Logic Lessons: Insufficient Evidence
In my dealings with evolutionists, I have been amazed at the number of logical fallacies that I have encountered. Many of them stand alone, but many others are combined into a Chaotic Crawling Casserole of Illogic. That is, there are so many errors, conversation becomes almost impossible and you're better off watching reruns of "Columbo". Among the logical fallacies I have encountered (in English) are:
- Attacking the person instead of discussing the topic
- "You do it too!"
- Appealing to numbers, as in, "Everybody believes this way" (or "Bandwagon") to the extreme of accepting evolution on faith, not evidence
- Confusing cause and effect
- Straw man (misrepresenting the beliefs of Creationists and then ridiculing the caricature that was made up)
- Appealing to emotion
- Appealing to unqualified authority
- Hasty generalizations
- Appeal to faith in scientism ("Science will some day find or prove such and so")
- Outright lies
Well, that's enough. You get the idea.
But I want to focus on one of the most common errors that I have encountered with evolutionists: The Fallacy of Exclusion. This is also a violation of the "principle of suppressed evidence". I cannot count the number of times that evolutionists and atheists have not bothered to do their homework, and they presume to tell me what I believe. Perhaps their straw man arguments are accidental, perhaps not. (We are not called upon to defend a position that we do not hold, anyway.) But I have found that many of my opponents are dismally ignorant of the Bible, Creation Science — and evolution itself. Some inadvertently make a straw man out of the position that they are attempting to support!
Anyway, this fallacy is quite simple: Leaving out important information that would change the conclusion is a Fallacy of Exclusion:
Leaving out evidence that would lead to a different conclusion is called the fallacy of exclusion. An example is: In the presidential elections of 2000 and 2005, Florida went to Bush, so it must be a Republican state. In fact, the evidence from 1996, which I purposely excluded from the sentence above, shows that Florida went to Clinton in that election, making this, too, a fallacy of insufficient evidence. By choosing to begin with the data from 2000, I was able to exclude evidence that contradicted the conclusion I wished to draw for the sake of this exercise.
When dealing with information that affects someone's worldview, it is almost criminal to leave out contrary evidence. It is certainly unethical and immoral. Let me be blunt, since I am showing some emotion on this: Suppressing evidence against evolution is not "science", it is brainwashing. That's right, I said it! How can someone make a proper determination about the origins of life, the universe and everything if the evidence is missing? Creationists are attacked for being "not scientists", and that is an outright lie. On the other side of the issue, for scientists who are Creationists to be able to properly present their viewpoints, they must have an understanding of the evolutionary positions. Creationist laymen, when educated properly, have an understanding of evolution so they can evaluate and present their evidence.
This article can become oppressively long if I bring in my encounters with atheists, so I will not go much further.
I insist, however, that evolutionists do not have sufficient understanding of the Creationists' viewpoints. Incomplete information leads to horribly wrong conclusions. The true spirit of scientific inquiry does what? My regular readers know where I'm going: "Follow where the evidence leads!"
The following humorous short video is all over the Web, but I'm sure that some people have not seen it yet. And it illustrates what I am saying so well:
