When people say that e.g. it’s such a miracle that life on Earth exists because the slightest change in its distance from the Sun or gravity or the lack of water would make it impossible for us to be around – forgetting that our existence presupposes all this. Or an argument for God that it cannot be accidental that we have all the preconditions on Earth to sustain ourselvea and that the way nature and our body works is a miracle – but it’s precisely why it can work and there are many planets where life couldn’t form for the lack of these components.
In: 10
I believe what you’re looking for is the argument from incredulity. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity)
How rare something is or appears to be doesn’t tell you anything about whether it’s true or not. Therefore statements like X seems unlikely therefore it must be false are logical fallacies. A long the same lines you have other logical fallacies like it’s also irrelevant to whether something is true just because the majority of people believe it to be true, or that those that believe it to be true believe it vehemently.
A popular one doing the rounds lately off the back of the recent UAP hearing in the US congress is that if aliens could travel here then they wouldn’t be crashing due to the knowledge and skill required just to get here. The issue here is that to be able to accept that this claim is true you would need to demonstrate that these alien craft are incapable of crashing. Until then you cannot reasonably assert that it’s true. For example, no matter how minuscule the chance of a crash may be, you can explain any number of observed crashes simply by scaling the individual uptime or by running more in parallel which are both vectors that we would have no way to confirm and if we could confirm it the argument would be redundant anyway.
The issue stems from an incorrect construction/framing of the argument. For any proposition there isn’t the proposition and its antithesis. This is where the concept of the null hypothesis comes in. You don’t get to declare something as true or false unless you have strong evidence to suggest the affirmative or negative and so in the absence of that evidence you should rationally assume the null hypothesis, whatever that is in the terms of the argument.
Latest Answers