Bill O'Reilly: "There must be a god, because I don't know how stuff works"

Oh, my. Watching this video actually made me feel profoundly embarrassed … for Bill O’Reilly. Sort of like when my elderly neighbor clicks the Forward button on his impossibly illogical, obviously faked, right-wing wacko email screeds - and they end up in my In Box. The only difference is that Bill O’Reilly isn’t really old, white haired, kindly and grandfatherly like my neighbor.

No, Bill … it doesn’t really take more faith not to believe in why the tides happen, or how the moon got into it’s familiar orbit. It does take some hubris and stupidity on a level not seen since … well, the last time Pat Robertson opened his mouth publicly.

This is really priceless. Bill O’Reilly is essentially telling us that since he is the ‘poster child’ EPIC FAIL of all science students that have ever snoozed through a classroom lecture, then of course this massive level of ignorance proves the existence of god.

Bill is so wrong that it’s EPIC WRONG. But, fortunately, he provides me the opportunity to address a couple more logical fallacies. (As maven digs through papers to pull out her Baloney Detection Kit)

Argument from ignorance (AKA Appeal to ignorance or God of the Gaps Fallacy): This ‘argument’ goes thusly:

• There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
• Therefore the cause must be supernatural.

Unfortunately for Bill, but good news for the rest of us, there isn’t so much a gap in the understanding of how the tides respond to the gravitational pull of the moon/sun or how the moon/sun/planets got where they are. We may not yet know all the minor details, but we have the broad understanding down pretty well by now.

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Bill O’Reilly Proves God’s Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Hey, boys and girls! You can come listen to Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak - tomorrow evening, right here in Reno, Nevada!

Show up at 7:00 p.m. at the Redfield Auditorium, UNR Campus, for “The World as Seen Through the Lens of a Scientist” presentation by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History in New York.

This man does know what causes the tides. How cool is that?

I digress. Back to Bill’s COLOSSAL LACK OF UNDERSTANDING about things like natural sciences, physics and uh, Wikipedia and Google.

Bill hasn’t learned to use the lending library, not to mention the internet, apparently. If he did, he’d know that Mars has a couple of moons. Those moons and ours were the result of a Mars sized chunk of rock hitting the earth. A huge mess resulted, as you can imagine (but Bill O’Reilly can’t). Gravity being what it is - and has been at least since the time of Newton  - that cosmic mess coalesced into larger chunks that fell into orbit (gravity again) around the Earth and Mars. Venus doesn’t have a moon, he’s right there. So what? Was god just being pissy and unfair? Had Venus been bad?

The Sun got there due to a lot of gases, dust and cosmic crap from the Big Bang that also coalesced and collapsed under its own weight - igniting nuclear fusion. Voila. Big fireball. It’s still happening throughout the universe, and we are observing it regularly through advanced astronomy.

Bill is right to suggest that science doesn’t ‘know’ everything. That’s why humans are still doing science - since we’re an endlessly curious bunch.

We didn’t know what caused disease at one time. Does that mean that disease was a punishment from god? That’s what people believed for centuries until science proved the existence of germs, viruses and such. Now we wash our hands, don’t cough on our neighbors and get vaccinated.

It’s a shame to see people wallow in ignorance and then want to be celebrated for it, but this is what Bill O’Reilly is doing. He is also failing to advance understanding - at a time when it is so critically needed - that science isn’t an end in itself, but rather a process and a way of thinking that has given humanity a much safer, healthier and more rewarding existence than they would otherwise have had.

Bill O’Reilly lives in a very, very small, fearful world. Such a pity.

BTW -There are some other informal logical fallacies that come to mind here:

Negative proof fallacy - that, because a premise cannot be proven false (that god did it, for example), then the premise must be true; or that, because a premise can’t be proven true then it must be false. Remember that (in the words of the late Carl Sagan and Marcello Truzzi)  “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

Demanding negative proof - this is what O’Reilly is using. He is avoiding the burden of proof for his fantastic claim of ‘god did it’, by demanding proof of the contrary from whomever questions his claim.

Statements like O’Reilly’s also touches upon other illogical fallacies such as Complex Question/Fallacy of Many Questions, Fallacy of a Single Cause, and Proof by Verbosity (especially true of the motor-mouthed O’Reilly. If you can’t win with facts, win by never shutting up) and the always popular with creationists, Either/Or (or False Dilemma).

-maven

Can you govern effectively when god is your co-pilot?

“It’s in the spirit of making good from bad that I am committing to you and the larger family of South Carolinians to use this experience to both trust God in his larger work of changing me, and from my end, to work to becoming a better and more effective leader,” he wrote.

The preceeding was from an op-ed piece that South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford is shopping around to the media in his state, perhaps on the premise that if the apology is based on the ‘unassailable’ premises of god, scripture, the flag and apple pie it will go down easier.

If I were a citizen of South Carolina, I’d be even angrier.

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