Logic and evolution
Re-visiting a post I read some time back — Bill Keezer’s take on the logical fallacies involved in the evolution-vs.-anything-else debate.
Right Questions, Wrong Conclusions
Question: Is there a God?
My Answer: Yes.
Question: Prove it.
Answer: It can’t be proven.
Conclusion: If it can’t be proven then it doesn’t exist.
Angngt! NOT!Other Conclusion: Whether it can be proven or not, I believe He exists.
Secondary Conclusion: If He exists, then He is all powerful and made everything.
Angngt! NOT!For the first mistake, failure to prove existence does not constitute proof of non-existence. For the second mistake, assumption of properties does not make them so.
Encapsulated in the two mistakes above is the essence of the ID/Evolutionism debate. The one side denies God for lack of objective proof, and the other side and attempts to justify their assumptions with science. The difficulty with both sides is that belief in God neither requires Him to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, nor does it negate anything that has been demonstrated by science and the scientific method.
One of the problems with the “debate” as Mr. Keezer casts it is that there are two arguments taking place simultaneously.
The first argument: Is there a god? (Possible answers are yes, no, and not provable either way.)
The second argument: Is there evolution? (Same possible answers.)
Many people dive in to the second argument as if it had any bearing on the first. This is usually their first of many logical errors.
In my most recent post on evolution, it’s interesting to look at the logic used in the comments:
From “conservativation”:
The absence of evidence IS evidence of absence! To assert otherwise about this statement in the general is absurd.
Not in the strictly logical sense. We can infer absence from an absence of evidence, however…. Every now and then we read about some animal that has been discovered after being thought to be extinct for some extended period. During the time the animal was believed extinct, there was no evidence that it continued to exist. No one argues that the animal did not, in fact, exist during that interval, only to reappear as soon as someone discovered evidence of its existence.
He then, in an attempt to class evolution as a religion, asks:
Two Questions:
1. Are there ANY assumptions, any at all, regardless how “big or small†that must be made to close gaps in evolution theory?
2. Is the “accepted†theory of evolution what you WANT to believe? In other words is there an emotional investment in the acceptance of it?
Answer: Irrelevant. The same questions can be asked of any field of science. There are assumptions that are made throughout science. The biggest assumption: what we observe around us is real, and not something created for us by the computer while we’re trapped in the Matrix.
Also, what we want to believe and what is actually so are two different things. There are probably more than a few scientists who wish Newton’s laws of motion were right in every detail, and that there had been no need for Einstein’s theories. John Derbyshire had an article a while back on just what it would mean to teach “all sides” in science classes.Â
Why stop with Intelligent Design (the theory that life on earth has developed by a series of supernatural miracles performed by the God of the Christian Bible, for which it is pointless to seek any naturalistic explanation)? Why not teach the little ones astrology? Lysenkoism? Orgonomy? Dianetics? Reflexology? Dowsing and radiesthesia? Forteanism? Velikovskianism? Lawsonomy? Secrets of the Great Pyramid? ESP and psychokinesis? Atlantis and Lemuria? The hollow-earth theory? Does the president have any idea, does he have any idea, how many varieties of pseudoscientific flapdoodle there are in the world? If you are going to teach one, why not teach the rest? Shouldn’t all sides be “properly taught”? To give our kids, you know, a rounded picture? Has the president scrutinized Velikovsky’s theories? Can he refute them? Can you?
All of these theories had adherants who not only thought they might be true, but wanted them to be true. Many still do. (Dianetics, to its credit, gave up trying to be a science when it kept failing tests, and became a religion.)
Whether people want them to be true has no bearing on whether they are, in fact, true.
“conservativation” then jumped on the use of the word “seems” in the quoted article:
…it seems that every gap in our current explanatory model has a Tiktaalik waiting to fill it, whether it comes from the Canadian tundra or a DNA microarray.
and responded:
The words “it seems†can be said differently, like “I believe†which is really what the author is saying.Â
I’m willing to go along with that, but let’s look at what the author is saying “I believe” about. Let’s make the substitution:
…I believe that every gap in our current explanatory model has a Tiktaalik waiting to fill it, whether it comes from the Canadian tundra or a DNA microarray.
Of course this is a statement of belief. It can’t be proven because every gap has not yet been filled, or even discovered. Notice what he’s not saying “I believe” about. He’s not saying “I believe” that Tiktaalik is an intermediate form. He’s not saying “I believe” that other traces of evolutionary history have been discovered. Where he wanders into belief is when he suggests that other gaps – other currently unexplained problems – will eventually be explained to the satisfaction of all but the most perversely adamant of holdouts.
Logically, we have no proof that every gap can be filled.  At least in terms of deductive logic, this is so. Inductively, we can observe that any number of gaps have been filled, either with observed life forms (Tiktaalik, Archaeopteryx, the Therapsid sequence, Ictheostega), or with plausible descriptions of small steps (the blood-clotting cascade, the eye, the kidney). Those who are pinning their hopes on an unbridgeable gap keep getting disappointed. It may only seem the trend will continue, but it’s a pretty strong seeming.
Hal falls back on calling names, a big-time material fallacy of relevance.
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