What Weight Evidence?

In order to control my blood pressure I've had to refrain from a couple of my usual blog haunts because I'm pretty sick of the same old tired apologetics delivered either with sheepish smugness (like the Family Circus) or increasing condescension. Some are skillful at debate - kind of master debaters you might say. To bad they aren't so concerned with facts. The problem is that debate does not require facts to be compelling. It can become something with the sole goal of gaining approval, often through some sort of slight of hand approach. Debate, like the law, is adversarial and, though ideally based in logic, may or not be factual. I keep coming back to this - Logic is not the same thing as truth. Take a recent example in a logic test. I smiled to my self when I read this because the authors (intentionally or not) created a false logic - something I accuse them of frequently...

• All ducks bark
• Donald is a duck
• Therefore, Donald barks

This is logically valid. It's also factually false. This one is easy to dismiss because we know ducks don't bark, but think about how often people confound debate with essentially identical arguments from logic. If the basic assumptions used in the logical argument are false the result is false logic. We waste so much time on this sort of thing because it can be convincing in a superficial sort of way and when confronted the master debater will often run off and hide in the realm of metaphysics where almost anything goes - even barking ducks. Philosophers may debate whether we can dismiss this logic out of hand. The apologist will say that because we haven't examined every duck or haven't tested them in the right manner to determine if they might all bark that we can't completely reject this logical claim.

But is that really true? Since the logic implies a positive statement, we can in fact, reject it using empiric methods. We just need one duck that can't bark. That won't convince the master debater because he'll just claim that the duck barks when we aren't looking. We have no evidence that ducks bark. We have never encountered a barking duck. The agbarkic may say that he or she doesn't know if a duck can bark or not. But among other things this is a cognitive bias called neglect of probability if nothing else. Since we have vast experience with quacking ducks and none with barking ones we might logically propose the following:

• No ducks have ever been observed to bark
• Donald is a duck
• Therefore, Donald does not bark

The master debater will be correct in saying that this is an example of overstepping the bounds of what can be concluded through logic, but so what. Do we really want to waste any more time on the notion of barking ducks? The master debater may consider it a win if he or she can get the skeptic to admit that all they can really say is that Donald probably can't bark. Within that tiny reed of uncertainty the master debater can continue their guerrilla war against rationality. With such an admission they can loudly proclaim that we cannot exclude the existence of a barking duck! Soon they'll leap to claim that this means that superpowerful ducks rule the universe, while chiding us for any lapses in logic... Our counter should be simple - Show me a barking duck or shut the heck up about it already. Absent the proof (or woof...) the logic statement becomes nothing more than intellectual amyloid that can be ignored. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence trumps the need to spend any more time on it. Reality has many examples of quaking ducks and not yet a single barking one. So the possibility (tiny) of a barking duck is of no practical importance. Find one and we'll talk.

What about this one?

• Reality can always be described through logic
• A particular master debater is always logical
• Therefore, the master debater can always describe reality

Why is this invalid in fact? Our courts are a good place to see one reason why it's not truthful (in an absolute sense). In the case of two opposing mutually exclusive logical positions, one must be false - unless truth is a quantum phenomenon... Reality may be amenable to logical description but that doesn't in any way mean that a particular human (or any of them for that matter) can accurately describe the baseline logic that is factual. People can, have, and continue to create false assumptions as to the baseline of reality and happily run off in some completely logical, albeit false, direction.

Take one of Zeno's famous paradoxes (created originally to mess with other people's minds) to see how we get caught up in this nonsense. One paradox (the dichotomy paradox) talks about traveling a fixed distance. It posits that before a traveler can get somewhere, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. Basically it says that he can never reach his fixed destination. The math can get quite cumbersome if one wants to refute this formally. But the practical minded person can just step back and say, " I have to cover ten meters of distance and my stride is half a meter. Therefore I will reach that fixed point in 20 strides. I won't get caught in an infinite regression because that's not how I walk. I can prove that empirically. No one else I know walks that way either so buzz off." By simply walking across the room the paradox is dispelled by a single exception.

That's one reason that many apologists hate science. It has this nasty habit of demonstrating that their philosophical emperor has no clothes. Rather than wasting time on logic constructs why not let the preponderance of evidence be our guide? When exceptions are proven, then revise the model. What might we call such an approach? Science perhaps?

So as for logic I must confess the following:

• The overwhelming preponderance of empiric information usually points toward the truth...
• I seek truth...
• Therefore as a practical approach, I will look in the direction created by the overwhelming preponderance of empiric data...

Or said another way - from now on I'm from Missouri...