Evaluation of Michael Shermers atheism presentation

As I watched the presentation, I noticed that he was very influential through the use of many persuasive methods including logical fallacies. I will try to reveal both as I saw them.

The first method or technique I observed was something that I will call “Association”. This is where You try to make something appear false by associating it with other obviously false things This can be done through making sweeping generalizations or grouping things all together that don’t belong together. Our brain uses shortcuts to avoid having to process unnecessary large amounts of data. This can save us a lot of extra unnecessary thinking and free up a lot of time and energy, but this mental short-cut can also be manipulated to get people to come to inaccurate conclusions. An example of how this technique can be helpful is if you have a group of people who are hostile towards you, you can identify everyone in this group as hostile and not trust them. This could potentially save your life, but obviously it could lead to identifying people as hostile or untrustworthy, who are in fact trustworthy and not hostile at all.

Once you can group something into a non-trustworthy pile, you then employ a logical fallacy called the "Either/or" fallacy: This is a conclusion that oversimplifies the argument by reducing it to only two sides or choices. Rather than seeing reality on a gray scale of high to low evidence, it is rather organized by our minds in a false dichotomy of a black and white piles of data where the items with extremely low evidence are all clustered around and in the same pile as the items with very high evidence. Then your brain employs the thought short-cut of “association” and the item is wrapped up with the other items and labeled as garbage.

Here is an example: "Either you can go with 'natural' health options or you can go with 'unnatural' treatments. Natural health options include things like exercise and eating fruits and vegetables. Unnatural methods include things that doctors prescribe like thalidomide (a drug that caused a large number of babies to be born without limbs), blood-letting, and vaccines.". Thalidomide and bloodletting are very bad. Vaccines are very good. But since the three were put in the same pile, your brain may undergo a shortcut and label the vaccines as bad. It just associated something that has evidence for with things that do not have good supporting evidence to be helpful.

This association grouping technique was used by the atheist speaker. He said something to the effect of :"either you can believe in natural things like physics and science, or you can believe in things like aliens, witches, monsters, fortune tellers, Santa Claus, unicorns, God, elves, and the flying spaghetti monster." He divided every idea in the universe into two piles of "either/or" and then made people feel like if they believed in God, then they were in the same “pile” as believing in unicorns. People don't use logical fallacies because they are illogical, they use them because they are effective in persuading people to change their minds. This method is very effective-- utilizing thought shortcuts that bypass deeper reasoning processes by associating things together is a very effective way to get people to change their minds.

I want to point out why that application of the "either/or" fallacy and this association are welding some ideas of theories that definitely don’t belong in the same basket as others.

Rather than putting every idea for which there is not current empirical proof into the same basket as the tooth Fairy, it is more reasonable to designate ideas on a scale for relative amounts of evidence supporting the idea. How much evidence is there for something like-- elves? Essentially none. Have you met anyone who claimed to see an elf or found evidence for the existence of elves? Doubtful. Have you ever heard of anyone, ever meeting anyone who ever claimed to see an elf or even believed in elves or thought that there might be some evidence for them somewhere? Doubtful.

Let’s compare that to the evidence for God. Unnumbered masses have claimed to have had interactions with God, if even only 1% of them are legitimate-- it is still countless accounts. Records in nearly every continent and culture for all of human history include records of interactions with God and for the most part-- they all give strikingly similar accounts of their experiences (of course I can find exceptions to this).

What about logic? Is there a rational argument for the existence of God? Absolutely. There are billions of intricately designed living organisms existing in a system where if even the tiniest piece of it were altered, they would all die. The complexity of the living organisms exceeds comprehension. To assume that such circumstances and systems spontaneously assembled would be comparable to a billion computers spontaneously forming at the base of a volcano. Certainly, there is a logical case for an intelligent designer in light of so many people presenting evidence of His existence. Is there a reasonable or rational argument for magical toy-making elves? …Absolutely not.

Supernatural is defined as: "Of a manifestation or event attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature [as we currently understand them]"

A person can have a worldview that includes natural and/or supernatural components. Supernatural basically means “beyond current scientific understanding”, which is to say, their worldview may encompass some components that they feel are not able to be either confirmed nor ruled out by use of the scientific method. This could be because of the unavailability of a way to observe or control the involved subject or evidence. Other fields have a similar problem-- history for example. Things happened, but we cannot observe those things, it is impossible now to do so. So, we evaluate the evidence that we have and we make theories. Some theories are determined to be plausible and some are not.

“History” can go WAAAYY back: Why does anything exist at all? Either we pretend that this question doesn't exist, or we entertain a few theories that are attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding-- like dark matter, God, or “cosmic foam”—but then we can ask where those things came from. When we see extremely complex entities, we come up with theories like spontaneous assembly or intelligent design. But even "intelligent design" isn't necessarily straightforward. Was the complex entity directly designed, or was the solar system designed to manufacture complex entities... or was the universe designed to manufacture solar systems that would produce complex entities? So, if we assume that a human spontaneously assembled, we call this "natural" but why is it suddenly "supernatural" when we entertain any evidence that the universe may have also spontaneously assembled anything more intelligent than a human?

The thing about the "supernatural" pile is that it is a category which, by definition, shrinks as the circle of "natural" grows. Everything beyond scientific understanding is supernatural and everything that is within scientific understanding is natural.

