For the following exercise on logical fallacies, have a look at this article printed in The Australian by Greg Sheridan called “The God Question: Listen To Your Inner Voice”.
There’s a number of claims that can be identified as fallacies in the article, some are quoted below — which fallacies are they? Some might be used more than once! There’s some hints at the end of this blogpost.
Claim One:It is more rational to believe in God than to believe there is no God. In fact, belief in God is much more rational than atheism. The resting place of the mind, its natural equilibrium, as it were, is belief.This is, in truth, a statement of the obvious.
Claim Two:In subscribing to atheism they are in radical opposition to the vast majority of people on the planet today, and the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived in history. There’s our first clue.
Claim Three:I have faith that I am the son of my parents. I have no real empirical evidence for it. It makes the most sense as an explanation of my life, it is the proposition that best fits with everything I know. But the main reason I believe it is faith, my regular, normal faith in my parents. So this is a faith-based belief, entirely rational, confirmed by experience, but certainly not rationally proven.
Claim Four:Because the high points in our elite and popular culture have been colonised by a militant and intolerant atheism, our young people have been denied the fruits of thousands of years of intellectual effort on matters of faith and belief by the best minds humanity has produced. This is wickedly unfair to children.
Claim Five:First, Thomas suggested that motion had to start somewhere, that there had to be an unmoved mover.
Claim Six:Second, the chain of cause and effect is so long, but it too had to start somewhere; there had to be an uncaused cause.
Claim Seven:Third, contingent beings — that is, beings who rely on some antecedent for their existence — must inevitably proceed from a being who relies on nothing for their existence, a necessary being.
Claim Eight:Fourth, there is so much goodness in the world, it must correspond to or proceed from a self-sufficient goodness.
Claim Nine:And fifth, the non-conscious agents in the world behave so purposefully that they imply an intelligent universal principle.
Claim Ten:If the rational power of the human mind is so feeble that for countless millennia it could believe in God, when this belief is a delusion for which allegedly there is no evidence at all, how can we now accept that this same mind has miraculously developed a new capability to get to the truth and to understand evolutionary theory? If the mind is shaped by evolutionary theory to irrational ends throughout history it might just as well be shaped to irrational ends when it embraces evolutionary theory. This is not what I believe but it is an inescapable implication of the Dawkins style of atheism.
Claim Eleven:That we now know so much more about the history of our planet, of our solar system, of our galaxy, leads some to the mistaken conclusion that God is superseded as an explanation.I think rather that what all this knowledge really indicates is the majesty and generosity of God. That the physical universe we know is apparently 14 billion years old tells us nothing about who created it or why.
Claim Twelve:There are countless clues of God throughout our world and within humanity itself. There is the strange phenomenon of joy, the even stranger delight of humour, the inescapable intimation of meaning in beauty and music. There is the mystery of love, along with the equal mystery of our consciousness and our self-awareness. It’s a lot of clues to ignore.
Thanks to Tim Minchin for bringing this article to our attention — answers can be found tomorrow on www.patreon.com/kyliesturgess
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
