This series of posts is meant to denounce flaws in the discourse of an influential figure. It analyses the opening speech of Islamic apologist Hamza Tzortzis in a debate with professor Lawrence Krauss (you can watch it in full here). He alleges having two arguments to support the claim that Islam is more sensible than atheism, and makes some remarks about common atheist contentions. Let's see them all.
The first thing to challenge is his statement that a deductive argument must always be preferred to an inductive one, and that only an intellectually challenged person would think otherwise.
We are accustomed to think that there is a platonic realm of logic that is immutable and accessible to us through reason and mathematics. Let us define logic as that which the rational mind is forced to accept, in the sense that, when presented with a logical argument, you could irrationally reject it, but it actually forces itself into a rational mind.
But that, of course, doesn't define logic, only our process of logic, which is ultimately all that counts. Anything you recognize as logical you do so because your brain, which has evolved in the physical world, is adapted to recognize as logical. Logic is doubly empirical, as it is both molded by your experiences and by the inherited experiences of your ancestors through natural selection.
In other words, our judgment of logic is as much intuitive as our natural understanding of physics. This is an important comparison. Our intuitions were sculpted by natural selection to deal with the 'classical world' of physics. Because of this, hardly anyone can intuitively understand relativistic physics and no one can intuitively understand quantum physics. Your instincts have been molded to understand classical physics – that which is not too small, not too big, not too fast. They fail elsewhere.
Our perceptions of physics for the past millennia have been wrong, and the same can happen to our adored logic (you can google 'Zeno's Paradoxes' for this). Now, if deductive logic can fail, does inductive logic fare any better?
Actually, yes! We do have a process for vastly refining inductive arguments, and it's called 'science'. For those unfamiliar with the terms, inductive reasoning means learning something from observation and extrapolating the conclusions for other instances. For example, if you throw a brick, it falls. From that you could make an inductive argument that all bricks fall. And you could be wrong.
What science does is to set very restrictive parameters for testing every type of conceivable variable, and demands others to reproduce the experiment, aiming to be as objective as possible. For example, maybe only red bricks fall, so we test that, or maybe they only fall in the northern hemisphere, so we test that, and so on. It works as a dialogue with nature, and after each test, our induction is closer to the material reality. It can never be equal to the physical reality itself, and we'll never have 100% certainty of any scientific discovery. But we can get pretty damn close.
The German philosopher Leibniz was obsessed with finding a way to use deduction to understand the world. His idea was that through deduction alone we could arrive at knowledge that could not be disputed. He followed this path and arrived at false conclusions. Modern science is as much passionate with finding the truth, but does so on inductive reasoning, and it fares much better. Science works.
