It’s time for the first ever Fallacy Friday! So what’s a “Fallacy”? I know most vocally irreligious people have encountered theists who will try and either convert or re-convert them (depending on one’s original stance relative to the questions concerning the existence of a deity), so we tend to be familiar with their arguments and with the fallacies that at least a few of these arguments present to us. But I want to start with a “blank slate” so to speak, so we’re going to begin a basic definition.

Fallacy: a mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument, also; a failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid, faulty reasoning; a misleading or unsound argument.

Fallacies tend to be written about and discussed extensively by philosophers and individuals who participate in formal debates, so there’s a variety of resources for anyone who is interested in reading about specific fallacies. Given that this is the Free Thought Blogs, the fallacies I’ll be discussing tend to be centered around religion. And more specifically, they’ll be centered on Christianity, because as people from Latin America, the religion we’ve gotten the most experience with is Christianity (and typically Catholicism). And in my own experience, in all of the Americas the religion most interested in spreading itself is Christianity.

For the first fallacy we’re going to chat about a form of the argument from popularity. I say a form, because this is a special type of that argument which focuses on general theism (as used by Christians) to discredit the general position of skepticism towards religious claims. This is the idea that due to the “popularity” of a belief in some sort of deity throughout history, and in the present day that there is some level of validity to this belief. Generally speaking this is any argument that uses how well received an idea or argument is as support for the argument being true.

The argument from popularity is never a good one to use, especially if you are arguing that a specific god exists, as opposed to some sort of deity in general. But in this specific instance it’s also bad for Christians to use, because 1: More people don’t believe in the tenants of Christianity than do believe with most estimates of the number of Christians being around 2 billion (usually 2.2) when the global population is 7.4 billion, and 2: monotheism generally isn’t super tolerant and the “God” of the Bible dictates that non-believers will either be outright destroyed (the group that says “Hell is a separation from God”), or sent to Hell (the group who argue Hell is a location which exists where non-believers go to suffer for eternity), depending on who is being asked. So to “God” according to many Christians the religion of the person is irrelevant provided they aren’t Christian. Some people make exceptions for Jews, and even for Muslims, but that still goes against there being any worth to this idea that the total number of people who believe in gods has any relevance. To some Christians, people who worship other gods are just as guilty as atheists are for not believing in “God”.

Additionally the argument from popularity is a weird one to use because it in a sense can imply that humanity is at it’s peak. That collectively, all of mankind has access to all of the knowledge necessary (or perhaps that we’ll ever have relative to this topic) for us to have any certainty about this particular topic, one of the topics that humanity has had questions about since even the earliest steps to civilization were taken. It implies that the majority have clearly all come to some sort of collective epiphany (which when boiled down to one of it’s original meanings actually has a Christian definition, specifically the manifestation of Christ to the Magi in Matthew 2:1-12), and thus can be trusted to be correct on this issue, more than those in the minority. It’s a fascinating argument to try and think about, especially when one thinks about it historically. Think about the various mythologies that have existed, the religions that were created by civilizations in the forgotten past, tribes and civilizations that humanity right now has no idea existed, who made up gods and goddesses we’ll never conceptualize because they were only spread through word of mouth and never written down or drawn. Mankind has had beliefs in the supernatural probably since the beginning of our existence as groups. But that doesn’t make these beliefs correct, or grant them any sort of validity.

The argument from popularity is a bad argument because just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right, or logical. Just because lots of people believe in something doesn’t make it true, or even respectable to believe in it. The argument from popularity isn’t evidence. Nor is it something to seriously consider when discussing the possibility of any deity existing. If a deity existed, there would be better arguments to use than the idea that just because civilizations throughout history have believed in some sort of supernatural being that means there must be something to it. These same civilizations often believed that the future could be divined through burned bones, and that the stars somehow impacted the future of mankind. They believed that light from the stars was the light as it existed, and not light that had taken millions of years to travel through space before getting to us. These are the same groups who believed that living beings were responsible for the sun, and that at night the sun vanished, rather than the Earth orbiting the sun. These people often didn’t know what laid beyond the horizon, and that thousands of miles away there was an ocean, and that across that ocean laid another gigantic landmass which was inhabited by humans (after humanity had lived for a while anyway). I’m sure if you told the earliest Christians all of the scientific discoveries we’ve made since their religion began to exist they’d be stunned, and not believe you.

Don’t use the argument from popularity. How “liked” an idea is about the nature of the universe and the origin of mankind has nothing to do with whether or not its true. It’s a bad idea to try and use the beliefs of the majority, especially when those beliefs in this topic were often spread from parent to child and for centuries this practice continued in societies that for various reasons were never skeptical of them. Let’s just avoid the argument from popularity. It’s just a bad argument.