What the BLOODY Hell? Am I going all WONKY again?

Ok, in my defense, and even before I launch into my defense, a premise:

I DESPISE it when I have to spend too much time on petty matters.

My JOB/GIG has me spending way too much time on petty matters. MADDENING that! But ok, I am going to start looking for an upgrade after New Year's (now is no time to try to jump ship, but after the New Year turns? Opps I digress . . . .)

Anyway, my brain is dying for something to at least occupy it in some worthy tangent.

So I am going to post some logic/rhetoric/heuristic stuff here.

I am not saying you, dear reader, need to read this, but I saying I need to think about such about now. Ok here goes:



Spotting arguments

Spotting an argument is harder than spotting premises or a conclusion. Lots of people shower their writing with assertions, without ever producing anything you might reasonably call an argument.

Sometimes arguments don't follow the pattern described above. For example, people may state their conclusions first, and then justify them afterwards. This is valid, but it can be a little confusing.

To make the situation worse, some statements look like arguments but aren't. For example:

"If the Bible is accurate, Jesus must either have been insane, an evil liar, or the Son of God."


That's not an argument; it's a conditional statement. It doesn't state the premises necessary to support its conclusion, and even if you add those assertions it suffers from a number of other flaws which are described in more detail in the Atheist Arguments document.

An argument is also not the same as an explanation. Suppose that you are trying to argue that Albert Einstein believed in God, and say:

"Einstein made his famous statement 'God does not play dice' because of his belief in God."
That may look like a relevant argument, but it's not; it's an explanation of Einstein's statement.

To see this, remember that a statement of the form "X because Y" can be re-phrased as an equivalent statement, of the form "Y therefore X." Doing so gives us:

"Einstein believed in God, therefore he made his famous statement 'God does not play dice'.

Now it's clear that the statement, which looked like an argument, is actually assuming the result which it is supposed to be proving, in order to explain the Einstein quote.

Furthermore, Einstein did not believe in a personal God concerned with human affairs -- again, see the Atheist Arguments document.


http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html



Ahhhhh!

That was refreshing for me. Hope it was for you too!