Another atheist fallacy: Post hoc

Post hoc means "after this".
A woman is pulling weeds. Passenger pigeons fly overhead in great flocks. Hens cluck. Corn husks rustle under the clothesline. She adjusts her bonnet. She has been a successful farmer and married a successful farmer. Her daughters are healthy. Her cattle bear strong calves. She knows the poor old woman down the road resents her relative good luck. She smiles at the idea that she is well-off because she deserves to be. Her whole family have lovely sweet rye cakes at every meal.
Her daughter should be milking the cows, and she isn't there. The woman lifts her apron hems and runs to the house to scold the girl. The old woman comes up the road. She is short, stunted for want of good food. She points to the farm woman and scowls, mutters something the farm woman can't understand and throws her apron and skirt over her head, ties them like a bonnet and walks into the forest that hangs wet and tall over the outskirts of the Pilgrim settlement. She returns the next morning with a scar across her neck and chin. The farm woman watches her. She seems so angry... poor for so long, and now a widow, never had a child that lived. Why is she hanging around here, pointing at me like that? Why the forest?
The farm woman walks into the house with her turnips in a basket and sees her daughter curled on the hearthrug, writhing. She is pointing too, but at everything in the main room. The woman shakes her shoulder and calls, "What's wrong?" into the girl's ear several times. She goes out to milk the cows before they bellow for the whole town to hear. She finds they've dried up. The hunting hounds are running in circles, barking at nothing. She returns to the field and waits, nerves taut, for her husband to come home and help her. When he returns he has no idea what is happening or where to go. She asks the woman across the way, an old friend. Her friend says, "That old woman spends every night in the woods now. She pointed at my house and laughed once." After trading memories for a few hours the two decide the old woman might be a witch. If so, the friend assures her, when the witches in town are all dead, the spells will be broken and their families will live. They are on a mission. They must stop the spells. But there is only one person acting strange, and the friend heard somewhere that witches always live in groups of 13. There are just 245 people in town. They must find out which 19th-part of the settlement are witches.
They start a campaign to root out the danger that doesn't stop until hundreds of farmers in the colony, all the people in the town, have been harassed, several tried, often by ordeal, and some executed in the gallows.
A couple of fearful isolated people have committed the post hoc fallacy.
A college student learns that Christianity spread throughout Europe in the last days of the Roman Empire and then the Empire collapsed and Europe was lost in the Dark Ages for a millennium, only to crawl out into the light again after a few skeptics and freethinkers discovered the hidden Greek artworks.
He concludes, and argues to his class and friends, that Christianity can't be true because it caused a thousand years of darkness.
He has committed the post hoc fallacy.
In reality, the daughter, cows and dogs' afflictions were most probably ergotism, a poisoning by a product of a rye fungus. Well-off people, especially women, children and dogs, got sweet cakes made from honey or sugar and sweet rye. The finest rye grows in the dampest wetlands, where ergot also thrives. The old woman was poor and therefore unlikely to eat much sweet rye, but she was aging and lonely, which contributes to senile dementia. She was mentally confused. She slept in the forest thinking she had to, or that it was home, or that someone was telling her to. She pointed because she had forgotten how to communicate. It was a coincidence. A very common one in a culture that prized rye. The result of post hoc thinking was injustice and destruction.
In reality, the student was getting a biased version of history that left most of the key facts out. His textbooks were written using materials from a violently anti-Catholic period of American history. In fact the so-called Dark Ages saw many inventions, scientific discoveries and feats of architecture that astonish those who study them. The reason these didn't lead to more technological progress was that constant attacks from primarily pagan invaders -- the Norse, for a prominent example -- made travel, communication and storage unsafe. Actually, some monasteries, especially in Ireland, preserved Greek and Roman works and indeed preserved literacy itself. A sort of Renaissance occurred in the 12th Century, as soon as a short time of peace and improved weather made room for one. But a series of wars that brought on a series of plagues cut it off. The development of better fortifications and better weapons, which had been a lot of what the engineers of the "Dark Ages" worked on, allowed enough safety in cities, and the population drop and improved weather in southern Europe contributed. A Renaissance began anew, this time bigger and more prosperous. Most of the artists were devout Christians. So were most of the scientists. Religion hardly changed, before or after the 14th-Century Renaissance.
The post-hoc fallacy, though, is used to attack the faith.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is its legal name. After this, therefore because of this. It means saying one thing caused another just because it preceded it.
A man says he lost his faith because his mother didn't like the name of a game he played with his brother (actual example taken from an "Ex-Christian" site). Maybe he really thinks so. If so, that's as thin as skin can be if you ask me. My mother was far grouchier than that and I just laugh over it now.
Next time an atheist or anyone else says "THIS happened, and ten years later, THAT happened! Explain that," say, "Since you seem to think you have the explanation, can you explain it?" Often the opponent won't even be able to describe a supposed mechanism. Then, you tell him or her why you think "THAT" happened -- if indeed it ever happened at all.
Until next time,
Slan,
Serena

