...but honestly, I can't think of a better way to put it. Luckily, this gymnastic anomaly is mental rather than physical, for which we can all be grateful.
Jason Lisle, on the very day I went over most of the major logical fallacies in my class, fired off another inane self-condemnation, by which I mean he wrote something on the Answers in Genesis website. It's part of his series, "Logical Fallacies," by which I presume that he means "how to make them and not realize it." It's been a breathtaking series of fair-use educational material for my students about how not to make a point, with the added bonus that not only do I get to point out logical fallacies, but I also get to teach them about irony!
The faulty appeal to authority is, in a way, the opposite of the ad hominem fallacy. Whereas the ad hominem fallacy denies a claim based on the person making it, the faulty appeal to authority endorses a claim simply based on the person making it. Essentially, the faulty appeal to authority is the argument that a claim is true simply because someone else believes it.
So, like when Ken Ham believes something? Cool. Because that little wacko is one goofy cult leader. Of course, I don't teach fallacies this way. I teach this fallacy as "the appeal to
false authority." In the real world, when Einstein makes a suggestion about relativity, you better listen. When he gives advice about your haircut, you smack him with a schnitzel and tell him to keep his day job. Discerning which voices to listen to is, as best as I can tell, a function of your degree of expertise in the subject and your innate intelligence, breadth of general knowledge of how the world works and reasoning capacity, which allow you to smell when someone is spoon-feeding you bullshit.
The basic structure of the argument is this:
- Bill believes X.
- Therefore, X is true.
Of course, it is almost never stated this explicitly. Often, the person to whom the appeal is made is considered highly esteemed for one reason or another. But the truthfulness of the claim at issue is not necessarily relevant to the popularity of the individual making the claim.
In formal, syllogistic thought is true. What you have here, of course, is an unstated premise, "Whatever Bill believes about anything is true." This may in fact be true, if you can somehow support that unstated premise. Good luck with that, by the way. However this is deductive logic, which proceeds from universal principles to specific examples: If Bill without a doubt believes X,
and Bill is invariably correct when he expresses any belief whatsoever about anything, then X
must be true. Of course, in reality we all know Bill is a douche and is almost never right about anything. You suck, Bill.
When we usually see this fallacy is in the argumentative structure of advertisement. "Ron Jeremy endorses X-tends male enhancement." So the fuck what? He was born with freakish junk. He's not a doctor or a urologist. His authority is false when it comes to wang enhancement. However, when you are talking about fun things to do with a vagina, Ron's probably your guy.
Tonight I will be discussing, if I finish my grading,
an article that actually says:
Homeopathy attracted support from many of the most respected members of society in the U.S., such as William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa M. Alcott, Mark Twain, former American Presidents James Garfield and William McKinley. In Britain among its supporters were George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, William Thackarey, Benjamin Disraeli, Yehudi Menuhin. Other famous supporters were Dostoevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mahatma Ghandi.
Nowadays, celebrities using and supporting homeopathy are many and include among others: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Tina Turner, Whoopi Goldberg, Pamela Anderson, Jane Fonda, Cher, Rosie O'Donnell, Martin Sheen, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Jane Seymour, Lesley Anne Warren, Mariel Hemingway, Lindsay Wagner, Paul McCartney, Axl Rose, Linda Gray, Susan Blakely, Michael Franks, Cybil Sheppard, Dizzy Gillespie, Vidal Sassoon, Angelica Houston, Boris Becker, Martina Navratilova, David Beckham, Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, Cliff Robertson, Jerry Hall, Diane von Furstenberg, Ashley Judd, Naomi Judd, Olivia Newton-John, Julianna Margulies, JD Salinger, Blythe Danner, Pat Riley (coach of the Miami Heat). The list of famous people who supported homeopathy is endless...
This is perhaps the crappiest evidence in the history of idiocy supporting any claim ever. Way back in ye olde times, most medicine sucked, so the best medicine was basically that which did not kill you. Because homeopathy was nothing but placebo, it was probably far safer than most treatments. Axl Rose? You want me to trust Axl Rose with my health? Jam it, loser. This is the biggest appeal to false authority that I have ever seen.
If an expert on U.S. law claimed that the Constitution does not contain the phrase “We the people,” would that make it so? We could easily refute his claim by simply reading from an actual copy of the Constitution. The fact that he is an expert does not override the evidence.
How could you possibly call someone with such a patently false belief an expert? You would call them a delusional wackaloon and be right. Perhaps you are lowering the bar so much so even
you can qualify as an expert?
Not all appeals to authority are faulty appeals to authority. It is legitimate to consider the opinion of an expert on a particular topic. None of us has the time or the ability to verify each and every truth claim that has ever been made. We can and should rely upon the expertise of others at times.
