The chair of a course on religion, philosophy and ethics at the University of Gloucestershire (being English, they'll pronounce that "glostersheer"), David Webster, is calling for people to give the worst argument in Britain. Go leave yours. Caveat: They already have the full complement of creationist nuttery, and anyway most of it's American, which is too easy.
Personally, I think that, as there are an infinite number of ways to mess up an inference, there is no single "worst" argument, so this is really about aesthetics.
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How do you think Gloucester is pronounced in Massachusetts?
Russell - probably with a silent Q.
The P is silent, as in...
Your comment reminded me of this ...
If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field. --Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Great quote!
My version of Rick's view: The reason faith is poor epistemology is because it amounts to choosing, at random, from all possible beliefs, which are overwhelmingly false. Some would say the false are infinitely larger than the true, in which case the probability of a faith belief being true approaches zero. I know the mathematicians get picky on me, but I think the truth is in there.
I'd say that this is what Tolstoy was getting at as well, albeit with a more limited scope, when he utterred his famous opening to Anna Karenina: "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".
And what on Earth did Tolstoy ever know about happy families?
Anyway, since this post has not asked solely for British examples (nor in fact for any examples at all), I volunteer my favorite, which can be found in the work of the noted scientific expert Michael Crichton:
They can't even predict tomorrow's weather, and they want you to believe they know it will be warmer 50 years from now?
The Australian podcast Philosphers Zone did a broadcast on this topic a year or so ago. Here's the transcript
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2007/2004685.htm
My preference in bad arguments goes to those which demonstrate that the supposed conclusion is false. With a bonus point for those which are "straw man" arguments, thus managing to demonstrate something which no one maintains.
being English, they'll pronounce that "glostersheer"
Actually John that's only the way you would pronounce it if you are some sort of poncy posh git! If you are a real normal English bloke like, then you shorten all the syllables and run it all together. The first one becomes a glottal stop and the other two get half swallowed producing something like a hiccup with three lumps "Glo'ta'sha"!
Thony C is correct: that's how we say it here in Gloucestershire - but maybe with a bit of an 's' - "Glos't'sha"
[btw - thanks for the interest in our blog, and the arguments there - Dave]
Psmith or pshrimp.
Is there a more obvious reference I should have spotted?
The worst argument ever has to be those apologetics that say "You cannot deny God, because before denying God, you must accept God. You cannot argue against something that doesn't exist." Pure sophistry. On the science side, it's gotta be:
"If we evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?"
It presumes evolution is some sort of magic force that effects all beings simultaneously.
My nominee for the dumbest argument relative to the serious attention people give it has to go to the Ontological argument, the greatest testimony of desire over intellect the world has ever seen.
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Well, that seems a little less than entirely fair. The choosing isn't experienced as 'at random' for most people. Regardless of how people experience their choosing, it's historically contingent, of course, but nobody has an Archimedean point from which they could weigh it all up and conclude, "Yup, historical contingency itself is random, all right."
In fact, if evolutionary mechanisms are to any extent present in the development of beliefs and other social formations (which seems to me likely, though not of course in some awful Herbert Spencer-y way), then the faith-tradition one's most disposed to believe is likely anything but random. I certainly don't say that to suggest that one OUGHT to choose faith in one or another tradition, but a broadly evolutionary perspective, as it seems to me, would have at least to acknowledge that different faith-traditions have been adaptive under different environmental conditions (on which they have themselves also acted; see viz. Weber in _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_).
I think that William James' "The Will to Believe" is particularly cogent on this point, though I also don't feel he's really nailed anything down very firmly there.
I'm not sure that (traditional religious) faith is necessarily poor epistemology, though I don't find a lot of faith-tradition's arguments about how to produce knowledge very compelling, myself. At any rate, it seems to me that a stronger evolutionary argument would be that faith-traditions represent mechanisms that have, by and large, ceased to be adaptive. I'm not sure even that's substantiable, frankly, but I offer it in the spirit of something like collaboration (while disagreeing entirely on the 'random choice' hypothesis).
To me, it seems the really interesting question here is how and when we view a certain perspective as adaptive.
Sorry, John. I was responding to Science Avenger's post #6: "The reason faith is poor epistemology is because it amounts to choosing, at random, from all possible beliefs, which are overwhelmingly false. Some would say the false are infinitely larger than the true, in which case the probability of a faith belief being true approaches zero."