This is not a good sign for the accuracy of educative references

Jen from Blag Hag is currently busy cramming as much revision as she can into her brain to prepare for her upcoming GRE (Graduate Record Examinations, the standardized test required to enter grad school in the U.S.), and is using your standard study book to help her through it all. She’s currently at a section focusing on logic and logical fallacies, and it started out pleasant enough, considering her being a blogger priding herself on critical thought and rational thinking – until she came across a rather frightening excerpt.

Shifting the Burden of Proof
It is incumbent on the writer to provide evidence or support for her position. To imply that a position is true merely because no one has disproved it is to shift the burden of proof to others.

Example: Since no one has been able to prove God's existence, there must not be a God.

There are two major weaknesses in this argument. First, the fact that God's existence has yet to be proven does not preclude any future proof of existence. Second, if there is a God, one would expect that his existence is independent of any proof by man.

Be sure to read that once or twice more, just to fully understand what is being said (and taught as being the correct manner of thinking). If you have any sense of critical ability (also known as a bullshit detector), alarms should be going off in your mind right now.

Now, I have to admit, I could instantly tell something was wrong with this sort of reasoning when I read it, but disturbingly (for me, someone who prides himself on possessing above-average critical thinking skills, as compared to most people), I wasn’t really able to identify just what was iffy. I formed some vague ideas, but only by reading Jen’s own detailed breakdown of all that’s wrong with this excerpt did it become appallingly clear. I’ll quote it here (note: I’ve taken the liberty of separating her points into separate sections for ease-of-reading):

My only gripe is that the sentence says "must" - I would lower it to "most likely" or "probably" because yes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But regardless, the explanation they give is itself illogical.

• One, the burden of proof should lie on those who make claims. An absence of something extraordinary isn't a claim - it's a null hypothesis. If you have absolutely no proof, what is supporting your argument?
• Secondly, it's effectively impossible to prove a negative (that something doesn't exist), which again leaves the burden of proof with those making the claims.
• Three, future proof doesn't hold any ground in current arguments. If I said that I might potentially eventually have proof that unicorns exist, would anyone take me seriously? If I said one day scientists may find that a diet of nothing but chocolate is good for your health, should we all eat nothing but chocolate? No, because it's not real evidence.
• And finally, the last sentence about God's existence being independent of any proof of man is a logical fallacy I like to call "Making Shit Up." Why is God's existence independent of any proof of man? What reason do you have to think that other than conveniently and arbitrarily defining God that way? Why God and not gods, or goddesses, or aliens, or fairies?

She is, of course, absolutely spot-on with every point she makes. However, that information being passed as accurate and logical in a study reference is fallacious, is really just half of the issue at hand. The other part of the problem here, is highly indicative of just why so many people fall for this sort of reasoning, and why I myself couldn’t even tell what exactly was wrong with it at first. It’s all in the framing; not only is this written to sound logical and sensible, which in itself would be enough to fool people into adopting as knowledge information that is actually false, but worst of all, this sort of illogic is being presented through an authoritative reference guide as the correct way to go about in one’s thought processes. This is highly problematic, and symptomatic of the issues we all deal with every day with people saying stupid things, yet actually believing in them.

How can people be expected to make sense and see the true logic, when they are being told by the proper authorities (such as students being instructed by this book and others like it) that such fallacious thinking is actually the right way to process information, to correct way to formulate arguments in a debate?

And then we sensible, rational proponents for reason and truth wonder why so many people seem so dead wrong all the time, despite being as intelligent as anyone else. It all has to do with what they’re taught.

(via Blag Hag)
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