Bad thoughts 5

More fallacies.

9. Begging the question. This one caught me by surprise. It boils down to countering an argument by assuming something with which your opponent disagrees. That is, you are begging the question. Sounds simple and obvious, but it is more incisive than expected. Let's take marijuana as an example. One side says: "It should be legalised." The other side says: "No it should be banned because it is harmful to you." This begs the question by assuming what is disputed. How? Well, because it presumes there are no benefits to marijuana. And surely, to make a decision the costs vs. benefits should be considered. Clearly, for those who advocate marijuana the benefits outweigh the costs (whether in monetary terms, or adverse effects to their own health). So the side that wants to ban it should indicate why a specific cost - it being harmful to a user - is a sufficient reason to ban it. And not assume that the supposed harmful effect is a sufficient cost to outlaw marijuana. Otherwise it merely begs the question.

10. Coincidence. This made me laugh. The most colourful example is that of people who observe the incredible unlikelihood of the exact conditions existing in the universe and on earth to allow humans to exist and conclude that, therefore, God exists. Jamie Whyte demonstrates that this is no less than saying that every lottery is rigged. Look at the small probability of Bob winning the lottery, yet he did. Unless the lottery was rigged in his favour. So therefore the lottery was rigged in his favour.
The problem lies in the conceit of the individual who reckons that somehow he or she is so special that someone must have rigged the universe for our sake. Well consider even a small fluctation in the solar system's circumstances - we would not have been here, but something else would have, and that would have been just as unlikely to exist. Therefore it was rigged (as well!). And so on ad infinitum.

Clever and quite persuasive. I would like to add that life as it is known on earth appears to be pretty "special" (in a non-religious sense of the word), and rocks and other elements fairly common. I.e. I would not presume that fluctuations in the origins of the solar system (or milky way, etc) would necessarily have caused anything as complex as life as we know it on earth. But perhaps I'm merely exhibiting my lack of deep understanding of cosmology and physics. But even if life on earth is an unlikely complexity, and most fluctuations would just cause a rearrangement of the elements rather than a complexity, then the same proof would still hold as above. Only it'd be more like saying that there are only two players in the lottery - Bob, who buys one ticket, and Bobo who buys the 15 million odd other tickets and has a funny knack of winning.