A Word on Logic

I believe it is worth circling around to some articles about logic and thinking.  I’ve previously written about evidence, logic, the watchmaker argument, personal projection, shifting goalposts, making unjustified excuses, the inaccuracy of personal experience, evidence again, jumping to conclusions, false dichotomies, and other topics of intelligent thinking and logic sprinkled in.

But I want to specifically discuss logic.  I SAY things like “your logic is faulty”, or “you didn’t support that statement” or “that is a fallacy” to people, and often it just rolls off their back as if I said nothing at all.  This is absurd.  If I were a restaurant owner preparing for a banquet, and I was told “we have no food”, you would hear the proverbial needle scratch as every person suddenly stopped dead in their tracks and stared.  Faces would pop with shock and fear.  Mouths would dangle open.  Blood pressure would rise.  Pins would set themselves down carefully as to not cause a riot.

You can’t have a banquet without food!  I don’t care if you have chairs, tables, nice flatware, a singer and piano player.  You have to have food.  Arguing without logic is like having a banquet without food.  You can say all the crap you want, but if you don’t put it together with logic, your conclusions are starving.  And it really shouldn’t be that hard.  After all, sound conclusions really only need two things.  1) Accurate facts, and 2) Sound logic.  I’ve covered facts in my evidence articles.  Let’s tackle logic.

A primer

Logic tells a story.  You can not tell a good story with plot holes, lack of information, and by changing the subject.  You have to fill in all of the blanks.  You have to paint the picture.  You have to explain the entire scene.  If you have not done this, then your picture is not complete, and your logic is faulty.

Have you ever been in a hurry and blurted something out to someone, and forgot to fill in the details?  “Get here quick or Bill will miss his plane!”  What?  What do I have to do with Bill missing his plane?  Now, in our everyday lives, often times we are already aware of some of the details.  For starters, we might know who Bill is.  If we know who he is, we also probably know his relationship to us and the dynamic of that relationship.  So let’s just say Bill is an employee and we are in charge of buying his company-purchased plane ticket.  We still don’t understand the whole story yet, but knowing the relationship is a key piece of information.  And without this key piece of information, nothing else we learn will help make any sense out of this story.

In logic, these are often called “assumptions.”  It doesn’t mean we’re making something up, it means it’s a fact that’s already been established.  And if a fact isn’t established, we can’t use it as an assumption.  Take note of that, please.

But we still don’t know what we have to do with Bill missing his plane.  This is what it means when someone says that you haven’t supported your conclusion.  It means you didn’t paint the whole picture.  And in logic, you paint the picture by specifically mentioning facts and premises.

Using our previous story, we have so far built the story that we purchased Bill’s plane ticket using company funds, and…..   And we don’t know.  So let’s build this out.  We are the purchaser of the tickets, and we therefore get confirmation of the purchases in our email.  The person asking us to come quick is at the office and just spoke with Bill on the phone.  Bill is at the airport but lost his tickets, the counter says if he can provide a confirmation number they can issue another ticket.  Bill and us are the only people that have the confirmation number in our email.  Bill doesn’t have access to his email at the airport, but he is standing by for a call.

Now we understand the urgency.  Now we know what we have to do with Bill missing his plane.  The entire picture has been painted.

A little structure

We discuss structure in logic because we often go abstract.  When we’re talking about Bill and his plane ticket, we’re pretty at ease knowing which influences which and what controls what, etc.  But in the abstract, we need to think about the rules and order a bit more.  I’m not going to go into any detail about structure in this article, but it’s good to know that the more complicated or abstract a concept, adhering to the structure becomes very important.

A quick example to illustrate this.  All Harley-Davidson motorcycles are motorcycles.  All Indian motorcycles are motorcycles.  Not all motorcycles are Harley-Davidsons or Indians.  The Harley’s and Indians are a subset of motorcycles.  It is therefore inaccurate (and logically unsound) for me to argue a point about Harleys when I mean motorcycles, or motorcycles when I mean only Indians.  This seems pretty obvious, but let’s change the topic a bit.  Instead of using the words “Indian”, “Harley”, and “motorcycle”, let’s use the words “miracle”, “supernatural phenomenon”, and “unusual phenomenon”.  You may know where I’m going with this.

If you are able to identify something as an unusual phenomenon, you can’t then just refer to it as a miracle.  Miracle is a subset of unusual phenomenon.  If something unusual happens, simply calling it a miracle is as logically unsound as just calling every motorcycle a Harley.

There are lots of structure rules which I can get into later.  Just know that structure is actually important.

Fallacies

If you are a religious person talking to a non religious person, you’ve probably heard this a lot.  Someone says you are using a logical fallacy.  I’ll dig deeper into fallacies in a later article, but I would like to point out something very, very important.  Logical fallacies are not some “technicality” that helps us atheists (or scientists, or whoever) ignore the thing you are trying to say.  A logical fallacy means you have screwed up somewhere in painting the picture, and now the picture is a mess.  You have painted a disfigured blotch of paint, mud, and crayon, and you’re trying to call it a Picasso.

There are two basic categories of fallacies: Formal and informal.  Formal fallacies are those that screw up the logical structure of the argument.  We can use the motorcycles.  Since all Harley’s are motorcycles, and all Indians are motorcycles, all Harley’s are therefore Indians.  Wrong!  This is a formal fallacy.  Which also means, yes, the phrase “all supernatural phenomenon are miracles” is also a formal logical fallacy.  You’re welcome.

There are also informal fallacies, where the problem is not the logical structure of the argument, but the premise itself is flawed.

Let’s get back to Bill.  In Bill’s case, we were able to help him because the confirmation email also came to us.  Also at the same time, there is another firm next door that also has a passenger at the airport that lost his ticket as well.  He also calls back to the person in the company that is responsible for the travel budget and wants them to rush to the office.  His logic is “That company did it, therefore my company can do it.”  He even goes so far as to tweet it out that there is no need for business travelers to bring tickets to the airport, since your company rep can just give you the confirmation number when you get there.  Other people stop bringing their tickets to the airport.

A bunch of people then miss their flight because they fell trap to the fallacy of anecdotal evidence.  Just because something happened once for someone doesn’t mean it is representative of everyone.  Let’s say most companies require either employees or their administrative assistants (if they have one) to do the purchasing themselves, and just submit a reimbursement form upon completion of travel.  They would have no way of knowing what the confirmation number is.  Therefore the conclusion is completely wrong.

I’d like to just point that out again for emphasis.  The conclusion was completely wrong.  People were stranded at the airport because they fell victim to a logical fallacy.  Using a logical fallacy is not just being “technically” wrong, it means completely wrong.

So why do you keep doing it?

When someone like me, who doesn’t believe in your religion, hears you defending your religion with a lack of evidence, lack of logical structure, or overabundant use of logical fallacies, I don’t believe you.  It isn’t that I “don’t like the answer” or “want to sin”, I don’t believe you because logical fallacies lead to wrong answers.  I don’t want the wrong answer.  Let’s diagram this:

Logical fallacy use = low confidence in correct answer
You use a logical fallacy = I have low confidence you have the correct answer.

Now, I’m pretty confident that there are no good arguments for the existence of god.  If there were, someone would have mentioned one of them by now.  On the flip side, if I were arguing in favor of something that was not true, it makes sense I would have to use factually and logically broken arguments.

So why do religious people keep ignoring logic and facts? Why do they brush off serious faults in their reasoning?  It’s because reality is not on their side.

The Spartan Atheist