If we discovered a strange but fully functional 5000-year-old computer sitting at the base of a volcano, we could choose to conclude that the elements in the volcano spontaneously melted together by random chance, or we could choose to conclude that something more intelligent designed the laptop. If you thought that something more intelligent designed the laptop, then would your theory need to be labeled as "supernatural" and would you now have to stand in the same group as someone who believes in witches and unicorns? Of course not. This is the implementation of the either/or fallacy. There are not only 2 circles. There are not only 2 types of worldviews. The most logical worldviews involve evidence and reason.

To take it back to our laptop analogy, imagine that there were masses of records all over the earth, in nearly every language and culture that documented a certain individual who made the laptop—but they gave him different names and there were some differences in the details about this person. You can still choose to believe that the laptop was formed naturally (spontaneously) because you don’t want to be in the same "supernatural" circle as people who still believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. Or maybe your perspective of worldviews has progressed a little bit past the limiting dichotomous way of seeing things in an “either/or” fallacy” pattern and you can choose what you believe based on logic and evidence.

Let’s go even deeper... Some conclude that the intelligent designer would be supernatural and spontaneous assembly would be natural-- but in reality, in an infinite universe combined with infinite time, it is just as probable for one thing to exist as another. Whether the endless possibilities of the universe produce a laptop or something that designs laptops (humans)-- or it produces humans, or something that designs humans ("God"), would be all explained by the same idea "spontaneous assembly". Rather than rejecting or accepting spontaneous assembly, the question should be: "Is there substantial evidence".

In summary, there is not just 2 circles; this does not need to be an "either/or" situation. It is much more complex than that, and when you dive deeper, the circles multiply and the borders get blurry. Ultimately it turns into a spectrum with lots of gray.

Another thing that the atheist speaker shared was a flurry of the most ridiculous examples of the silliest instances where people had attributed things to be by the hand of God. He shared stories about people seeing the outline of Jesus on their food or people who thought that sprinklers hit a window was an act of God because it was shaped like the virgin Mary. These things were portrayed by the man as being the "poster child" of all believers as their evidence for why they believed in God. He talked about how the primitive cave man brain interprets its surroundings to recognize patterns essential for survival and stated that this is caveman-like brain function is the source of all theology (thus, again associated religion with cave-man-like thinking or “unintelligence”). Thus, he made it appear as though he had knocked down the origin of all religious belief in a fatal blow, attempting to persuade his listeners that believing in God was comparable to a cavemen believing in the tooth fairy. When this man was presenting “Jesus on a taco” as the poster child for all believers, he was doing something called creating a “straw man”. This is an example of another popular fallacy called the strawman fallacy: This move oversimplifies another’s viewpoint and then attacks that hollow argument.

Near the end of his presentation he shared that his mother had Alzheimer’s and he watched her personality change because her brain was damaged, and then, he acted as if this experience gave definitive undeniable evidence—thus he oversimplified his absence of reasoning to a devastating degree and he stated something to the effect of: "this is how I know that there is no God and there is no such thing as a soul". Hastily drawing a conclusion without any evidence or reason—acting as if it was some kind of “Res ipsa loquitur” (the thing speaks for itself) kind of statement.

This is an example of the logical fallacy called “Hasty Generalization”: This is a conclusion based on insufficient or biased evidence. In other words, you are rushing to a conclusion before you have all the relevant facts.

This occurs with many people who find problems with their religious beliefs. They have a mistaken understanding about something or believe something that is partially wrong and partially right. Then they hastily come to a conclusion without properly evaluating the basis of their claims—much less the sources that these claims are based on. I know some people who see a bunch of problems with theism and rather than working through these problems, they just toss the whole theory into the trash. Maybe a religious leader behaved in a way that was corrupt or maybe there was a traditional idea that was way off base. Whatever it is, they rapidly; (without sufficient further extensive analysis or theory restructuring) toss massive amounts of evidence in the trash without even revaluating it, while saying "I don’t need to look at any evidence, I already know it’s all wrong". If a similar approach were to be taken with medical science, (with its atrocious history of things like blood-letting), the field of medicine might have been tossed in the trash. There are people who go from fully believing in God, to full blown atheist in a week without even cracking a book. And then, not a piece of evidence in the world can budge them (of course the fact that they won’t even peek at any evidence doesn’t help either). On another note... Imagine if we determined the efficiency and usefullness of families based on the number of problems we could identify about them... People do this same thing in regards to religion regularly and think it is logical. The fact that I can come up with a million problems with govenment, doesnt mean that government is still not the best model.

Towards the conclusion of his speech, the speaker demonstrated the most deplorable of all logical fallacies. He appealed to the popularity bandwagon as he communicated that universities and employers are going to stop hiring and promoting people who believe in God because it is becoming increasingly unpopular and people will think believers are stupid and ignorant and refuse to hire or promote them or publish their work. This fallacy is called:  Ad populum/Bandwagon Appeal: This is an appeal that presents what most people, or a group of people think, in order to persuade one to think the same way. Getting on the bandwagon is one such instance of an ad populum appeal. The long slew of logical fallacies concluded with him asking for money by selling magazine subscriptions and taking donations. This was the man who had dealt serious blows many peoples fatih.