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Pascal, ESC and Logical Fallacies

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Pascal, ESC and Logical Fallacies Wednesday evening, 25 October 2006

I was reminded this morning of a logical fallacy based on Blaise Pascal’s argument for the existence of God. Well, it wasn’t really an argument, per-se, more a reasoning based on game logic that you should consider the existence of God. You have two choices – believe in God / don’t believe in God and there are two possibilities – God exists / God doesn’t exist. The argument goes that if you believe in God and he doesn’t exist, you break even, if you don’t believe in God and he doesn’t exist you break even, if you believe in God and he does exist you go to Heaven and finally, if you don’t believe in God and he does exist, you go to Hell.

If you read the earlier link you will already begin to see what the problem with this argument is, it actually tells us nothing at all about the existence of God. Of course you can apply this kind of reasoning to absolutely anything. The link earlier shows how it applied to the existence of not of Lewis Carrol’s Boojum monster!

Now, I think it is fair to say, that this line of reasoning is being used in support of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research as can be clearly seen by the high profile figures that have supported it. I’m talking about the late Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox’s recent appeal. Michael Fox suffers from a terrible degenerative disorder called Parkinson’s disease. It attacks the nervous system so that you can’t control your muscles properly.

The argument coming from the ESC camp is roughly “There are terrible diseases out there, embryonic stem cell research potentially offers the cure for all of them, therefore we must support and fund ESC.” That there are terrible diseases out there, I don’t deny, however this line of reasoning commits the same fallacy as all the others. ESC might potentially be a new panacea, to be likened to the discovery of penicillin or some such thing, but then it might not. This latest appeal does nothing to prove or disprove it’s validity. Just because Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s and says that ESC will cure it, doesn’t mean that it will (and likewise it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t).

At this point I have to disagree with Pascal. If I believe in God and he doesn’t exist, I have not broken even. I have put in irreplaceable effort and energy into a relationship that is actually all in my head. Likewise if I believe that ESC research is the cure for Parkinsons, and it isn’t, then I haven’t broken even. I’ve expended resources, that could have been used pursuing another avenue.

I should also point out that there is a slight discrepancy in my analogy in that, potentially, we could prove or disprove the case for ESC in this life, and we can’t with God. However, at the present, the facts are being distorted on all sides as to the importance of ESC. The majority of the arguing seems to be based on highly charged emotional appeals- MJ Fox, Christopher Reeve et al. with their panacea on the ‘Left’, the sanctity of life and Adult Stem Cell (ASC) research on the ‘Right’.

If you’re interested in knowing a whole lot more, just googling ESC vs ASC yields a lot of results.

 

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