RSSToo Bad Numbers Isn’t a Book About Logic
November 12th, 2005 | View Comments
Oh, Pat Robertson. There you go, shooting off your fool mouth again. The man is supposedly a lawyer and he can’t recognize a logical fallacy when he utters one.
That would be the fallacy of the False Dilemma, also known as the False Dichotomy. Unless those eight Dover school board members were officers that were personally selected, installed, and maintained by God, voting them out of office does not necessarily constitute a rejection of God. More likely, it counts as an act of common sense.
Furthermore, just because voters object to the injection of intelligent design into a biology class does not mean that voters would also object to other religiously-based discussions in other classrooms.
For example, they may find a reading of Genesis in a literature course to be perfectly appropriate and possibly even necessary in order to provide students with the grounding in Biblical imagery that they need to interpret a wide variety of literary works and products of pop culture.
But I suppose this particular error on his part is weirdly appropriate, since the entire intelligent design argument is based on a false dichotomy of sorts. It is possible to believe that God has a hand in everything and still accept that evolution is a scientifically valid concept.
Furthermore, even if some forms of life are too complex to have evolved through natural selection, that does not necessarily imply the existence of an intelligent designer. There could be some alternate, non-intelligent mechanism at work that hasn’t been uncovered yet.
This variation on the false dichotomy is sometimes referred to as the Argument from Ignorance, which is also known as the Argument from Lack-of-Imagination. (hee)
I have softened my previous hardline stance on not allowing intelligent design in the science classroom. Now I’m willing to let it be discussed, but only as a contrast to sound scientific process.
Yvonne posted this on November 12th, 2005 @ 5:13pm in Education, News/Politics, Religion, Science | Permalink to "Too Bad Numbers Isn’t a Book About Logic"
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