[blind-democracy] Re: Circular Reasoning

  • From: "Roger Loran Bailey" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender rogerbailey81 for DMARC)" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2018 09:54:30 -0400

Just a note here to say that I remembered the name of the theologian who compared finding a rock in a field with finding a watch in a field. He was William Paley. Now I can call that logical fallacy the Thomas Aquinas fallacy, the cart before the horse fallacy, the circular reasoning fallacy or the William Paley fallacy. There are a lot of other theologians who make the same mistake and I suppose I could even call it the Mustafa or Jason fallacy, but I think the name for it in most textbooks of logic is circular reasoning.


On 8/4/2018 4:17 PM, Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender rogerbailey81 for DMARC) wrote:

I was looking forward to Mustafa's reply to my message pointing out the three logical fallacies he indulged in with the previous message of his. Unfortunately he did not reply to any of my points, but instead just threw a tantrum. I wanted to explain in another way how his fallacy that I have been calling the Thomas Aquinas fallacy goes wrong. So I will just make this post and explain it anyway even if I am not replying directly to him. It is a fallacy that has been repeated many times over the centuries by various theologians, not just Thomas Aquinas. They use various examples to illustrate their point. When someone once used the existence of an automobile as proof of an automobile factory I had such a fun time refuting it that whenever it comes up again I refer to it again myself. Another example that was famously used was by Bishop something. His name escapes me right now. He talked about finding a watch in a field and the mere fact that it was lying there supposedly proved the existence of a watch maker. If I remembered his name I could add the word fallacy after it and have another name for the fallacy. Anyway, it can be called the Thomas Aquinas fallacy, the cart before the horse fallacy, or, most famously, circular reasoning. The problem with it is that it assumes the conclusion in order to reach the conclusion. If the conclusion is already known there is no point in trying to deduce the conclusion in the first place and any attempt to do so is a tautology at best. If you do have prior knowledge of the conclusion then you have to justify that prior knowledge itself. So you look at a watch or you look at an automobile or you look at the universe around us and the very existence of what you are looking at is evidence of its own existence. The question is, of course, why does it exist? As I have pointed out before, the prior knowledge of watch makers or automobile factories makes it a reasonable conclusion that the origin of the watch or the automobile was a watch maker or an automobile factory. But what of the origin of a rock? The bishop who used the watch as an example said that since the watch had to have been created by a watch maker then the rock had to have been created by a rock creator. He also started out his argument by saying that if he was strolling through a field and he found a rock it might as well have always been there as far as he knew. If he had left it at that he would have stated the correct thing about the existence of the rock given his knowledge of geology which was obviously very limited. His contention of a rock creator was an unjustified jumping to a conclusion though. I am far from an expert on geology, but I know enough about it that I expect that the rock was composed of silicon oxide in crystalline form and that it came to be formed in some geological event such as volcanism or sedimentation or something similar and that the silicon oxide material was formed in a coalescence from a nebula some five and a half billion years ago. A professional geologist could tell you more detail. If I was completely ignorant of geology, though, I would have to say the same thing that the bishop started his essay with. That is, it might as well have been there forever for all I know. I would not be able to infer anything else about its origin. Before I could infer anything about it at all I would need some information other than the mere existence of the rock and without that information I would have to start looking for the information. Even saying that geological processes formed the rock would be a matter of making up something if I did not know about geological processes. I can only say something about the geological processes if I already know about geological processes and if I say that the rock had to have been formed by geological processes as a conclusion of applying a logical syllogism to the existence of the rock I would be assuming the conclusion to reach the conclusion. Now, as little as I know about the formation of rocks there are other things that I have no clue as to the answer. Let's look at the very largest context in which that rock exists, the entire universe. Unless we are all disembodied minds imagining our own existence - another contention for which there is no evidence - the universe is here. As to why it is here, I could talk about the big bang and I could talk about fluctuations in the quantum foam and I could talk about collisions of branes, but for each of those hypotheses and theories on the cutting edge of cosmogeny the question of where that came from can be asked. Ultimately, I don't know the answer and no one else does either. To find out the answer, if there is one, further investigation has to be done and professional physicists are doing just that kind of investigation. To posit any answer whatsoever without evidence for it amounts to nothing short of just making up answers. Then to claim that any of those made up answers is true because the existence of the universe proves that they have to be true is circular reasoning. It would be making up an answer and assuming it to be true in order to reach the conclusion that it is true. That is why atheism is not a positive assertion. Atheism is just the act of assuming that an answer is not correct until there is some reason to believe that it is. I so hope that Mustafa reads this. He might have stalked off in his tantrum, but I hope he reads this and if he really sees anything wrong with it that he will explain my error. But I don't expect that. He just keeps validating my position by being unable to refute me instead of making the same logical fallacies over and over again.




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