Another Atheist Fallacy: The non sequitur

A non sequitur is something that doesn't follow. It's Latin. It means "It doesn't follow."

Atheists often try to use the non sequitur as they do the ad hominem, tu quoque and straw man tactics -- to distract. These and others, such as the tantrum, the unanswered question, and many more, are what we call red herrings, rabbit trails, or diversionary tactics.

The non sequitur can be subtle, as when you say, "God is merciful," and the other person replies, "Well, then, what about Darfur?" In these cases you have a difficult choice. You can appear to dodge what might sound at first hearing like a rational response, and come out looking as if you don't care about Darfur. You can follow the red herring and get lost in a side discussion and never get the topic you brought up discussed. You can try to compromise and risk looking flustered. Or you can call it out. Say, "That's a red herring, and I want to talk about God's mercy." If the opponent can actually connect the topics, she will probably then try to do so. It helps to remember you're right. This keeps you free of the mistake of assuming equivalence. You aren't winning if you get out of talking about her topic and she gets out of talking about yours, any more than a robbery victim is winning if she gets to go home early tonight and so does the robber. It's not the same. You aren't trying to hide anything and you have no reason to avoid any topic at all. Forge forward. Only forward. But be aware where you are.

It can be screamingly upfront, as when you say, "God is Love." And your opponent says, "Oh, yeah? What about the different translations? Doesn't that prove there can't be a worldwide flood? I mean, didn't you drop out of high school and only go back and get your Master's in Ancient History last June? Doesn't that tell you I'm right?" That makes it easy. Ask what that has to do with what you said. Repeat your statement verbatim. Repeat as many times as it takes to get back on topic or win a default game when your opponent runs away.

That's today's look at the non sequitur, another favorite atheist debate tactic.

Slan,

Serena

Today's atheistic fallacy: The straw man

Atheists love to style themselves "rational". Are they?
They posture as courageously sticking to the evidence wherever it may take them. Do they?
They decry those who believe in more than the physical world, while they claim to use their logical minds exclusively. Is that so?

Today we''ll look at a favorite tactic of atheists -- the straw man.
Long ago, boxers would take bets that a much bigger man could beat them. They rolled up their sleeves, squinted, spat and threw roundhouse punches that laid their opponents out flat, never to stand again.
Ringside gamblers would notice something yellowish poking out all over the fallen fighters: straw. They were clothes stuffed with dried grass and leaves to look like tall, strapping men, roaring to go, but there was no one there. Just dummies invented by the "winning" boxers, who ran with the cash in hand before the furious crowds could pound the money back out of them.


A straw man is such a dummy in debate, a position no one holds, and a straw man argument is one that works by knocking down a straw man: refuting what no one is saying in the first place.

