http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Aij0-1aYk&feature=watch_response
So imagine that you have a daughter who’s pretty young, who hasn’t even reached adolescence, yet. Imagine that she has an interest in sports, so you find yourself taking her to soccer practice. Translating for my subscribers in other countries, that’s football practice.
Imagine that one day, while practicing, she manages to twist her ankle. How do you react?
Well, if you’re the typical parent, you feel compelled to get her some much-needed medical attention. So there you are, in the waiting room at the hospital or clinic, and to pass the time, you have a conversation with someone else, and one thing that comes up is your daughter’s ankle.
After hearing your situation, this character says, “So your love is conditional? You can’t accept your daughter as she is? Are you so vain that you feel the need to correct every little imperfection? No one’s perfect.” (JACKASS ALERT!!!)
What’s wrong with this knucklehead’s reasoning? The problem here is this complete and fundamental mischaracterization of your situation. You’re there, at the hospital, because your daughter is injured and in pain. You are there to get your daughter’s injury treated because your daughter deserves two functional ankles; not in service to your own vanity. You’re there to meet your responsibilities as a parent, and the failure to provide proper medical care for a child is a form of child abuse.
I present to you the strawman fallacy.
Now imagine, instead, that you’ve just read a book about a lot of underhanded dealings between members of the President’s staff, members of congress, and various corporate officials. These dealings usually entailed the corporate officials receiving favors and the political figures receiving money. To test the book’s claims, you randomly select ten events from the book and seek independent verification of them.
After successfully finding that confirmation, you conclude that the book must be true. You subsequently sigh in dismay and disenchantment.
A few days later, you find yourself commenting about all this to a friend and someone nearby overhears and jumps into your conversation, saying, “If you hate this country so much, why don’t you go live in Russia or China
Whoa. Who said anything about hating the country? This is another exercise in mischaracterization.
One who cares about a child wants to do something to mend that child’s injury, and one who cares about a country wants to do something about that country’s problems with corruption.
It’s another strawman fallacy when the creationist and/or theist says to me, “Surely it’s absurd to believe that the Universe came from nothing.” Yes. It’s absurd. That’s the problem with creationism. Creationism posits a god who created everything from nothing. This absurdity is one of the reasons I’m not a creationist.
The word “special” is often used as a euphemism in place of the word “retarded.” This euphemism comes to mind every time I come across another clip from a “special” made by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. In the beginning of one, Cameron explains that what you are about to see had no script, no production, no filming, etc, but that there was instead, a Big Bang in the production studio.
Comfort responds by pointing out how absurd such a suggestion is and this is presented as a refutation of the Big Bang theory. I’ll continue this video when my headache passes.
Intermission
Okay. Let’s clarify a few things about the Big Bang theory. First, this label (Big Bang) came from a critic, not an advocate. Second, this theory was not formulated to answer the question, “How did the Universe come into existence?” It was formulated in response to the question, “What events and/or processes are responsible for the Universe’s ongoing expansion?”
The Universe is expanding. We know this because if we take a telescope powerful enough to see other galaxies, we see that very few intergalactic distances are decreasing, while the overwhelming majority are increasing. With the occasional exception, the galaxies are moving away from one another. Tomorrow, they will be further apart than they are today. Today, they are further apart than they were yesterday.
That means that yesterday, they were less far apart. The day before that, even less. Before that, less still. This is strong enough evidence to suggest that the further back in time one looks, the closer they must have been, until one reaches a point at which they are all together, forming an object with so much mass that its gravitation must be of a magnitude we can only assess mathematically.
Now here we’re getting into quantum physics which is a really weird field of science. As I understand it, grasping it entails restructuring one’s whole way of thinking about things on a fundamental level; a level more fundamental than most of us ever realize is possible. So I don’t know the precise process postulated here, but when we first began speculating about what manner of process could hurl the different parts of this primordial particle away from each other with the necessary momentum with which the galaxies are moving away from one another today, the process postulated, it was determined, would leave a background radiation which, today, would be about 3 ma. We designed the necessary equipment to detect this radiation and we found it. It measured at 2.78 ma; close enough for confirmation.
So the Big Bang is an explanation for the ongoing expansion of the Universe; not its existence in the first place or the arrangement of its matter into galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, moons, etc.
So think about it. What does it mean when one’s efforts to use a hammer to do a task for which the screwdriver was invented are unsuccessful? Does it mean that there’s something wrong with the hammer? Of course not.
When Ben Stein points out that evolution does not explain the origin of life, does this indicate a weakness in evolution? Of course not. Evolution was never intended to explain the origin of life. It was intended to explain the diversification of life; the origin of species, hence the title of Darwin
Neither evolution nor gravity explains the origin of life because neither was ever intended to. The Big Bang theory does not explain the arrangement of matter in the Universe into objects because it was never intended to. If one insists on misusing a tool, it’s not the tool’s fault. If one insists on trying to use a theory to explain something that theory was never intended to explain, the resulting lack of success is due to weaknesses in the theory’s application, not the theory itself.
These very weaknesses depend completely on the strawman fallacy.
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