparently does not mind the atheists who are quiet, but decries the "new" atheists who are

As brash, noisy and confident as an electric kettle.

That's very brash, noisy and confident of Crave to proclaim these things about atheists, isn't it? He goes on to say that the "new" atheists are targeting Catholics in particular. He thinks this is odd, given the proliferation of other religions for us to target and surmises that we attack the Catholic Church because doing so is the equivalent of "nuking the Pentagon" and "Guerilla bands of Baptists and Pentecostals can be liquidated at leisure."

Nice! Crave managed to insult non-Catholics as well as atheists by completely diminishing all that they have works for by referring to them as "Guerilla bands" as if they are meeting in huddled corners of abandoned buildings. He does this in the same paragraph that he compares atheists to terrorists.

Sir Crave, make no mistake: we have issue with parts of all religions. The Catholic Church is a very large organization and it is unique in the way in which it functions as well as its vast historical significance to the current culture. When you have an issue with certain beliefs, you tend to spend more time targeting the beliefs that are most pervasive in society. Jesus is central to Catholicism, so you spend a lot of time talking about Jesus. Sin is a big issue, so you spend lots of time talking about sin. The date of Jesus' birth is not central to your doctrines, so you spend much less time targeting that for discussion. This is perfectly logical and the way that most people manage their time or focus. Instead, he portrays us as a petty group of people attacking Catholics because it might mean someone will pay attention to us.

Crave goes on to attack other religions (not the superb hypocrisy here) proving that what he means by "Attacking Christians is not really clever, witty or funny" is "Attacking the Catholic Church is not really clever, witty or funny – but attacking everyone else IS."

Catholics have the undeniable advantage that they demonstrably believe in something. Attacking some of the more swinging Christian denominations might mean upsetting people who believe a good deal less than the average atheist

He proceeds to use lots of insulting adjectives in an apparent attempt at wit, referring to atheists as, "a diverting pastime", "designer atheism", "common or garden atheist", "tabloid atheist", "atheistic bigotry". Let's imagine for a moment that these adjectives were applied to Catholics. Catholicism is a diverting pastime. Designer Catholicism. Common or Garden Catholicism. Tabloid Catholicism. Catholic bigotry.

But Oh no! atheists are bigoted for pointing out that some Catholics are bigoted.

In an average week of atheistic bigotry in the Melbourne Media, we can expect to learn that Catholics endorse child molestation, hate all other religions, would re-introduce the crusades and the auto de fe at the slightest opportunity, despise women, wish to persecute homosexuals, greedily divert public moneys for their own religious purposes, subvert public health care, brainwash children, and are masterminding the spread of the cane toad across north Australia

Um…Here's the thing. I do not hear atheists (even Australian ones) claiming in the media that Catholics do all of those things in the above paragraph. We say things like this: "This particular Catholic demonstrably hates other religions. Here are some specific examples…" which gets strawmanned into… well… this. If atheists do say this, then I do not agree with them. Even if they do make these blanket strawman statements, Crave is the pot calling the kettle black. Of course, when he wants to point out examples of "atheist bigotry", he provides no references to the claims being made.

Apparently, Crave thinks we are supposed to ignore or politely dismiss Christians. But he is not ignoring or politely dismissing us.

The end of his piece reads: "There is nothing funny, witty of clever about hate."

You're right. Sir Crave – you are a bigoted, hateful individual, as evidenced by your writing. Please. Imagine that someone were writing a piece as scathing as yours in a national newspaper about Catholicism. If the "media" has something negative to say about Catholicism, it is usually to point out some FACT. It is a fact that there is an issue in the Catholic Church concerning child sexual abuse by priests. It is a fact that some Catholics are hateful to other religions. It is a fact that some Catholics condone treating women as inferior to men. It is a fact that the Catholic Church persecutes homosexuals. It is a fact that the Catholic Church uses public money for religious purposes. It is a fact that the Catholic Church has spoken out against public health care. It is a fact that the Catholic Church raises children to believe in the tenants of Catholicism, sometimes using psychologically subversive techniques. Can you imagine a group of schoolchildren being forced to recite passages from The God Delusion on a weekly basis and being smacked if they say "god bless you" when someone sneezes? I don't know what that reference to the cane toad is, unless Crave means that atheists are being bigoted when they compare Catholics to a plague. Yes, it is bigoted when you compare a group of people to the plague. Crave needs to take a good long look in the mirror.

I'd really recommend reading Craves whole article – it's the most ironic mishmash of hypocrisy I have read in a long time. I only included a few select quotes.

Fallacious: Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent

The last part in Lisle’s series on logical fallacies is Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent. (I know these related fallacies as converse error and inverse error, respectively.) Rather to my surprise, he does a very good job of explaining the basic modal logic, modus ponens and modus tollens, and the fallacies themselves, and I won’t spend much time or space here doing what he already did.

