The purpose of this thread is to deal with a common logical fallacy that is used to argue against faith.
This thread is ONLY for discussing this logically false argument and NOT whether atheism or deism or last-thursdayism is a logically valid position.
The argument usually goes something like this:
- If you believe in something without evidence, then you should believe in any other thing without evidence.
- There is no evidence for invisible pink unicorns.
∴ therefore, you should believe in invisible unicorns or admit that you cannot believe in something without evidence.
As a counter example we can propose alien life in the universe:
- If you believe in something without evidence, then you should believe in any other thing without evidence.
- There is no evidence for alien life elsewhere in the universe.
∴ therefore, you should believe in alien life elsewhere in the universe or admit that you cannot believe in something without evidence.
Curiously, this does not seem as absurd as the belief in invisible pink unicorns, in fact it seems quite possible -
even if it may never be possible to prove that alien life exists.
Then we can discuss the roll scientific hypothesis before there is evidence to test the hypothesis. For instance when it was first discovered that the rotation of distant galaxies did not match the theoretical rotation rates, one hypothetical solution was to propose dark matter: something invisible that caused more gravity than the current calculations used. Then when they ran the calculations it appeared that there has to be waaay more dark matter than all the kinds of matter that we know about. Somewhere around 80% of matter needs to be dark matter to make the equations work. This seems like a pretty silly concept to believe without any evidence.
Today it seems very rational to believe in dark matter, even though there is still no "smoking gun" evidence of an invisible mass, and this is because it matches the current scientific theories.
So there is a spectrum of concepts that are not based on known objective evidence, and they run from silly to likely to serious, and the reason there is this spectrum of different results when they all should be as silly as the invisible pink unicorn if the argument was valid is because the argument is flawed.
The fallacy is one of :
quote:
Definition:
The size of the sample is too small to support the conclusion.
Examples:
1. Fred, the Australian, stole my wallet. Thus, all Australians are thieves. (Of course, we shouldn't judge all Australians on the basis of one example.)
2. I asked six of my friends what they thought of the new spending restraints and they agreed it is a good idea. The new restraints are therefore generally popular.
Proof:
Identify the size of the sample and the size of the population, then show that the sample size is too small. Note: a formal proof would require a mathematical calculation. This is the subject of probability theory. For now, you must rely on common sense.
And of course "common sense" means referral to your world view, your subjective opinion of the "rightness" of concepts.
As we have seen there are similar samples that do not have the same degree of improbability as the
ad hoc invention of invisible pink unicorns, so this sufficiently demonstrates that comparing this concept to other concepts of belief without evidence is indeed a hasty generalization.
Consider this analogy:
- If you believe you can see light waves of one wavelength, then you should believe you can see light waves of any wavelength.
- You cannot see infrared lightwaves.
∴ therefore, you should believe you can see infrared light or admit that you cannot believe that you can see light of one wavelength.
This is patently false, and yet this is the same form of argument as the one that uses invisible pink unicorns (or whatever
ad hoc fantasy comes to mind).
QED
Enjoy.
we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
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