The young-Earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis (AiG) has started publishing articles explaining various logical fallacies, a practice not unlike a blood-stained lion defending vegetarianism. In each article, the author—Dr. Jason Lisle—attempts to show how biologists and other scientists who support evolution commit these fallacies. That Dr. Lisle frequently contradicts himself and misrepresents both scientists and the logical fallacies can almost go unsaid, given AiG’s reputation for world-class, straight-to-the-shitbag journalism.

I would have written this rebuttal sooner, but I was sick for the past few days and I was pretty sure attempting to read this nonsense would induce even more vomiting than I was already experiencing. At any rate, Dr. Lisle’s second article discussed the fallacy of reification. Briefly, when an abstract idea is treated as concrete or physical, the fallacy of reification has been committed. What I find ironic is that I almost feel as if I am reifying Dr. Lisle in discussing his article and attributing intentions and beliefs to him, as his commentary is so stupid and outrageously wrong that I often wonder whether he is not, in fact, some sort of inanimate man-shaped mechanical object made out of straw and mud.

Now, the examples of the fallacy of reification offered by Dr. Lisle are incredibly laughable.  One example of the fallacy is the following sentence: “The evidence speaks for itself.” He then argues that this is fallacious when evolutionists* say it because evidence cannot actually physically speak, quite oblivious to the fact that no evolutionist who makes this remark actually believes that. Naturally, this phrase is only a fallacy of reification if its metaphorical sense (in which evidence physically speaks) is essential to the validity of the logical argument. For instance, the following argument would commit the fallacy of reification: “The only reasonable interpretation for the existing evidence is that evolution is true, because the evidence for evolution speaks for itself by physically saying, in a squeaky, ethereal voice and with mystical vocal cords, ‘Evolution is truuuuuuueeeeeeeeeee!’ in between bouts of making statues of itself weep and appearing on burnt grilled-cheese sandwiches.” Whenever someone who is not completely insane uses this phrase, of course, they are not being literal. Dr. Lisle is only attacking a strawman here. He’s tilting at windmills. Please take your crazy, Dr. Lisle, and sell it somewhere else. (Watch, he’ll accuse me of reifying “crazy” in the previous sentence.)

Another example also pertains to a talking concept, his obsession with the capacity for speech no doubt stemming from his belief in a talking snake:

“Creationists say the world was created supernaturally, but science says otherwise.” Here the person has attributed personal, concrete attributes to the concept of science. [...]

Is Dr. Lisle’s head filled with styrofoam peanuts, glass, and assorted other electrical insulators? How does he even manage to breathe on his own? Or does he have to think very carefully before he does that, too, or else risk accidentally setting himself on fire when he simply means to inhale? Show me just one instance in which the theory of evolution is justified on the basis of the concept of science physically speaking, you ignorant goon!

Even so, if scientists really did believe that science could speak, that beliefs could be “held” in one’s hand, or that the moon was made of omnipotent green cheese, this would have no bearing on the validity or empirical truth of evolution. Nowhere in On the Origin of Species, for instance, does Darwin set forth to prove evolution by describing how, one mystical night, science and evidence came riding toward him atop unicorns made of licorice, both entities wearing toilets for hats, who then informed him with booming voices that evolution is true because they say so, and also that they’d like to please touch his really wicked beard.

But Dr. Lisle’s most stunningly retarded example is the following:

Sometimes in an argument, an evolutionist will say something like this: “Nature has designed some amazing creatures.” This sentence commits the fallacy of reification because nature does not have a mind and cannot literally design anything.

Of course, as any reasonable person can recognize, Dr. Lisle once again has not demonstrated that this remark is supposed to be taken literally because the ignorant boob has not bothered to show how it would be situated and interpreted within a logical argument. Moreover, it is blindingly obvious that an “evolutionist” would not intend a literal interpretation of this statement! Those who accept evolution believe living creatures resulted from non-conscious selection pressures and genetic mutations; someone who insisted that a conscious, personal entity named nature literally designed living organisms would be endorsing a form of creationism, not evolution!  How did Dr. Lisle become so incompetent at using language that he can claim those who accept evolution also reject evolution?

Obviously the problem here isn’t that scientists commit the fallacy of reification; the problem is that Dr. Lisle possesses the linguistic aptitude of a preschooler raised by deaf-mute wolves. His face is planted so far up the ass of his creationist “worldview” that he is pathologically driven to interpret every rhetorical or poetic remark by a scientist as a fallacy of reification, even when that interpretation makes no fucking sense at all and implies that evolutionists do not accept evolution. It’s time to plan an intervention, before this guy overdoses on stupid.