In brief, modus tollens (“method of affirming” is the form of argument that runs like this:

	Formal logic	Example
1.	p → q	If I am an atheist, I do not believe in Yahweh.
2.	p	I am an atheist.
3.	∴q	Therefore, I do not believe in Yahweh.

The fallacy of affirming the consequent, or converse error, has the form if p then q; q; therefore p. This is clearly not valid (in the above example, we would get I do not believe in Yahweh, therefore I am an atheist—a conclusion that would surprise non-Abrahamic theists all over the world, not least a billion Hindus).

Similarly, modus tollens or “method of denying” makes another observation from the original premise (here, premise 2 is untrue but the argument is valid, if not sound):

	Formal logic	Example
1.	p → q	If I am an atheist, I do not believe in Yahweh.
2.	!q	I [don’t not] do believe in Yahweh.
3.	∴!p	Therefore, I am not an atheist.

Here, we are at danger of the inverse error, or denying the antecedent, which has the form if p then q; !p; therefore !q. Again the error is fairly clear; the example turns into If I am an atheist, I do not believe in Yahweh; I am not an atheist; therefore I do believe in Yahweh. (The Hindus would again be surprised.)

If my examples don’t make it perfectly clear, you can read Lisle’s article (I can’t believe I just said that), the Wikipedia articles, or find more examples via Google.

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What made me want to write anything about this post of Lisle’s is not his discussion of the fallacies per se, but rather his antiscientific examples, which are slipperier than usual. They demolish strawman positions of science, of course, but the lies are subtler than Lisle’s deceptions usually are. He uses two examples: One attacking the Big Bang theory of cosmology, and the other (of course) evolution. Let us consider the first one. Here’s how Lisle accuses rationalists of committing a converse error:

1. If the big bang is true, then we would expect to see a cosmic microwave background.
2. We do see a cosmic microwave background.
3. Therefore, the big bang must be true.

Lisle correctly points out that this is not a valid logical argument (This big bang supporter has failed to consider other possible causes for the cosmic microwave background). There is no error in this statement. Moreover, it is not an overt strawman as Lisle’s tend to be, in that the argument is in fact very similar to something a rationalist might say. The error, and this is what makes it slipperier, is that we do not present it as a logical argument. A logical argument is one that is fully determined by logic. Unfortunately, this is the province only of mathematicians (and philosophers, if you will, when they stick to things as simple as formal logic—which is really quite mathematical and has been formalised as Boolean algebra, underlying the principles of computers).

When a scientist does cite the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) as evidence for the Big Bang, what he’s actually saying is something like this:

1. Before the Big Bang theory was developed, no one suspected the CMB.
2. The theory was developed from other data, and predicted the CMB with a specific temperature of 2.725 Kelvin.
3. Therefore, If the big bang is true, then we would expect to see a cosmic microwave background.
4. No other proposed theory has predicted a CMB.
5. If the theory is not true, then we would not expect to see a CMB.
6. Even if there is a CMB, if the theory is not true, there’s no reason to expect the CMB to have a temperature of 2.725 K.
7. We do see a cosmic microwave background.
8. The CMB does have a temperature of 2.725 K.
9. If the theory had been false, there’s no reason why we should have found this.
10. Therefore, the big bang must be true.
11. When we say “must”, we do not mean that it is a logical necessity, but rather, it is overwhelmingly likely that the theory is ‘true’ in the scientific sense of being a good model for, or interpretation of, what really happened. It made a very specific prediction; it could have been false, but it wasn’t; and no other theory predicted these results.

This is the argument scientists actually make, and unlike Lisle’s version, it is not fallacious.

The philosopher might well say (as might Lisle) that this is a weaker statement than the pure logic above, and this is of course true…but it is an empirical argument, and when we analyse the natural world, it’s what we have to deal with. As empirical evidence goes, this is really a very, very strong case. (It is also, of course, much less than the full case for the Big Bang, which is supported by many lines of evidence.)

Imagine that a doctor listens to your description of your symptoms, predicts that If you have disease X, we should find that you have a fever of 103.2°F, and you turn out to have precisely that: Certainly something else might have caused the fever, but no other proposed hypothesis explains it, and even if some other prognosis did, why should it be exactly 103.2°F if the doctor was wrong? The CMB evidence for the Big Bang theory is of course vastly stronger, because no other astronomical prognosis ever predicted this cosmic background fever at all. A fairer analogy would predict something utterly surprising, straight out of House M.D.; perhaps an organ from an absorbed twin in just such a location…

I will not squander precious blog space by deconstructing Lisle’s attack on evolution in such detail: Suffice to say that it can be deconstructed in a completely analogous manner and is a strawman if precisely the same fibre. The same goes for the first of his alleged examples of inverse error (If we found dinosaurs and humans next to each other in the same rock formation, then they must have lived at the same time; We do not find them next to each other in the same rock formation; Therefore, they did not live at the same time).

