Moving the Goalposts Imagine you’re about to kick a field goal. You line up your kick perfectly, and it’s heading right on target to clear the uprights. Just as the football is about to pass through the goal, someone picks up the goalposts and moves them ten yards to the left. This is the idea behind the ‘Moving the Goalposts’ Fallacy. Here’s an example that a theist might use: Theist: “Show me an example of a transitional fossil!” Atheist: “Homo habilis.” Theist: “That’s not a transitional fossil! Show me a fossil of a fish that turned into a human!” In this example, the theist has asked for a transitional fossil. Technically, all fossils are transitional fossils, but for the sake of the argument we’ll consider that what the theist is asking for is an example of a fossil that can be clearly demonstrated to be a bridge between one species and another. The atheist in the above example has satisfied the requirements by offering a commonly accepted transitional primate fossil: Homo habilis. The theist then ‘moves the goalposts’ by manufacturing an ad hoc redefinition of ‘transitional fossil.’ There are no transitional fossils demonstrating a fish turning into a human (fake mermaid fossils aside) because there were several million transitional steps between humans and fish. So the theist’s demand is shifting the goalposts from the scientifically accepted definition of ‘transitional fossil’ to a patently absurd definition only used by the scientifically illiterate. The way to defeat a ‘moving the goalposts’ fallacy is to note what the theist is trying to do by explaining how they’ve shifted the goalposts. The way to do this in the example above would be to simply state that of course there are no transitional fossils between fish and human, since the theory of evolution does not say that fish turned into humans in one step. Once you’ve done that, you may move the goalposts back to where they should be, and start over. The way to do it in the above example would be to explain exactly what a transitional fossil is, and why it’s transitional. tinyurl/l3lvb2f
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 20:50:00 +0000
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