Jason Lisle, Ai.G. Commits the Logical Fallacy of Being a Complete Idiot.

I was waiting for this series to start peeking out the bunghole that is Answers in Genesis. Jason Lisle, to whom I have decided to refer by his professional association, not his doctorate, which as far as I can tell might as well have come from a Cracker Jack box, promised me a series on logical fallacies. Finally, the astrologer is playing on my court! (Whatever you do, it ain’t astronomy, JL.) And he starts with a fallacy that I had a hard time finding in any one of the dozens of books on logic that I have piled around me at any one time. In fact, it was in none of them. He calls his article “Logical Fallacies: The Fallacy of Reification.” He is a suicide bomber of unintentional irony, and he will be demonstrating, in quite some detail, the fallacy of the straw man.

I’m going to rip you a new asshole, Jason Lisle. Bend over.

Reification is attributing a concrete characteristic to something that is abstract. Perhaps you have heard the old saying, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” This is an example of reification because “nature” is an abstraction; it is simply the name we give to the chain of events in the universe. Nature is not a person and cannot literally be fooled, since nature does not have a mind. So, this expression would not make sense if taken literally.

Personification? Your beef is with personification? Sweet tap-dancing Jesus clowns. That’s not even a logical fallacy, it’s a rhetorical device! Hahahaha! You make Christians dumber.

Of course, not all language should be taken literally.

You know, like the Bible.

There is nothing wrong with reification as a figure of speech.

It is always a figure of speech, as far as I can tell.

It is perfectly acceptable in poetry. Even the Bible uses reification at times in its poetic sections.

Therefore, you read the Bible literally at the risk of putting up a dinosaur petting zoo.

For example, Proverbs 8 personifies the concept of wisdom. This is a perfectly acceptable (and poetically beautiful) use of reification.

You are kissing the Bible’s ass (oops! I gave the Bible an ass!). “You are SOOOO well written, Bible. *Smootchie smootchie!* What was that about making false idols? Besides, the characters in the Bible are flat, the story is completely unbelievable, the plot jumps around too much, and it’s sort of preachy.

However, when reification is used as part of a logical argument, it is a fallacy. The reason for this is that using such a poetic expression is often ambiguous and can obscure important points in a debate. It is very common for evolutionists to commit this fallacy.

Now here is the problem, as best I can tell. Scientists have no illusion that they are saying that nature thinks or has a mind, and they are therefore free to use the linguistic/metaphorical shortcut. When they are explaining it to someone who is just an evolutionist, well, chances are that the layman has a basic understanding of this as well. Now, when people are unschooled or not sophisticated or as stupid as you seem to suggest your intended audience is, you may have to qualify this statement. And this is what biologists and other scientists do in their popular writings, to be careful. In numerous books I have come across, scientists who are tired of being quote-mined by your ilk endlessly qualify their statements and use of the word “design.” Or the metaphorical use of the word "God."

Let’s look at some examples of the fallacy of reification as they are commonly used in evolutionary arguments.

Sometimes in an argument, an evolutionist will say something like this: “Nature has designed some amazing creatures.” This sentence commits the fallacy of reification because nature does not have a mind and cannot literally design anything.

Yeah, the issue here is not the reification of “Nature” or granting it a “mind”; it is the shorthand of “design” for “what appears deliberately designed to the human eye, which is itself is totally the product of natural selection operating on chance mutations.” If your goal is to make the language of evolution so tedious that nobody will want to use it, well, good luck. Must you suck the artistry out of science writing as you suck the intelligence out of biblical interpretation?

By using the fallacy of reification, the evolutionist obscures the fact that the evolution worldview really cannot account for the design of living creatures. (Keep in mind that he may be doing this unintentionally). God can design creatures because God is a person. Nature is a concept and cannot design anything.

*Blink blink* Um. There is no nature; it’s just an abstraction? Dude, you just got trippily postmodern on me. Also, if the debate is about whether or not the world is designed or, you know, evidently happened, well, you can’t just say, “Evolution doesn’t work. Y punto.” You are just nay saying. You could run an argument clinic.

“Creationists say the world was created supernaturally, but science says otherwise.” Here the person has attributed personal, concrete attributes to the concept of science. In doing so, he or she overlooks the important fact that the scientists draw conclusions about the evidence and verbalize such conclusions—not “science.” Science is a conceptual tool that can be used properly or improperly. It says nothing. It does not take a position on issues. So, this common example of reification is logically fallacious.

In this case, I would say that scientists are the ones saying something. If you are using something associated with something else to stand for it, you are using the rhetorical device of metonymy. Do you get annoyed, hop up and down during the evening news and shout smugly, “The White House didn’t say anything!! The White House can’t speak! Stupid Katie Couric!” Almost any metaphor that you read literally will be goofy. “Haha! Stupid Shakespeare! My love is not a red, red rose!”

“The evidence speaks for itself.” This expression is quite common, but when used as part of an argument, it is the fallacy of reification. Evidence does not speak at all. Evidence is a concept: the name we give to a body of facts that we believe to be consistent with a particular point of view. People draw conclusions about evidence and verbalize their thoughts. But evidence itself does not have thoughts to verbalize.

Imagine that you are standing with a rotten squid lodged down to your tonsils. I am standing there, laughing and my hands smelling of rotten squid. What does the evidence tell you? What can you infer from that? And if you say that God stuffed the squid in your throat, I am going to imagine jamming a hypothetical lobster into your made-up, theoretical jacksie.

Seriously, you want to throw out science as a topic of discussion? Evidence? Next you are going to want to throw out the phrase “natural selection” because it has the word “selection” in it.

Even the phrase natural selection is an example of reification and could be considered a fallacy if used in an argument. Nature cannot literally select.

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Well, if you want to play in the shallow end of the sandbox, I guess “scripture” can’t literally “teach” anything, jackass. And certainly not logic. The arguments for evolution do not depend on evidence literally speaking or science literally saying. This is what we would call the fallacy of the straw man, mischaracterizing your opponent’s argument and demolishing that instead of the argument.

Thus endeth the lesson, bitch.

HJ