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An few interesting asides can be made here:

It is frequently the case that empirical arguments are misunderstood and misconstrued as logical ones. p → q can be read as the logical p implies q, but we could also imagine an empirical, statistical reading: p suggests q. Causation does not imply correlation, but it does suggest it—it does not mean that we can conclude that there is a connection, but it does tell us that there might be one…if we can find that the relationship is systematic, and if we cannot poke holes in it.

I also think that a good case can be made that the scientific method in the traditional sense of hypothesis ⇒ successful test ⇒ theory relies precisely upon attempting modus tollens. Because no knowledge based on observation is absolute, we accept things as true if we attempt to devise ways of disproving them, but consistently fail. A theory is not a hypothesis that must logically be true; it is a hypothesis which makes predictions that are falsifiable in principle, but which consistently stand up to attempts to disprove them.

We may also note from Lisle’s examples that he never actually makes predictions. This is why “creation science” is not actually science: It never stands up and bares its heart to potential falsification. The only time creationists stand up and say Our Biblical view predicts X for any empirically observable fact X is when real science has already predicted or confirmed it. For the most part, creationists seem engaged in a running battle to make their views compatible with whatever scientific theory they cannot simply deny. Unfortunately, to paraphrase somebody presumably brilliant, A theory that excludes nothing, explains nothing. As I have asked before, taking my cue from Jerry Coyne, how would you know if you were wrong?

Fallacious: Strawman

When I first noticed that Dr. Lisle of Answers in Genesis had published an article on the strawman fallacy, I started snickering before I even read it – mostly because Lisle has committed repeated strawman fallacies in nearly all of his  other  fallacy  articles.

I will readily agree that some people are guilty of strawmanning the theist position. Sometimes it occurs in the context of the argument, and sometimes not. I think one of the biggest mistakes atheist commit is assuming that if you're taking to a self-identified Christian, that they believe a certain thing (such as the existence of hell, for example). Since Christians believe a huge variety of things, it's really important not to strawman your opponent by assuming they believe in even the most basic Christian doctrine – they might not.

So here we go my analysis of Dr. Lisles treatment of the strawman

The straw-man fallacy is when a person misrepresents his opponent's position and then proceeds to refute that misrepresentation (i.e., the "straw man") rather than what his opponent actually claims.
Here's an example:

"Creationists do not believe that animals change. But clearly, animals do change. So, creationists are mistaken."

I have never actually heard anyone say this. It appears that Dr. Lisle is creating a strawman of strawman arguments!

Such a misrepresentation could be unintentional; it could be that a particular evolutionist simply misunderstands what a creationist is teaching. Or the fallacy could be quite deliberate. That, of course, is a dishonest approach, yet it is quite common in origins debates.

It could also mean that the creationist misunderstand what the evolutionist is saying. Really, I've never heard an evolutionist claim this. Lisle says this is quite common, so I sure wish he would back up his claim that evolutionists actually claim this with a link. If I said, "creationists often strawman the atheist position by claiming 'atheists want to kill god with guns, but clearly you cannot kill what you do not believe in'" I would be making a strawman creationist strawman. Nice.

Even in cases where the misrepresentation is unintentional, there is still a degree of liability. After all, the arguer should have done sufficient research and studied what it is the opponent actually teaches. We would certainly be willing to overlook minor misunderstandings, particularly where a position is complex or nuanced (though the critic should still be corrected on the issue). However, there are a number of cases where the creationist position is so clear that misrepresentations by evolutionists are simply inexcusable. The following are a few examples.

Creationists believe in a lot of different things, so I am not entirely sure that the creationist position is "so clear".

If an evolutionist were to claim, "Creationists don't believe in science," this would be a straw-man fallacy. Creationists do believe in science. There are several full-time Ph.D. scientists on the Answers in Genesis staff. I've argued on this website, as in my book, that biblical creation is what makes science possible.

There is a footnote here: "It could also be an example of equivocation if the evolutionist conflates operational science with origins science or science with evolution."

It could also be an example of equivocation to equivocate the AiG "scientists" with real scientists. Sorry, but evolution is a science. I'd explain why this is the case for the umpteenth time,but I trust that my readers are intelligent enough to find reputable sources or search my site for an explanation. Suffice to say, Lisle offers no explanation as to why evolution is not science – instead, he simply asserts that it isn't and that an evolutionist is equivocating by saying it is. If evolution is a science, and creationists do not believe in evolution, than creationists do not believe in science with regard to evolution. It is a strawman to say that creationists do not believe in any science, but to take the words of someone making the claim "creationists do not believe in science" to mean literally that they do not believe in any science whatsoever is another strawman of strawmans.