Dr. Lisle also has idiotic things to say about natural selection! He claims that it implies nature has thoughts and feelings and consciously selects which organisms survive. Interestingly, Dr. Lisle is not as big a douchebag when talking about natural selection, because he writes, “This phrase is so commonly used that we might not call it a fallacy providing the meaning is understood by all.” He finally understands! No reasonable person (except a dim-witted creationist) is going to interpret “natural selection” as implying that nature can think and literally select things. Similarly, no reasonable person would interpret any of his other examples of this fallacy in a manner that reifies the problematic term. Somehow, Dr. Lisle thinks that most people would be intelligent enough to not reify “natural selection” (a term misunderstood by plenty of Americans if poll data is any indication), but he thinks creationists are so stone-dumb that they will interpret “The evidence speaks for itself,” as implying that evidence physically speaks. Does he really have such a low opinion of his creationist readers that he believes they can’t understand such a well-known, oft-used phrase? I suppose the worry isn’t so far-fetched; people who interpret the Bible literally probably do have difficulty distinguishing between the metaphorical and the literal, in addition to asses and elbows.

The reason Dr. Lisle seems to think it is acceptable to attribute literal interpretations to the obviously metaphorical statements of evolutionists is rather odd. Here are his own words in explanation:

However, when reification is used as part of a logical argument, it is a fallacy. The reason for this is that using such a poetic expression is often ambiguous and can obscure important points in a debate.

Apparently, if a term is ambiguous and can be potentially misinterpreted and reified in a way that obscures the important points, then the argument is fallacious. Not surprisingly, this is not quite correct. Reification is a fallacy if and only if the validity of the argument depends on the switching of the ambiguous term from an abstract sense to a concrete, physical one—one cannot claim that an argument is fallacious merely because it is ambiguous, particularly when dealing with arguments written in a nonmathematical language like English. If that were the case, one could argue that arguments using the words “live” or “right” are always instances of the fallacy of equivocation because the meanings of these words are ambiguous (“right” can refer to a direction, being correct, and so on). Because languages are always open to ambiguity, demanding that an argument be free of ambiguity, lest it be fallacious, is completely unreasonable. Of course, Dr. Lisle has to endorse such an unreasonable standard because it’s the only way he can falsely misinterpret the metaphorical remarks of evolutionists as fallacious. Because I’m an asshole, I’m going to do the same to him, using some of the sentences and phrases from his article:

Dr. Lisle said, “This sentence commits the fallacy of reification…”  Look! He is implying that sentences are capable of performing physical actions, as “commits” frequently implies performing a physical act! What a foolish moron, so readily using ambiguous language that reifies ideas!

Dr. Lisle said, “Science is a conceptual tool that can be used properly or improperly. It says nothing.”  Oh!  Here Dr. Lisle is implying that science says nothing. That is, science can physically speak, and it chooses not to say anything. Only a complete moron thinks science has the capacity to talk or choose not to talk, Dr. Lisle! You should have watched out for that ambiguity there, you fucking shrivel-headed loon!

Dr. Lisle said, “People draw conclusions about evidence and verbalize their thoughts.” Ah! The word “draw” is ambiguous here. He’s saying that people draw pictures of conclusions! Only a swollen-assed baboon would reify the abstract phrase “draw conclusions” (which should mean something like “decide”) into the physical act of drawing with crayons!

As can be seen, when you willfully apply misinterpretations to people’s words merely because they could potentially be misinterpreted, it becomes incredibly easy to find what Dr. Lisle calls “logical fallacies”. Rather than continue in this deep, deep vein, however, I will instead revert back to using real logic to argue against Dr. Lisle, as opposed to the fantasy-land, bullshit variety of logic Dr. Lisle has conjured into his muddled head.  Of course, all of this insufferable stupidity has caused me to wonder whether Dr. Lisle even understands what he is writing. Perhaps he is locked in a Chinese room and merely fed instructions about how to mechanically convert his native language (Idiotish) into English, using only the manipulation of symbols.  For some reason, just calling him a moron doesn’t seem adequate enough—they are at least capable of some rudimentary understanding.

To summarize, Dr. Lisle’s examples of the fallacy of reification are strawmen, as no scientist believes that evidence or science physically speaks. His standard for noting these remarks as reifications is so broad as to include his own remarks and any number of other benign, easily understood phrases in the English language. Finally, his insistence that evolutionists believe a conscious entity named nature designed living organisms is so foolishly ridiculous that it’s a wonder his brain did not implode upon formulating that argument.

For an analysis of this article that wasn’t written by a cranky skeptic who takes out all of his rage on creationists, be sure to check out Ziztur’s assessment, as well.

