Mar 15 2011

Name That Logical Fallacy

I just read this article on foxnews.com. Texas Teen Basketball Player Dies During Tourney

Here is a quote from that article.

“Robert was a great, great human being,” Escobar told The Monitor. “I’m very, very sad. The Lord asked for an angel to come to Him today. He took care of his body. He ate all the right things. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Then don’t explain it! Most likely it was caused by an undiagnosed preexisting condition but this repulsive person admits that he doesn’t know what he is talking about immediately following his idiotic explanation for why it happened.

Read this and tell me what is wrong with it: “I do not have an explanation for what caused this event, so let me offer this explanation for what caused this event” As far as reasoning goes, it’s a logical fallacy called Argument from Ignorance. When put that way, isn’t it clearly nonsense?


Mar 14 2011

Ray’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

It never fails, if you want a taste of stupid just go to Ray Comfort, he has an all-you-can-eat buffet.

I decided to take a peek at his blog today to see what kind of lies he is telling and not surprisingly he has some related to the earthquake in Japan.

“But atheism says that there is a good reason for the 8.9 earthquake killer quake and the horrific Tsunami that followed. It is nature making improvements. Everything is getting better. People being crushed to death or drowned in a Tsunami is just part of the work of nature.”

It is unbelievable how religious nuts have the ability to project their own stupid beliefs onto others so they can dismiss it and completely miss the irony of doing so. Assuming that there is an “atheist movement” that can collectively “say” anything, it certainly would not say anything in the preceding paragraph. As a matter of fact, replace nature with God and it sounds exactly like what a Christian might say. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard “It’s all part of God’s plan” in reference to the earthquake.

His point, however, is merely to get to talk about a subject that he knows absolutely nothing about – despite having it explained ad nauseam – but which he loves to talk about as if he has a deep understanding of the subject. It’s a common misconception that ignorant people (willfully in this guys case) have about evolution. Neither evolution nor nature have a goal of making anything better in the sense that he is using the word better. If I were to describe evolution as the process of making living organisms better – and I wouldn’t, but for the sake of argument if I did – better would not necessarily mean smarter, stronger, tougher, longer life, etc. (i.e. the things that we humans think would be better). Evolution simply makes the changes necessary to make a population more likely to survive, it may be the case that a smaller, weaker and dumber version of humans have a better chance of surviving in a million years on Earth and if that is the case, that is what will evolve. “Better” to evolution is not necessarily what we would consider better.

At any rate, rest assured that the earthquake in Japan has nothing to do with evolution. Earthquakes are an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of living on a planet that is itself quite alive and active. Atheists, like most decent people, are horrified by the effects that the earthquake and tsunami have had in Japan.

Ray would know this if he weren’t the stupidest person I’ve ever witnessed. That isn’t hyperbole either. Discounting people who are literally mentally handicapped in some manner, I’ve never heard of anyone so incredibly willfully ignorant, he is un-teachable. His mind is a solid block of “God did it” that can’t be reasoned with.


Mar 10 2011

Stupid quote of the day

I’m paraphrasing this so I don’t have to post the whole paragraph. This is from a one star review of Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World on Amazon. The commenter was trying to make the point that Sagan puts forth invalid comparisons and gives this as an example.

“The story about Mary appearing in Lourdes, France is based solely on faith, whereas the tabloid headline about NASA hearing voices in space is based on nothing.”

It’s just so damn sad that he doesn’t realize that faith is the same as nothing!