Someone may claim, "Creationists believe in the fixity of species." However, this is certainly not the mainstream biblical creationist position. There may be a few individuals that hold to such a concept, but it is not the position advocated by most creationists. Thus, the generalization "creationists believe . . ." is false.

Okay, fair enough. It is better to say, "some creationists believe…" but we can at least say, "creationists believe in creation" without being false.

Likewise, the claim, "Creationists say there are no good mutations" is not representative of what biblical creationists teach. Generally, we say that mutations do not add brand-new, creative information to the genome and are thus in the "wrong direction" to make evolution happen. But we do believe that mutations can result in traits that increase survival value under certain conditions.

I'd really like some evidence that this is the entire claim being made. Who says these things? Without that information, this is yet another example of a strawman strawman.

"Answers in Genesis is pushing to get creation to be taught in public schools alongside evolution."

This is definitely false. Answers in Genesis as a ministry is not about political or legal change. Rather, we are about defending the Bible from the very first verse and teaching other Christians to do the same. Although this may eventually result in a changed political and legal situation, we do not (as a ministry) attempt to change laws or get involved in politics.

What? If you desire for creation to be taught in public schools, and you write articles explaining why creation should get taught in public schools, and you advocate in print and on the radio for creation to be taught in public schools, then you are pushing to get creation taught in public schools! This wordsmithing is blindingly transparent. When someone says, "X is pushing for Y" they are not necessarily saying, "X attempts to change laws of get involved in politics of Y". Once again, Dr. Lisle strawmans a strawman –poorly, I might add. It must be false that I am pushing for a rational examination of religion and alternative medicine because I am not about political or legal change – I have not attempted to change laws or get involved in politics either.

"The Bible teaches that the earth has literal pillars and corners and cannot be moved. It is clearly wrong."

This is a misrepresentation of Scripture and therefore constitutes a straw-man fallacy. The Bible uses figures of speech (just as we do when we say, "Tim is a pillar of the community") and poetic language at times. Referring to the cardinal directions as "corners" or the stability of the earth as not able to "be moved"
is not an error. It is entirely inappropriate for a critic to take the poetic sections of the Bible as literal—or the literal historical sections as poetic. Many objections against Scripture turn out to be straw-man fallacies.

The problem with this is that scripture can be represented in whichever way one sees fit. In order to claim that a given argument is a misrepresentation, one has to establish first that it is a misrepresentation rather than simply claiming it is so. Typically when people mention oddball Bible passages, it is not to show that the Bible is utterly wrong – it is to show that some of the Bible is metaphorical, some of it is literal, and people pretty much pick and choose which is which. Most of Biblical interpretation is a tautology – it means what it means when you want it to mean what it means, and means something else when you want to mean something else. I am reminded of a horoscope: it fits because you want it to fit, or it fits because you make it fit, or it does not fit and that is because it is metaphorical or was meant for three weeks ago or forgot to take into account your moon sign or when it said you'd be getting a lot of money it really meant your roommates were going to fill your dorm room with 10,000 sheets of crumpled up newspaper.

The claims that creationists believe in a flat earth, that we deny laws of nature, or that we take every verse of the Bible in a wooden literal sense are all baseless assertions.

Assertions that intelligent people who are arguing against creation do not typically make. I really wish Lisle would use an example of a strawman that is actually common.

Nonetheless, claiming that creationists believe in such things makes the creation position easier to discredit—but it is not a rationally cogent way to debate.

Claiming that evolutionists make such arguments makes the evolutionist position easier to discredit – but it is not a rationally cogent way to debate.

Creationists must also stay educated on both sides of the issue so that we do not commit the very same fallacy. Watch for misrepresentations of creation or other Christian teachings and be ready to point out that such straw-man arguments are fallacious; yet always do so with gentleness and respect.

Footnote: "This doesn't seem to be quite as much of an issue, perhaps because our culture is so saturated with the notion of particles-to-people evolution. Evolution is taught in virtually all public schools in the United States (and usually biblical creation is not); so, most creationists are aware of the evolution position. We should also note that all Christians have at one point been non-Christians; so, we can understand how the unbeliever thinks about things. However, non-Christians have difficulty thinking like Christians (even if they were brought up in the church) because the crucial issues require the enlightening of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, the unbeliever cannot understand spiritual issues apart from God's power"

I think that some Christians who do not accept evolution understand evolution, but I have been to several creationist seminars in which the speaker clearly did not understand evolution – such as the case with people like Ray comfort or Brad Harrub, who believe evolution means a "dog can change into a fern". AiG has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not understand inference or value the scientific method – given that they have repeatedly claimed evolution is not a science.