A popular atheist straw man is "Christianity is the only ancient religion." They go to enormous trouble to refute this but no one said it. They try to distract the debate from the comparative merits of Christianity and other religions by posturing as teachers explaining to remedial students that there are others. We know that. We wish to talk about the differences because fact-finding is a process of distinction.

Some will knock down "Priests and preachers are perfect and have never done wrong things." Again, a straw man. No one thinks religious leaders are perfect people. We just find that they help us in valuable ways. Some are corrupt, abusive and unfit for the job. That is so in every profession. There are more child molesters per thousand men in the profession of teaching American public schools than in the priesthood many times over, and this country is hardly the only place teachers molest. But does that mean there is no truth to the multiplication table -- or even to an ethics text?

Be prepared as well to hear round denunciations of "Every word in the Bible is to be accepted literally and in every translation without reference to context or linguistic and literary traditions." Even among hardcore Bible-pounding Fundies who begin every discussion with jabs into that soft leather and a "Show me where it is in here!" you won't find that assertion. There is obviously poetry, metaphor, simile, analogy, allegory, cultural context, textual context, literary style and a little thing called an expression or several in those 73 books.

Keep an eye on your haystacks and straw bales when debating atheists, and never bet on a fight until you've shaken both men's hands.

Till next time,
Slan,

Serena

Welcome to Reason Supports Belief

Picture a long portico, lined by white columns. Sea winds glare at your right, and slippered footfalls resound to your left in the recesses of a palace in which only filmy curtains shadow the white tiles between the Ionian pillars. Reason: a breeze; clear light; cool breaths. Right?
Then think of a warm fireside,charred pine, sputtering pitch, a lullaby lulling along. Outside in the night the trees whistle. The hounds yawn. Faith; the fires of home; the tried and true; warm reminders of childhood. Religion. It's the opposite of the columns and air and coolness, right?
Isn't it?
Or is that the illusion that confuses everything?
Occam's Razor says we must not multiply entities beyond necessity. Detectives say, echoing Arthur Conan Doyle, that when we have eliminated the impossible we have the truth. How can we know what is necessary to explain what happens? Only when we know how things can and can't work, and what did happen. These rules, therefore, are the same.
A man walks on a peg leg for years, in front of thousands, some religious, some not very. He goes home. He has prayed and prayed. He walks through the street, no peg, just two legs, each mole and bruise where it had been before the wagon wheel maimed him so long before. He stumbles, tries again, and relearns his balance. Thousands see him. An investigation seeks to refute the reappearance of the long-buried part. It cannot. He has regrown a limb.
A young woman sleeps. She dreams of a relative she has met only a few times in her life, someone no one has mentioned to her in quite a while. The old woman pauses at a picnic table and asks her why she doesn't keep in touch. The phone rings, waking the young woman. It's her mother, telling her the old relative died in the night. She died while hosting a picnic. A family picnic.
A woman has shown her mysterious skin growth to her doctor and another person. It's the size of an egg and the same shape, a hen's egg half protruded from her chest. It hurts.
One day, she puts her hand lightly over it and asks God to remove it. By morning there is no sign of it.
On and on, stories pour through the riverbeds of time and social life. Most people feel sure they have encountered the supernatural. But those who do not want to accept it say they have heard nothing but feelings. They offer money to those who can make the supernatural act on command.
The supernatural acts everywhere but in the testing centers.
Why?
I believe, and will devote this blog to demonstrating the reasoning and evidence that say, there is a supernatural Entity Who is sovereign and answers to no one unless He chooses to for His own reasons. He will not act on the command of those who despise Him. When He demonstrates His power to such people He does so when they are ready to hear Him, and He knows when that is. I believe further that evidence supports the conclusion that this Entity is the most powerful of all supernatural entities, that some supernatural beings love Him, some hate Him, and He loves the natural beings, such as humans. I will also show that He does respond to requests in many cases but not to orders.
And I will show why I believe He does communicate with humanity, He does want to be known, He did create us and everything else, and He does love reason and wishes us to reason.