The Great Tim Tebow Fallacy - by Richard Dawkins

I gather that Tim Tebow is extremely good at football. That’s just as well, for he certainly isn’t very good at thinking. Perhaps the fact that he was home schooled by missionary parents is to blame. 

The following is what passes for logic in the Tebow mind. His mother was advised by doctors to abort him, but she refused, which is why Tim is here. So abortion is a bad thing. Masterful conclusion. 

It is a version of what, following the great Nobel-Prizewinning biologist Peter Medawar, I have called the Great Beethoven Fallacy. 

Versions of the Great Beethoven Fallacy are attributed to various Christian apologists, and the details vary. The following is the version favoured by Norman St John Stevas, a British Conservative Member of Parliament. One doctor to another:

“About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic. The mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?” 

“I would have terminated the pregnancy.” 

“Then you would have murdered Beethoven.”

It is amazing how many people are bamboozled by this spectacularly stupid argument. Setting aside the simple falsehood that Ludwig van Beethoven was the fifth child in his family (he was actually the eldest), the falsehood that any of his siblings was born blind, deaf or dumb, and the falsehood that his father was syphilitic, we are left with the ‘logic’. As Peter Medawar, writing with his wife, Jean Medawar, said,

“The reasoning behind this odious little argument is breathtakingly fallacious … the world is no more likely to be deprived of a Beethoven by abortion than by chaste absence from intercourse.”

via richarddawkins.net

continue reading… wapo

Recent comments

Blog comments powered by Disqus

Notes

  1. brooklynmutt posted this