Perhaps this last bit would be slightly truer if all Christians, while being non-Christian, were adults who were familiar with argumentation and apologetics. Most Christians, however, are Christians from an extremely young age – when their capacity to reason is not fully developed. The fact that all Christians were once non-Christians does not support the conclusion that Christians generally can understand how unbelievers think. Lisle leaves us with tautology – we don't get it because we don't believe. My arguments for rationality would not be stronger if I said, "Christians have difficulty thinking like rationalists because the crucial issues require the enlightening of rationality."

Fallacious: bifurcation

Let's go through another of Dr. Lisle's "fallacies" on Answers in Genesis, a fallacy Lisle calls, "bifurcation". Once again, this is a great example of, "how to commit fallacies without realizing it" and unfortunately for Lisle, the fallacy-committing is right out in the open.

A person commits the fallacy of bifurcation when he or she claims that there are only two mutually exclusive possibilities—when, in fact, there is a third option. For this reason the fallacy is also known as the either-or fallacy and the false dilemma.

Not quite. Bifurcation – more commonly known as the false dilemma, is an unsound argument in which the premise is false due to logical reasons. It typically takes this form:

1. Either P or Q
   
2. P
   
3. Therefore not Q
   

The premise, either P or Q, is logically sound if it is a contradictory proposition – only exactly one can be true. It is logically unsound if the propositions are contrary – that of the two propositions, at most one will be true, but both could be false. We'll use Lisle's example, "either the traffic light is red, or it is green". Lisle says that this is obviously false, because the light could be yellow.

In fact, this is not the only option – the light could be yellow. Or, the lights could be malfunctioning, and none of them could be on. Or, someone could have replaced the yellow bulb with a purple one. Or… you get the point. The example above is an example of confusing a contradictory proposition with a contrary proposition. If we said, "the light is either red or not red" we would have a logically sound contradictory premise.

As another example, Lisle says:

A more realistic example is this:

"Either you have faith or you are rational."

This commits the fallacy of bifurcation, since there is a third possibility: we can have faith and be rational. In fact, faith is essential in order to have rationality (e.g., to make sense of laws of logic).

It is unclear from this context whether or not this is an example of a fallacy. What does Dr. Lisle mean by "faith"? Whether or not this is a fallacy is entirely contingent on that definition. I tried to find a place in which Lisle defines faith, but instead only found articles about how logic can't exist without the Bible. So by "faith" does he mean, "trust in the Bible"? I don't really know. 

If I define "faith" as, "persistent belief without evidence and despite contrary evidence" then there is no fallacy if we're talking about some specific belief. Rational people do not persist in belief even in the face of contrary evidence.

At the same time, I know a lot of people who are rational about some things and apply standard of evidence to other questions besides that of their god, and so these people can be said to both have faith and be rational. Once again, when left without context, we cannot say one way or the other whether or not this is a fallacy. But, I suppose I can buy that it is.

"Either the universe operates in a law-like fashion, or God is constantly performing miracles."

This is also fallacious because a third possibility exists: the universe operates in a law-like fashion most of the time, and God occasionally performs a miracle.

Assuming that "miracle" is defined as "When god causes the universe to not operate in a law-like fashion" than I can buy that this is a false dilemma.

Sometimes the origins debate is framed as "faith vs. reason," "science or religion," or the "Bible vs. science." These are all false dilemmas. Faith and reason are not contrary. They go well together (since all reasoning presupposes a type of faith).

Lisle has not demonstrated that reasoning presupposes faith, and thus I do not find that this premise supports his conclusion that these are false dilemmas.

Likewise, science and religion (the Christian religion to be specific) are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is the Christian system that makes sense of science and the uniformity of nature. Likewise the debate should never be framed as "the Bible vs. science," since the procedures of science are fully compatible with the Bible. In fact, science is based on the biblical worldview; science requires predictability in nature, which is only made possible by the fact that God upholds the universe in a consistent way that is congenial to human understanding. Such predictability just wouldn't make sense in a "chance" universe.

Holy crap, did you see that false dilemma there?

"Either god upholds the universe in a constant way, or science can't work"

Granted, it's implied, but since Lisle says, "The fallacy of bifurcation maybe more difficult to spot when the person merely implies that only two options exist, rather than explicitly stating this," it sees okay to point out implied instances of the false dilemma.

The whole rest of the paragraph is entirely unsupported by anything. The Bible says a lot of things that are not compatible with science. I think one of my favorite examples of Biblical science is in Genesis, when Jacob puts spotted sticks next to his flock of cattle and causes spotted or striped offspring because his flock was forced to look at the sticks:

Genesis 30:37-39 - "Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted."