*Those who believe in evolution are better labeled as “scientists”, “scientifically literate”, or “people who aren’t utter morons”—but I will borrow the creationists’ use of the word “evolutionist” for clarity’s sake.

The creationist organization Answers in Genesis (AiG) is perhaps best known as the group that brought us the creation museum, an impending sense of doom for the future of humanity, and the world’s largest bucket of cognitive dissonance (only slightly smaller than the world’s largest ball of twine).  However, I was delighted to learn that AiG is apparently branching out from its expertise in stupidity; one of their authors has been writing a series of articles about logical fallacies!  Even better, the article will focus specifically on logical fallacies made by “evolutionists” (i.e., scientists).  Of course, creationists have been unintentionally writing about logical fallacies for ages, as their arguments are typically nothing more than lengthy strings of incomprehensible jibberish and invalid reasoning.  But now, after years of such indirect tutelage and so much direct experience in the art of idiotic arguments, the AiG now considers itself an expert in this field.  And if the old elementary school adage is correct—It takes one to know one!—then the creationists certainly have the advantage when it comes to logical fallacies.

Normally, one would think that watching a creationist explain logical fallacies would be like watching an old woman with osteoporosis explain powerlifting: both can explain the subject in the abstract, but as soon as they attempt to actually do it, they fall crumpled to the ground in helpless, quivering lumps after giving themselves a hernia and shitting their pants.  In reality, though, reading an AiG creationist’s thoughts about logic isn’t quite that bad.

It’s worse.  Reading AiG’s series of articles on logic is literally worse than an old lady herniating and shitting herself while sustaining a serious, life-threatening injury.  If the ethical theory of utilitarianism holds any merit whatsoever, then it would take at least 43 nearly-dead old ladies with shit-stained pants for their suffering to outweigh the untold horrors released upon the world by this ghastly and grossly incompetent treatment of logical fallacies.  Such is the unimaginable stupidity of these articles.

Now, of all the grease-painted mimes scrambling out of the clown car that is AiG, a young-Earth creationist astrophysicist named Jason Lisle has been given the daunting task of explaining logic.  He seems to be the perfect man for the job, as even his own credentials appear to be logically contradictory.  The guy studied astronomical objects that are measured in distances far exceeding a few thousand light years, in which case it took light from some of these objects millions and billions of years to reach us, and in spite of this believes the universe is a few thousand years old.  Either this guy thinks the speed of light is significantly faster than its currently accepted value, or else he thinks the universe is the size of a fucking shoebox.  Being a creationist astrophysicist is almost like being a historian who thinks the world was created just a few seconds ago.  (Incidentally, even getting a doctoral degree in the history of a few seconds ago is slightly more difficult than getting one for creation science, which generally requires little more than holding a Bible, refraining from drooling excessively, and paying $10,000 to Kent Hovind.)

According to his biography page, Lisle is interested in developing models of stellar aging and cosmology—that is, he wants to ignore current models of stellar aging because they contradict a literal reading of Genesis!  But the biography page continues by saying, “Creationist thinking in these areas is still very preliminary.”  If by “preliminary” you mean outlandish, idiotic, totally incompatible with the evidence, and bordering on insane, then I agree.

Needless to say, Jason Lisle is probably an expert in logical fallacies and contradiction, given his abundant personal experience and capacity to resolve a PhD in astrophysics with young-Earth creationism.  However, his introduction to the logical fallacy series is just a puff piece going over the basics of logic, so I won’t bother discussing it here, as this is no doubt familiar territory for those of you who have mastered the ability to use a toilet.  I will, however, briefly mock it.

To lead off, Lisle says:

I have often thought it would be fun to carry a little buzzer that I could push when someone makes a fundamental mistake in reasoning. Of course, that would be impolite. However, we should all become familiar with logical fallacies so that our mental buzzer goes off whenever we hear a mistake in reasoning.

Yes, and I have often thought it would be fun to throw my bloody feces in peoples’ faces whenever they make a fundamental mistake in reasoning.  Because this is impolite, though, I will refrain from doing so and will only throw mental feces covered in blood.  In fact, I will throw the greatest conceivable mental bloody feces, which will no doubt immediately pop into existence as soon as I mentally unleash it, owing to the validity of the ontological argument.  As such, I ask you, dear reader, to envision Jason Lisle’s face covered in the greatest conceivable bloody feces each time I rebut one of his horrid arguments.  Throughout the coming months, there will be many occasions for imagining his bloody, shit-faced visage, as I will regularly dissect and eviscerate each article in his series about logical fallacies.  Be on the lookout!  Coming up soon: the argument from reification.