But not biologists. He's going to say, "But not biologists."
So, when does the appeal to authority become a fallacy? It seems there are three common ways in which this occurs:
1) Appealing to an expert in an area that is not his area of expertise. Our hypothetical Dr. Bill may indeed have a PhD in biology—and that qualifies him to say something about how organisms function today. But does knowledge of how things work today necessarily imply knowledge of how things came to be? This is a separate question.
Ah, redefining "biologist." You sorry asshole. I'm going to make you squirm like a bitch for bringing up using people in other fields whose opinions are essentially meaningless. Have you been to the "
Dissent from Darwin" petition? Do you see how many vets, materials scientists, historians of dentistry and adjunct tutors of natural science there are on there? What makes them qualified but all publishing biologists unqualified?
The experiments Dr. Bill has done and the observations he has made have all taken place in the present world. He has no more direct observations of the ancient past than anyone else today. [the footnote here reads: "For some reason, it is common for people to think that paleontologist and geologists study the past. But this is not so. Rocks and fossils exist in the present (otherwise we wouldn’t have access to them). Although there is nothing wrong with speculating about past events (e.g., how fossils or rocks formed) and then testing the plausibility of such models with experiments in the present, we should keep in mind that the past is never actually observable or open to scientific investigation."]
Seriously, why do you even pretend to give a hoot about the scientific method? You don't need direct observations to reach evolution inductively, no more than crime scene investigators need to have committed the murder to walk away with good information about it. By your idiotic standard, all reports drawn up by forensic scientists say, "Well, the corpse is getting stinky. We have no idea how that happened, because friends say the guy was fine a few days ago." And we can directly observe the effects of evolution, you tit. You're sitting on the effects of it. We can predict where in the geological strata we will find fossils.
2. Failure to consider the worldview of the expert and how this might affect his interpretation of the data.
The truth of the matter is independent of what the researcher's beliefs about it are. Either something did happen or didn't happen. The difference between the scientific worldview and that of Answers in Genesis is science starts with a null hypothesis, gathers evidence, comes up with the best explanation and then tests it again, discarding what doesn't work and keeping what does. You write articles complaining about how scientists are playing unfair because they are pantsing you.
3. Treating a fallible expert as infallible. We should also keep in mind that even experts do not know everything. They can make mistakes even in their own field. Some new discovery may cause a scientist to change his mind about something that he thought he knew. So, at best, appealing to an expert yields only a probable conclusion.
No responsible researcher does this. This is a straw men. Science labs aren't cults of personality. And you think that the ability to improve a hypothesis is a weakness. It guarantees your irrelevance and lack of a presence in respected journals.
Of course, if the expert had knowledge of everything and never lied, then there would be no fallacy in accepting his statements as absolutely true. In fact, it would be absurd to not do so under those circumstances. The Bible claims to be such an infallible source—a revelation from the God who knows everything and cannot lie. Thus, there is no fallacy in appealing to Scripture as absolutely authoritative. Some evolutionists have mistakenly accused creationists of committing the faulty appeal to authority on this very issue.
This post now officially declares itself to be infallable. See how I mispelled infallable and mispelled? Those are the new standard spellings. Get used to it. Do you have any idea how vacuous and circular your assertion of biblical authority is? No, of course not. If you did, you would not be able to show your face outside.
Holy shit. Watch what is coming up. He totally blows it on this one. (Oh, my students and I are going to rape this article tomorrow!)
Another type of faulty appeal to authority is the appeal to the majority. This is when a person argues that a claim must be true simply because most people believe it. But, of course, just because a majority of people believe something does not make it so. History is replete with examples of when the majority was totally wrong. Truth is not decided by a vote, after all.
That's right. Truth usually has to be forced into classrooms by court order, if you guys can swing it. Here it comes:
The appeal to the majority is often combined with the appeal to an expert—an appeal to the majority of experts. Evolutionists often commit this double-fallacy; they try to support their case by pointing out:
“The vast majority of scientists believe in evolution. (Therefore, evolution is very likely to be true).”
However, simply adding two fallacies together does not form a good argument!
We sometimes hear phrases like
“According to mainstream science . . . ,”
“The scientific establishment . . . ,”
or
“the scientific consensus is . . . ,”
as an alleged proof of a particular claim.
You.
Suck.
At.
Life.
"Ignore the majority of experts." That's the only way you can get people to believe your fairy tales? There is a difference between "expert" and "asshat know-nothing." I am so glad that your expertise is confined to astrology, where you are confined to duping the gullible. You'd never make it in the real world.
HJ
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