I agree that science and religion don't have to be mutually exclusive, but parts of the Christian religion are mutually exclusive to science. Is Lisle saying that both science and the Bible require predictability in nature? I would contend otherwise – god breaking the laws of nature means that in the biblical worldview, nature is not predictable. God could at any time cause something contrary and unpredictable to happen.

"The Bible teaches that 'in Christ all things hold together.' But we now know that the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are what hold the universe together."

This is an example of the fallacy of bifurcation because the critic has implicitly assumed that either (1) God holds the universe together, or (2) gravity and electromagnetism do. However, these are not exclusive. "Gravity" and "electromagnetism" are simply the names we give to the way in which God holds the universe together. Laws of nature are not a replacement for God's power. Rather, they are an example of God's power.

So, either the laws of nature are a replacement for god's power, or they are examples of god's power? I smell another false dilemma.

"You must not really believe that God is going to answer your request for healing; otherwise you would not have gone to the doctor."

The implicit false dilemma here is that either the doctor will help the person or God will. But why can't it be both? God can use human actions as part of the means by which He accomplishes His will.

One point for Lisle.

On the other hand, in some situations there really are only two options; and it is not fallacious to say so. "Either my car is in the garage, or it is not the case that my car is in the garage" commits no fallacy. When Jesus states, "He who is not with Me is against Me" (Matthew 12:30, NAS), He has not committed any fallacy because God is in a position to tell us that there is no third ("neutral") option. (An attempt to be neutral toward God is sinful and, therefore, non-neutral.)⁷ The key to spotting fallacies of bifurcation is to watch for cases when only two options are presented (either explicitly or implicitly) and to consider carefully whether or not there is a third possibility.

…

…?

…!?

Oh! So whatever god says is right, even if it seems to be an example of a false dichotomy, because god is in a position to tell us that there are no other options. There are other options: your god is a Bronze Age myth. Sorry, but logically this is a fallacy, even if your god says it's not. You really can't just declare immunity from logic because god says so. Why does the other option have to be "neutral"? Have we established that "neutrality" toward god is a sin? How about an infant, who has no concept of god yet? Is that infant "against god"? What about people who have never heard of the Christian religion?

I officially declare myself to be perfect and always right. I say that you either have faith or reason. I am in the position to say so because this is my blog. So there. What, I can't claim this because I'm not god? Actually, I am god. Just try to disprove it.

Fallacious: appeal to authority

I just love Dr. Lisle's series on logical fallacies over at Answers in Genesis because they are perfect examples of how some people can completely misunderstand fallacies while simultaneously making both the fallacy as inanely described and the actual fallacy as correctly described. I'm going to go over each and every one of the fallacies in his list and dismantle his treatment where dismantling is deserved. Today we're going to discuss the "Faulty Appeal to Authority".

I thought that fellow blogger Bing over at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes did a delicious job with his treatment of this particular piece of Lisledrivel*, so I am not going to reinvent the wheel – merely expand upon his treatment and bring up a few points I think he missed (probably for the sake of not having an extensively long blog post). First, Lisle defines "faulty appeal to authority".

The faulty appeal to authority is, in a way, the opposite of the ad hominem fallacy. Whereas the ad hominem fallacy denies a claim based on the person making it, the faulty appeal to authority endorses a claim simply based on the person making it. Essentially, the faulty appeal to authority is the argument that a claim is true simply because someone else believes it.

This is not quite correct. In philosophy literature, there is such a thing as an "appeal to authority" fallacy. A "faulty appeal to authority" is a very uncommon way of phrasing this, and I could not find this particular fallacy phrased this way in any of my fallacy websites or books on logic.

An appeal to authority is a fallacy in which someone makes the argument that a particular proposition is correct because the proposition is given by a source that is commonly regarded as authoritative. The argument goes like this:

1. Source A says P
   
2. Source A is authoritative
   
3. Therefore P
   

Appeals to authority are quite important in informal logic because individuals cannot be experts on all things. Instead, we rely on the judgment of individuals who are experts in their particular field. The problem arises when an "expert" is not actually an expert in the field for which the claim is being made, or if the argument is treated as deductive logic, i.e. source says p, source is an authority, and therefore p must be true. In other words, an appeal to authority is a fallacy if the "authority" is not actually an authority in that area or if the authority is treated as infallible. Citing an actual authority on a given subject makes the proposition more likely to be true but does not guarantee its truth. An appeal to authority can never guarantee that a claim is true, but if the authority is a legitimate expert on the subject then it can make the claim more likely to be true.

The basic structure of the argument is this:

Bill believes X.

Therefore, X is true.

Of course, it is almost never stated this explicitly. Often, the person to whom the appeal is made is considered highly esteemed for one reason or another. But the truthfulness of the claim at issue is not necessarily relevant to the popularity of the individual making the claim.

