There can be an answer despite I do not know it By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari
‘Everything is fated to perish save His Face. (28:88)
Allah!
There is no (other) god but He, the Eternally Living, the Maintainer (in charge of all things). Neither slumber nor sleep seizes Him. His is whatsoever in
the Heavens and the Earth. Who is that who (Nobody) intercedes in
His presence except by His permission? He knows what is between their hands and what is behind them. And they do not surround a thing of His knowledge except whatever He wills. His Chair encompasses the
heavens and the Earth, and it does not fatigue Him to preserve both of them (the Heavens and the Earth), and He is the High, the Supreme. (Al-Baqara, 2: 255).
There can
be an answer despite I do not know it.
· Every scientist is educated enough to know
that each discipline is subject to its own assumptions, dimension of analysis,
and methodologies; they, therefore should never say religion is wrong because they
think monkey is the father of human beings. All they can say is that dogmas are
not incontrovertible or there is not a scintilla of truth in them only because they
cannot be proved scientifically. Scientists must know that it is ridiculous to
say that territory cannot exist if it is not discovered.
Logical
consequence (also Entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which
describes the relationship between statements that
holds true when one statement logically follows
from one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one
in which the conclusions are
entailed by the premises, because the conclusions are consequences of the premises.
Syntactic accounts of logical consequence rely on schemes using inference rules. For
instance, we can express the logical form of a valid argument as:
All
A are B
. All
C are
A.
Therefore, all
C are
B.
This argument is formally valid, because every instance of arguments constructed using this scheme
are valid.
This is in contrast to an argument like "Fred is Mike's
brother's son. Therefore Fred is Mike's nephew." Since this argument
depends on the meanings of the words "brother", "son", and
"nephew", the statement "Fred is Mike's nephew" is a
so-called material consequence of "Fred is Mike's brother's
son," not a formal consequence. A formal consequence must be true in all cases.
Reductio ad Absurdum
(also known as: reduce to absurdity)
Description: A mode of argumentation or a form of
argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications
logically to an absurd conclusion. Arguments which use universals such
as, “always”, “never”, “everyone”, “nobody”, etc., are prone to being reduced
to absurd conclusions. The fallacy is in the argument that could be
reduced to absurdity -- so in essence, reductio
ad absurdum is a technique to
expose the fallacy.
Logical Form:
Assume P is true.
From this assumption, deduce that Q is true.
Also deduce that Q is false.
Thus, P implies both Q and not Q (a contradiction, which is
necessarily false).
Therefore, P itself must be false.
Example #1:
I am going into surgery tomorrow so please pray for
me. If enough people pray for me, God will protect me from harm and see
to it that I have a successful surgery and speedy recovery.
Explanation: We first assume the premise is true:
if “enough” people prayed to God for her successful surgery and speedy
recovery, then God would make it so. From this, we can deduce that God
responds to popular opinion. However, if God simply granted prayers based
on popularity contests, that would be both unjust and absurd. Since God
cannot be unjust, then he cannot both respond to popularity and not respond to
popularity, the claim is absurd, and thus false.
Example #2:
If everyone lived his or her life exactly like Jesus lived
his life, the world would be a beautiful place!
Explanation: We first assume the premise is true:
if everyone lived his or her life like Jesus lived his, the world would be a
beautiful place. If this were true, we would have 7 billion people on
this earth roaming from town to town, living off the charity of others,
preaching about God (with nobody listening). Without anyone creating wealth,
there would be nobody to get charity from -- there would just be 7 billion
people all trying to tell each other about God. After a few weeks,
everyone would eventually starve and die. This world might be a beautiful
place for the vultures and maggots feeding on all the Jesus wannabes, but far
from a beautiful world from a human perspective. Since the world cannot
be both a beautiful place and a horrible place, the proposition is false.
In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction
to absurdity"; or argumentum ad absurdum, "argument to absurdity") is a form of argument
which attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to
a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by showing
that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible.
This technique has
been used throughout history in both formal mathematical and philosophical
reasoning, as well as in debate.
Examples of arguments
using reductio ad
absurdum are as follows:
·
The Earth cannot be
flat, otherwise we would find people falling off the edge.
·
There is no smallest
positive rational number, because if there were,
then it could be divided by two to get a smaller one.
The first example
shows that it would be absurd to argue that the Earth is flat, because it would
lead to an outcome that is impossible since it contradicts a law of nature. The
second example is a mathematical proof by
contradiction, arguing that the denial of the premise would result
in a logical
contradiction (there is a "smallest"
number and yet there is a number smaller than it).[3]
What is the “Reductio ad absurdum” Fallacy?
The Latin term reductio
ad absurdum literally
translates to, “reduction to the absurd.” In formal logic, the reductio
ad absurdum is
actually a legitimate argument, but it is often applied fallaciously. The
fallacy follows the idea that if the premises of someone’s argument are taken
as true, then it necessarily will lead to absurd conclusions.
This is a fairly good
fallacy to remember when watching courtroom drama series, as lawyers may try to
use this fallacy to show that a witness is lying. For example, a witness could
make a claim on the stand, such as, “I know she was driving a blue cars.”
Lawyer: “How do you
know this?”
Witness: “Because I’m
an interior decorator and I always notice the colors of cars on the road.”
Lawyer: “Oh really?
Can you tell us then, when you came to court today, what was the color the car
that parked in front of you? To your left? Your right? What was the color of
the car that was behind you on the freeway? [etc.]”
The lawyer has just
used a reductio ad absurdum in this rather contrived example to
show that the witness’s testimony that they “always notice the colors of cars”
is very likely to be a false premise because when it is followed to its logical
extent (that they would be able to answer the lawyer’s question about every car
they saw that day) it is an absurd claim.
Example from UFOlogy
An admittedly
contrived example from a UFOlogist could be had in the following statement by
them: “If you’re so skeptical that you need to see proof with your own eyes of
an alien body before you’ll believe that they exist, then how do you believe in
the existence of Paris? Or of a dodo bird? Or an echidna? You’ve never seen
them, how do you know they exist?”
The person has just
used the reductio ad absurdum fallaciously because they assumed
there was only one premise – that I required the proof of
the alien body to see with my own eyes. Rather, I would accept other evidence,
such as a gazillion verifiable photographs, independent corroboration, real
hard evidence that has been examined by the bulk of the scientific community
that studies such things and has reached the conclusion that it is real.
For example, the
existence of Paris is something that I have seen in books, magazines, and
movies. I’ve read about it in history books, my parents have been there, and
I’ve met people who claim they come from that city. It has apparently been an
integral part of the world’s history for at least a few centuries. To me, that
is enough evidence that I can trust that Paris exists.
(This example will actually work with any pseudoscientific
field where the skeptic actually wants real hard evidence of the phenomenon, I
just happened to apply it to UFOs.)
Final Thoughts
The reductio
ad absurdum argument
can be used logically so long as one understands what they are doing. The false
use of it will usually occur when one assumes a limited initial premise to the
claim (in the above example, that I would only “believe it when I see it”).
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