Friday, February 07, 2014

Bill Nye's Logic Fallacy

Each time Nye contrasted “Ken Ham’s creation model” of a young world with “us in the scientific community,” he committed the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle wrote in Discerning Truth that this fallacy is committed “when an arguer defines a term in a biased way to protect his argument from rebuttals.”....
What did he do? He essentially redefined the word Scotsman to insulate his argument against virtually any example that refutes it....
Nye was wrong to assume that no real scientist could ever hold the creation model, since scores of real scientists have and do...[E]arly creation scientists forged the paths of each of today’s major scientific branches of inquiry, like Isaac Newton’s physics,4 Matthew Maury’s oceanography, Louis Pasteur’s immunology,5 Michael Faraday’s electromagnetism,6 and George Carver’s agriculture.7,8 Are we to believe that Newton and Pasteur were not real scientists?
~Brian Thomas, Institution for Creation Research

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