Friday Fallacies

Rather than post up my thoughts for the day, on Fridays I think I'm going to hit on and describe a common logical fallacy.

Keeping on the topic of my prior posts, today's fallacy is the argumentum ad ignoratiam - more commonly known as argument from ignorance, also known as the god of the gaps.

The best example of this fallacy appears in the common term for it - god. The concept of god itself is, in fact, an argument from ignorance. When you do not have an answer to a question, and admit that you do not have an answer, and then make up an answer and assert it must be true because you do not have an answer - that is an argumentum ad ignoratiam.

Speaker 1: How did the universe begin?
Speaker 2: Well, since the universe is so complex, and we don't understand how it was created, obviously God was the only one who could create it.

You see how it works? It's literally making up an answer out of ignorance, and asserting that it must be true because of the complexity of the problem.

If we wanted to be technical, all scientific hypotheses began as an argumentum ad ignoratiam - but they quickly move beyond that stage when you offer valid evidence to support the concept.

The difference between science and 'god' is that the evidence presented for science has some sort of solid reasoning behind it, while god simply avoids reasoning by placing itself outside the laws of the universe.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.