Actually, Lisle is missing a necessary part of the basic structure of this argument/fallacy – Bill's status as an authority, or the second premise in my example above.

In the origins debate, the faulty appeal is often to someone who is considered an expert on a particular topic—a scientist or perhaps a theologian. For example, "Dr. Bill has a PhD in biology, and he believes in evolution." The unstated conclusion is that evolution must therefore be true or is at least likely to be true. But such an argument is fallacious. After all, we could equally point out that "Dr. Dave also has a PhD in biology, and he believes in biblical creation." The fact that other experts on the topic draw the opposite conclusion should reveal the vacuous nature of the evolutionist's argument.

It is unclear from the context of this argument that the unstated conclusion is that "evolution must therefore be true". To cry fallacy before the conclusion is given is to assume the conclusion before one is made. If the arguer in this case claimed, "Dr. Bill has a Ph.D in biology and believes in evolution, therefore evolution must be true", then one could claim that this is a fallacy. Otherwise, the statement is just that – a preposition. For all we know, the arguer intended to go on to say, "therefore some biologists believe in evolution". To cry fallacy before an argument is made is to jump the gun. It's really too bad that, "assuming the conclusion of an argument before the conclusion is given" isn't a fallacy.

Another example would be this:

"Jim has a doctorate in theology, and he says it's okay to believe in evolution and the Bible."

Again, we could certainly find many qualified theologians who would state the exact opposite. While it is okay to consider what a theologian has to say about the Bible, it is infinitely more important to consider what the Bible actually states!

The problem with this is that people disagree on "what the bible actually states". What Jim says about the Bible appears in this instance to be considering what a theologian has to say about the Bible. Again, we're given no conclusion, so without that context we cannot assume that the person mentioning Jim intends to say that because Jim believes in evolution and the Bible, that evolution and the Bible are more likely to be true or are irrefutably true.

If an expert on U.S. law claimed that the Constitution does not contain the phrase "We the people," would that make it so? We could easily refute his claim by simply reading from an actual copy of the Constitution. The fact that he is an expert does not override the evidence.

I think part of being an "expert" on U.S. law involves knowing the first words of the Constitution. Though, I will grant that what people say, whether experts or not, does not override evidence.

Next, Lisle explains that not all appeals to authority are faulty, and says that it is legitimate to consider the opinion of an expert. Obviously, I agree with this, but here is where Lisle continues to divorce himself from actual logic:

1. Appealing to an expert in an area that is not his area of expertise. Our hypothetical Dr. Bill may indeed have a PhD in biology—and that qualifies him to say something about how organisms function today. But does knowledge of how things work today necessarily imply knowledge of how things came to be? This is a separate question. The experiments Dr. Bill has done and the observations he has made have all taken place in the present world. He has no more direct observations of the ancient past than anyone else today.¹ The question of origins is a history question that deals with worldviews. It is not really a biology question, and, so, Dr. Bill's opinion on the topic of origins isn't necessarily any more qualified than any other opinion.
   

There is also a very important footnote here, "For some reason, it is common for people to think that paleontologist and geologists study the past. But this is not so. Rocks and fossils exist in the present (otherwise we wouldn't have access to them). Although there is nothing wrong with speculating about past events (e.g., how fossils or rocks formed) and then testing the plausibility of such models with experiments in the present, we should keep in mind that the past is never actually observable or open to scientific investigation

Okay. For some reason it is common for people to think that historians and theologeans study the past. But this is not so. Historical documents, the Bible, and all of its associated artifacts, scrolls and what-not exist in the present. The past is never observable or open to scientific investigation. Therefore, if biologists are not qualified to say things about origins, neither are theologians or historians qualified to say things about origins.

Truth has nothing to do with people's worldviews, and the question of origins is most emphatically not a question of history (which by Lisle's own argument is unreliable) or worldview. If I come home from work and find a large pile of dog shit on the floor, I don't need history and worldview to come to the conclusion that it was my dog, alone in my apartment all day, who shat on my floor rather than a shitgoblin. I can use inductive reasoning to arrive at the most probable conclusion.

1. 
   
   
   Failure to consider the worldview of the expert and how this might affect his interpretation of the data. We all have a world-and-life view—a philosophy that guides our understanding of the universe. When we interpret scientific and historical evidence, we use this philosophy to draw conclusions.² The fact that Dr. Bill believes in evolution means that he is predisposed to interpret the evidence in a particular way. (My point is not to fault him for this; everyone has biases. Rather, we should simply be mindful of what his biases are). A creationist with the same credentials might draw a very different conclusion from the same data. So, while I may put confidence in what Dr. Bill says about the structure of a particular protein that he has studied under the microscope, his bias against biblical creation means it would be unwise for me to trust his opinions on questions of origins.
   
