Click here to view the full episode on YouTube.
Arguments for Young Earth Creationism tend to be riddled with fallacies – in this case, the fallacy being a formal fallacy known as Denying the Antecedent, as I explain in this video.
Yes – it would indeed be impossible for there to be a living tree over seven-thousand years old or for there to be written records from over seven-thousand years old if the world itself was not older than seven-thousand years. However, the absence of such things does not in any way prove that the world is not older than that.
For starters, even though we don’t have a living tree which is that old, or written chronologies of history that are that old, there are tons of other forms of evidence that the world is much older than that. But even if that were not the case, this guy who made that argument still committed a fallacy known Denying the Antecedent.
Click here to view the full episode on YouTube.
Denying the Antecedent is one of the formal fallacies. Basically (for any two statements labeled ‘A’ and ‘B’) if you know that A being true proves that B is true – and you also know that A is false – Denying the Antecedent is when you infer from that that B must also be false.
It is a fallacy because just because A being true proves that B is true does not mean that A being false proves that B is false.
In the transitional episode of Sophia’s Vlog (“transitional” because its name is changing from “Sophia’s Vlog” to “Red Angel Sophia”) I expose how when someone argues that the world must be very young just because two very specific pieces of evidence of it being older are absent, they are committing a classical example of Denying the Antecedent. I even delve a bit into just how ridiculous this specific instance of that fallacy is.
