Fallacy Friday: Post Hoc

Another Friday, another fallacy. This time we examine the confusing of correlation and causation, more formally named post hoc ergo propter hoc (latin for "after this, therefore because of this").

Gambler's Fallacy
The logical fallacy is committed when we fall into laziness and leap to conclusions about what caused something to happen. Have you ever blown on a pair of dice before you tossed them, and they come up with exactly what you wanted? If you were to conclude that your breath of "luck" made you roll sevens, then you would be guilty of Post Hoc reasoning.

And we've all done this at one time or another. You got up on the wrong side of the bed, and spilled your drink at lunchtime. Or you take an Advil and three hours later your headache goes away. Or you catch a cold and stay home from work, and two weeks later you're better. A lot of us jump to conclusions all the time, mostly because it's easier than checking all possibilities of causation.

Imagine an ancient tribe frantically ripping out the hearts of their human sacrifices to appease the gods and stop the phenomenon we now call a solar eclipse. The end of the eclipse would prove to them the efficacy of their actions, and year after year, they'd be cutting out hearts. You should be able to see here where the connection can be made with superstitious thinking, namely in the form prayer.


Close Your Eyes and Make A Wish
Suppose you ask your deity for a new car, and a month later you get a raise at work, allowing you to purchase one. Rather than ponder other factors, such as your job performance or your company's motives, you make the leap and confuse correlation with causation: the prayer caused the car. Or you lose your keys, so you ask Baby Jesus to help you. Then you go looking for your keys, and find them under the couch. Prayer must have worked, right?

Simply following sequentially from an event isn't enough to adequately say that it was the direct cause of that event. Shit happens. Consequences happen. Lucky charms and little stupid personal rituals all follow from this fallacy. It's the reason for any religious ritual or rite.

You do a funny little dance and it starts to rain. You're amazed so the next day you do it again, but it doesn't rain. What happened? Were you not doing it right? You alter your dance a bit, maybe bowing to the sky every other step. It worked! Now, do that any time you want it to rain. What's that? Didn't work again? Try something else. Maybe just wait till April, then try again.

Or you get a rather large wart on your finger. Based on a story your great grandmother tells you, you cut a potato in half, rub it on the wart and then bury it under the light of a full moon. Over the next month your wart shrinks and eventually vanishes. How right your elders were about the cure!

You get the point on coincidental correlation by now, I'm sure. We've come a long way from the time of the ancient tribes; we know better. Sequences don't establish a probability of causality any more than correlations do. If you want to know the real cause for something, do a controlled, scientific study. And GET OFF YOUR KNEES!

-STA

Arguing From The Bubble

Recently, I was in a pseudo-debate with a Christian on an internet forum. After enduring several claims of "fact", appeals to emotion, and general lack of cohesive reasoning from said Christian, I reached the conclusion that he was either A) too ignorant--and too blissfully therein--to ever understand his fallacies, or B) he was simply disregarding logic and formal rules of argument for the, pardon the pun, hell of it. I hope the latter wasn't the case, but even the former brings me grief to consider. I also hope I planted at least one seed of doubt in him. Whatever the case, it spurred me to make this post.


Does Not Compute
Einstein once said, "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." My Christian opponent had an expansive imagination. He didn't (or chose to discard) the basic principals of logical reasoning, and I'm sure other apologists don't either.

Logic, as the study of the rules of correct thinking have shown, is fundamentally necessary for an argument to hold any weight or be taken as true in any useful sense. For it to remain consistent, an argument must provide set of statements, one of which is the conclusion, and the rest as premises supporting the conclusion. In other words, a statement along with the evidence that supports it. If your conclusion isn't held up by evidence, you've committed some kind of logical fallacy; you've broken the laws of logic. I cover these fallacies on this blog every Friday, so I need not go into them now.

Above I stated that most apologists don't hold to these principals, though I'm sure they all disagree. One might wonder how this could be possible. How could any religion survive for centuries if they aren't logically sound? The answers to these questions cover an extremely large amount of topics that I am not qualified to discuss (biology, psychology, sociology, history, etc.), and besides that it isn't the purpose of my blog. A more simple and purposeful answer: they are.


Superman, Hands Down
Yeah. Some religions are logically sound, but (you really didn't think there wasn't a kicker, right?) they are only sound internally; on the inside. Here's what I mean: If, for the sake of this example, Jesus really was the son of God...

Sorry, I nearly passed out just thinking of the number of leaps of faith that would take to believe. Anyway:

-If Jesus really was the son of God, then walking on water would be simple. He could do it.

-If the Hindu gods really drink soma, the moon would naturally wane because the gods are drinking away some of its properties.