   

   Footnote: "Some evolutionists might claim that they have no philosophy—that our interpretations of evidence should be "neutral" and unbiased. But this is a philosophy in and of itself, albeit a very bad one since it is self-refuting."
   
   

   
   
   

I'll just quote Bing here: "The truth of the matter is independent of what the researcher's beliefs about it are. Either something did happen or didn't happen. The difference between the scientific worldview and that of Answers in Genesis is science starts with a null hypothesis, gathers evidence, comes up with the best explanation and then tests it again, discarding what doesn't work and keeping what does. You write articles complaining about how scientists are playing unfair because they are pantsing you."

The scientific method and skepticism are not worldviews. They are tools. Bill probably also has a "bias" against any of the other religious creation stories. Similarly, I suppose we should fault Dr. Lisle for having a bias against Native American creation stories. A creationist who believes in Biblical creation means he is predisposed to interpret evidence in a particular way. A creationist has a bias against evolution, so that means it would be unwise for me to trust his opinions on questions of origins.

The point is this: how did the biologist arrive at his conclusions about evolution? Hopefully he arrived at them using the scientific method.

How exactly is interpreting evidence using the most neutral and unbiased eye self-refuting? No explanation is offered.

1. Treating a fallible expert as infallible. We should also keep in mind that even experts do not know everything. They can make mistakes even in their own field. Some new discovery may cause a scientist to change his mind about something that he thought he knew. So, at best, appealing to an expert yields only a probable conclusion. It would be fallacious to argue that something definitely must be true simply because a (fallible) expert believes it.
   

I've never met a scientist who treats the opinions of any expert as infallible. This is a deliberate strawman. I do, however, meet creationists who treat the Bible, theologians, or their pastor as infallible. Also, the fact that the body of science is amenable to new evidence is an example of the strength of science, not a weakness. Imagine where we would be if science were unchangeable.

Lisle is absolutely correct that appealing to an expert leads only to a probable conclusion, but this is true about everything – there are no guarantees.

Of course, if the expert had knowledge of everything and never lied, then there would be no fallacy in accepting his statements as absolutely true. In fact, it would be absurd to not do so under those circumstances. The Bible claims to be such an infallible source—a revelation from the God who knows everything and cannot lie.³ Thus, there is no fallacy in appealing to Scripture as absolutely authoritative. Some evolutionists have mistakenly accused creationists of committing the faulty appeal to authority on this very issue.

See how Lisle commits the fallacy of the appeal to authority here? This is quite ironic. Just because the Bible claims to be an infallible source does not mean it is, any more than Bill claiming to be an infallible source means he is an infallible source. We have not "mistakenly" claimed that this is an appeal to authority – it is a primary example of the appeal to authority – treating a fallible expert (the Bible) as infallible.

Another type of faulty appeal to authority is the appeal to the majority. This is when a person argues that a claim must be true simply because most people believe it. But, of course, just because a majority of people believe something does not make it so. History is replete with examples of when the majority was totally wrong. Truth is not decided by a vote, after all.

Creationists do this all the time. I really wish Lisle would provide examples of when creationists commit fallacies alongside "evolutionist" fallacies.

The appeal to the majority is often combined with the appeal to an expert—an appeal to the majority of experts. Evolutionists often commit this double-fallacy; they try to support their case by pointing out:

"The vast majority of scientists believe in evolution. (Therefore, evolution is very likely to be true)."

However, simply adding two fallacies together does not form a good argument! Again, we could point to many historical examples of cases where the scientific consensus was dead wrong. Yet, people

As with a single expert, it is not fallacious to consider the opinion of a group of experts. However, as before, we should consider whether they are qualified in the issue under investigation, be mindful of their worldview and biases, and keep in mind that they are fallible people with finite knowledge.

So in other words, we should ignore the majority of experts if they disagree with the ultimate authority figure – my particular brand of god. Who cares if they start with the null hypothesis, gather information, test, come up with the best hypothesis, repeat, repeat, repeat, change their minds if different evidence is presented which is sufficient to contradict prior conclusions. They are unqualified because they are ignoring the infallible Bible. Is Lisle really making this argument? Yup:

I believe that God gave people different interests and is pleased when they study hard and develop expertise on some aspect of His creation. It is commendable to esteem the opinion of experts, provided that we are discerning and never regard fallible human opinions above (or equal to) the authoritative Word of God.

*I will also throw in a few ad hominems just for fun. In case you're reading this Dr. Lisle, the ad hominems make for more entertaining reading. Screaming that they are not a logical argument is pointless. This is like me saying, "There is a cat." And you saying, "A cat is not a verb!" It will not make you look more intelligent or learned.