Reason for rejection: The Mexican "bodies" were assembled from llama and human bones and had been seized by Peruvian customs years earlier; their presenter had previously announced a different alien corpse that turned out to be a mummified…

Agnosticism

"We cannot know, so believe" is backwards. Fideism, the leap of faith that Kierkegaard made a virtue of, treats the unknowability of the question as a licence. The correct inference runs the other way: a claim that cannot be supported is n…

Ghosts

Belief in ghosts remains common (roughly a third to a half of adults in UK and US surveys) because the brain is a pattern-detecting, agency-attributing machine, and the cost of a false positive ("something is there") was historically lower…

Miracles

Canonisation. A saint needs two miracles, and the miracle is established by a medical board declaring that it has no natural explanation. That is the Appeal to Ignorance written into procedure. The first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa…

Near-Death Experiences

Even granting the experience, the inference fails. "I had an experience I cannot explain, therefore I visited another realm" is the Appeal to Ignorance. The brain-based explanation accounts for the same data with one fewer universe (Occam'…

Argument from Biological Information

The argument is the Origin of Life Argument in a different coat. Once a replicator exists, selection accounts for every subsequent increase in information; the only gap is the first replicator, and that gap is not evidence of a mind (Appea…

Argument from Consciousness

This is the Appeal to Ignorance in its purest form. "We do not understand consciousness, therefore God" is the structure of every gap argument, and consciousness is the last large gap. It is being filled: the neural correlates of experienc…

Argument from Contingency

The argument, like its relatives, trades on the Appeal to Ignorance: we cannot say why there is something rather than nothing, therefore God. I do not know why the universe exists, and I see no reason to think that the question has an answ…

Argument from Miracles

"Unexplained" is not "inexplicable". That medicine cannot currently explain a remission does not make it supernatural; it makes it unexplained. To infer God from the gap is the Appeal to Ignorance.

Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason

I do not know why there is something rather than nothing. I see no reason to think the question has an answer of the kind the argument wants, and I decline to let my incomprehension be used as evidence (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance, Appeal t…

Fine-Tuning Argument

"Could have been otherwise" is not known. There is no theory of how the constants are set. They may be free parameters, or they may be fixed by a deeper theory we do not have, or they may be the only self-consistent values. Premise 3 asser…

First Cause Argument

Quantum events (vacuum fluctuations, radioactive decay) challenge the universality of causation as the argument understands it. 2. Rejection of premise 1, as it is contradicted by the conclusion. If everything needs a cause, the first caus…

Origin of Life Argument

"Not yet explained" is not "inexplicable". This is the god of the gaps in its purest surviving form (Appeal to Ignorance). The gaps have a record: the synthesis of urea in 1828 ended the doctrine that organic chemistry needed a vital force…

Religious Apologetics

The arguments share a family of errors: Equivocation on key terms ("cause", "nothing", "greater", "objective", "preserved", "law", "information"), special pleading that exempts God from the rule just used to establish him, the Appeal to Ig…

Teleological Argument - Argument from Design

"Chance" is dismissed on the basis of a probability we have no way of calculating. A probability requires a distribution, and we have a sample of one universe. See Appeal to Ignorance.

Transcendental Argument

The method is dishonest in practice. The presuppositionalist refuses to argue for their own position, and instead demands that the interlocutor prove the possibility of knowledge from scratch, treating any failure as a win. This is a Loade…

Theodicy

This proves too much. If we cannot judge God's reasons for permitting evil, we cannot judge that he is good either, and every inference from the world to God's character, including the ones the apologist likes, is cut off at the root. It i…

Creationism and Intelligent Design

Why it matters. Around 40 per cent of Americans tell pollsters that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years. Creationist schools exist in Britain, and a replica of the Ark stands in Kentucky as a theme p…

Evolution by natural selection

Appeal to Ignorance

Data and Evidence

In Sagan's words, the expression is a critique of the "impatience with ambiguity" exhibited by appeals to ignorance. Despite what the expression may seem to imply, a lack of evidence can be informative: where evidence would be expected if…

Philosophical naturalism

Naturalism does not say that everything is currently explained. It says that the unexplained is unexplained, not supernatural. To infer the supernatural from a gap in knowledge is the Appeal to Ignorance.

Problem of evil

Mysterious ways. God has reasons we cannot know. This abandons the claim that the god is good in any sense we understand, and makes the attribute unfalsifiable (Popper's Razor). It is also an Appeal to Ignorance.

Avi Loeb

Avi Loeb (born 1962), Israeli-American theoretical astrophysicist, long-serving chair of Harvard's astronomy department and a serious cosmologist, who since 2018 has argued that the interstellar object 'Oumuamua was probably an alien artef…

Personal Incredulity

Appeal to Ignorance

Burden of proof

A common move is to try to shift the burden: "prove there is no god", "prove the landings were not faked". The correct response is to decline. See the Appeal to Ignorance, which is the fallacy of treating an unmet burden as if it were evid…

Owens Tryptic of Ignorance

The point of the tryptic is that my incomprehension is total and even-handed. I cannot understand an infinite past, but I cannot understand a finite one either, so the fact that an infinite past is hard to imagine (Hilbert's Hotel) is no r…