@Randem

I often find myself pointing out logical fallacies to people who use them. While unfortunately it is often in vain, I continue to hope that people will base their arguments on fact and logic rather than emotion, faith, or tradition.

This list of the Top 20 Logical Fallacies gives a good overview of the most common abuses of logic, such as:

4. Argument from final Consequences Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves. For example: God must exist, because otherwise life would have no meaning.

7. Confusing currently unexplained with unexplainable Because we do not currently have an adequate explanation for a phenomenon does not mean that it is forever unexplainable, or that it therefore defies the laws of nature or requires a paranormal explanation. An example of this is the “God of the Gapsâ” strategy of creationists that whatever we cannot currently explain is unexplainable and was therefore an act of god.

16. Straw Man Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.

An interesting detail I noticed as I was reading the list, is that a large number of the examples dealt with religion. I am not surprised, since the majority of my experience with logical fallacy has come in debates with religious people.

Let me clarify that I, personally, am not against a person believing whatever they choose to believe. And I’ll happily discuss the merits of any belief system. But the moment rules and beliefs and proofs start to be passed down under a logical fallacy, I’m done listening.

[Update]
How fitting that after I posted this, I would stumble onto John Scalzi’s Creation Museum Report, including over 100 photos from the Creation Museum, many of which are filled with logical fallacies, but none more obviously than this one, in which one commenter even called it by name, “Begging the Non-Sequitur”.

Tags: religion

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 8:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.