-The angel Moroni must have told Joe Smith the truth, because the angel was from God, and angels can't lie.

-If Adam and Eve were oblivious to their nakedness, then eating from the Tree would indeed open their eyes.

All of the above logically follow from the premise. The problem is of course that the premises must be rejected outright, or at least backed up by something that, in turn is backed up by another thing, which is in turn backed up by another, which is itself backed up by another--how ever many or few steps this takes--all with sound reasoning. This is the labyrinth of logic that theists get lost in.

The point here is that yes, you can argue just fine within the bubble of your religion. This same principle is the reason why Trekkies can argue to the point of exhaustion regarding the layout of the Enterprise, or the inner workings of hyperdrive or whatever the fuck it is. The same goes for arguing a case for Neville Longbottom fulfilling the prophesy instead of Harry Potter, or what would happen if Spiderman fought Superman. The point is: THE SHIT AIN'T REAL.


A Ship of Corn Flakes Upon a Milk Sea
I don't give a fuck if you can convince yourself and your 8-year old daughter that humanity is suffering, and the only way to not suffer for the rest of eternity is to find Jesus. You must still show how any of that shit makes logical sense IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!

I'm sorry for this rather blunt way of putting things, but this stuff really gets in my craw. Of course it's fine to argue and speculate on who would win in a fight between superheroes, or even what would happen if Jesus came back. The problems arise when you take these fanciful arguments as truth without backing up their underlying proposition. Even worse when you start taking actions against others for not agreeing.

It is in the best interest of your children, your countrymen, and yourself to learn to think critically, and learn how to logically get from A to B.


-STA

STA Movie Review – Inherit the Wind

This weekend I was able to watch the award-winning film 'Inherit the Wind', a 1960's movie directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Dick York, and Gene Kelly.

It's an amazing movie; one surprising for it's time. It's based on a play of the same name, which in turn is based on the famous 1925 Scopes 'Monkey' Trial, in which John Scopes was convicted for teaching Darwin's evolution of man to his high school science class. This was against a Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of anything besides creationism. The film isn't a documentary of that trial, nor does it accurately portray the events therein (though it did use some lines from the actual transcript of the trial). Nevertheless, it does its job at pointing out the absurdity of the now stricken Tennessee law and similar laws which try to arrest freedom of thought.

A Beautiful Mind
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." This embodies the, forgive the term, 'spirit' of the film. The school teacher on trial was accused of breaking a law that prohibited thought. All he was trying to do was to show his class that there are ways to question, and that you shouldn't be afraid to at least ask.

This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. Where religion is content at saying, "I don't know how this happened, it must have been God!", science looks for a way to explain the phenomenon. Positing "God" as an answer is no answer at all; you've answered a mystery with another mystery. What is God? What are its properties? How do we know?

Children of the Corn
Religion--all religion--uses its mind-control to hijack our thought processes, and try to legislate or otherwise prohibit, any dissenting thoughts. Jesus supposedly said that being angry with someone was equivalent to murdering them, and looking lustfully at another person was just the same as rape. Thoughts aren't crimes; actions are. While Jesus didn't mean that we should put people to death for simply thinking about murder, his views represent a naïve morality that builds a doctrine where those thought crimes should result in eternal punishment.

The bible, and indeed its god's religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is systematically engineered in such a way as to hinder critical thinking and questioning. You are not to question, but to trust. You must practice faith--accepting something as true without questioning it. Questioning is what brought me out of the fog of Christianity and into the "light" of individualistic critical thought. And this is exactly what the character in the movie, and his real-life counterpart, aimed to do.

The film depicted several scenes of the hatred, bigotry, and ignorance associated with religious thought. In one such scene, an angry mob marches down the street, holding signs that read, "Down with Darwin", "Don't Monkey With Us", and "Atheists Go Back to Hell" while singing hymns. In another, a preacher damns his own daughter because she does not agree with his ideals. I realize that these are fictional scenes for a Hollywood movie, but they nevertheless portray the contempt and ignorance that religion fosters.

I, Robot
As geneticist Jerry Coyne said, "If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance 'God' ". Again, it's a cop-out answer; same as saying, "I don't' know, I'm stumped. So I'll give up on trying to find the answer, and fill in the blank with: God did it. Hmm...I think I'll have cake now." If we allow our minds to be pounded into the mold of religious dogma, we will lose that which makes us truly human.


The tangent is purposefully, trust me. I didn't want this to be a retelling of the film, or how it varies from the 1925 trial. My bigger reason was to relay the impact of the basic premises that make the film so great: the undermining of biblical authority, the separation of church and state, and the freedom of thought. Please rent or buy 'Inherit the Wind' (if you don't like old black-and-white movies, I hear the three TV remakes are about the same quality.)

