Jkrebs
Posts: 590
Joined: Sep. 2004
|
Yesterday we discussed the creationists tendency to be over-enamoured of math without regard to its relationship to reality. Another thing they are over-enamoured of is analogies, and Daniel King's post at UD, with accompanying quote, is excellent. Therefore, the IDists don't get it.
Here's the post, for posterity.
| Quote | Daniel King 08/02/2008 4:46 pm
Paul Giem and kairosfocus,
I trust that you will take the following in the helpful way that I intend it: Your arguments by means of analogy suffer from a logical problem that I learned about as a stripling. Neither of you would have passed my first year college course in logic if you had tried to defend such arguments.
Here is a verbatim quote from my textbook, Monroe C Beardsley, Practical Logic, 1950, Prentice Hall, Inc., New York.
| Quote | | An analogy doesn’t prove anything; it merely calls to mind a possibility that might not have been thought of without the analogy. It’s the experiment that counts in the end. Bohr’s classic model of the atom is only a picture. It has clarified some points about the atom, it has hinted at some good hypotheses; but if you take it as proving anything about the atom, you are misusing the analogy. You can be fooled just as much by it as were those early inventors who tried to construct airplanes that flapped their wings, on the analogy with birds. Analogies illustrate, and they lead to hypotheses, but thinking in terms of analogy becomes fallacious when the analogy is used as a reason for a principle. This fallacy is called the argument from analogy. |
The form of the argument from analogy is pretty clear from this simple example:
X has certain characteristics a, b, c
Y has the characteristics a, b, c
But Y also has other characteristics x, y, z.
Therefore: X has the characteristics x, y, z.
This from a professional logician, not a scientist.
You are both entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own logic. |
|
