My favourite podcast, SGU has a list of 20 common logical fallacies up on their website. It’s a brilliant list; you tend to come across quite a few of them in everyday arguments.
Ad ignorantiam: The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don’t know that it isn’t true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.
Argument from Personal Incredulity: I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. Creationists are fond of arguing that they cannot imagine the complexity of life resulting from blind evolution, but that does not mean life did not evolve.
Confusing association with causation: This is similar to the post-hoc fallacy in that it assumes cause and effect for two variables simply because they are correlated, although the relationship here is not strictly that of one variable following the other in time. This fallacy is often used to give a statistical correlation a causal interpretation.
False dichotomy: Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.
Straw man: Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.
The moving goalpost: A method of denial arbitrarily moving the criteria for “proof” or acceptance out of range of whatever evidence currently exists.
Check out the entire list. It’ll probably come in handy the next time you’re matching wits with someone as logically dissonant as Bill Maher.
From what I’ve seen of Bill Maher, I’d say he exploits these fallacies rather than employing them himself. Have you seen Religulous? In that, most of the arguments for religion are sort of the ad ignorantiam menioned above.
Oh no, I do know that Maher exploits his opponents' logical fallacies.
What I can't reconcile is the self proclaimed *skeptic Maher* and the *alternative medicine/quackery subscribing Maher*. You really start to wonder what his line of reasoning would have been for him to embrace atheism (antitheism or apatheism even).
Thanks for the link – if you haven’t already, check out dbskeptic.com and skeptoid.com
I do listen to skeptoid. Will check out dbskeptic. Thanks!
I think he has a point on a lot of things- religious people should think about what they believe and why they believe it. I particularly think he made a good point about some televangelists. However, it would be a hasty generalization to say that all televangelists are necessarily like him. I prefer to think that everything is really more complicated than it appears- meaning that individuals and circumstances can vary.