As an aside for the creationists who happen to get this far, please visit talkorigins.org for info on why evolution is a fact.

-STA

Fallacy Friday: Straw Man

Stop putting words into my mouth!
One way of making your own arguments stronger is to anticipate and respond in advance to the arguments that your opponent might make. That's all well and good, but when you misrepresent a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, then refute this misrepresentation of the position, and conclude that the real position has been refuted, you've committed this friday's fallacy: a straw man fallacy.

It's memorable name vividly illustrates the nature of the misconception. Imagine a fight in which one of the combatants sets up a man of straw, attacks it, then proclaims victory. The straw man won't fight back and it's easy to destroy.

You need to focus your arguments against the actual argument your opponent makes, rather than refuting a caricatured or extreme version of it.

Here's an example of this fallacy of ambiguity during a debate on evolution:
1) "Evolution is false! How could a fish evolve into a hippopotamus!?"
2) "There would have to be billions of changes for that to occur, and
nobody has ever seen speciation anyway!"
3) "So it's silly...who has ever seen a fish evolve into a
hippopotamus? Nobody!"
4) "Therefore, evolution must be false!"

1) The straw man is built. Some straw man arguments end here, but let's go on.
2) The straw man is "knocked down" by any means necessary, pretending that the straw man is the real argument and not the ridiculous caricature created with deliberate ignorance and made-up facts.
3) The original position is connected with the straw man. The arguer is attempting to equate the outlandish claims of his straw man with the original position's claims. This makes the defeat of the straw man seem more victorious.
4) The opposition's argument is claimed to be refuted. Problem is, it missed the point by missing the facts.


Just the Facts, Ma'am
It's easy for the perpetrator to knock down their own straw man because they built it themselves; it's a tailor-made position for the person using it. They'll easily destroy its distorted facts soon after it is created.

This subtle tactic can actually fool those who aren't looking close enough. To counter a straw man argument, simply point out the facts. You can point out to them that they just knocked down their own caricature of the argument, not the facts that support the argument. A real counter-position to the above would cite the facts to support the position of evolution.

So instead of being lazy or ignorant, argue with facts and not cowardly accusations. Stick to the point!

In debate, a straw man can be used strategically without creating a fallacy. If the straw man is not too different from the arguments your opponent has actually made, a carefully constructed straw man might entice an unsuspecting opponent into defending a silly argument that he would not have tried to defend otherwise.

But most of the time, it just ends up being a fallacy -- especially in a small town.


-STA

Shrek Wasn't Real

Silly Fundies, Fairy Tales Are for Kids!
Whenever I hear a fundie clinging tightly to the fairy tales in the bible, I sit in amazement at the thought that I was in his shoes. I mean, God is all-powerful, right? That means that anything you could dream up would be an afterthought for God. Talking snakes, talking donkeys, long hair improving strength, floating iron, dust into lice, water into wine; kid's stuff for God.

Talking donkeys. Kid's stuff. See the connection?


Fish Sticks
A person capable of equating the validity of, say the biblical explanation of the rainbow, with known scientific fact is a person who is operating with a delusional mind. It's important to understand that this delusion is a necessary byproduct of their acceptance of God. If you accept that there exists an invisible being that can do anything, you must accept ANYTHING. In the apple harvest of life, nothing can be left out of your possibility bucket.

And I mean nothing. Even with our knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of Cetaceas, coupled with our knowledge of the anatomy and physiology (and psychology) of a human being, a devout believer would have no choice but to take the story of Jonah and the whale as literary history. Just ask one: "All things are possible through God."

This kind of mental instability is dangerous.


The God-Deluded
I understand that to some people, having a God-will-save-you-from-anything, fear-no-evil attitude seems benign, but it corrupts knowledge and undermines others' safety. What's to stop you from jumping off the nearest tall building, "knowing" that God will catch you? I'm not meaning to commit a slippery slope fallacy here; I just think that's entirely the reason why most people don't go nuts and jump off buildings everyday. But that's where the logic takes it.

1) God can do anything.
2) Think up something that you KNOW will occur (drop a glass=broken glass, remove your head=loss of life, etc.)
3) God can invalidate or reverse Step 2.

Of course you do go crazy and kill people, they're not 100% sure that God will comply with Step 3. At least, most religious people don't. But the point I'm making here is that religious beliefs such as this are harmful to yourself and/or others. Faith can move mountains, but you should see what it does to skyscrapers.


Let's Get Back to Reality
I love a good fairy tale just as much as the next guy. I just hope the next guy will understand that talking animals and incredible, unbelievable events are to be, well, unbelieved. At the very least, we should be looking for a moral behind the story.


-STA