Fallacy of elephant hurling

The fallacy of elephant hurling, arises when the debater start to amassing huge quotes, accumulating a large amount of evidence supposedly supporting his position, to give the impression of weighty evidence, but without demonstrating that all the evidence does indeed support his argument. The debater has the undeclared assumption that accumulating a great deal of evidence out of context would make his ideas seem true.

Jonathan Sarfati and Michael Matthews described in their book this tactic:

There is a debate tactic known as ‘elephant hurling’. This occurs when the critic throws summary arguments about complex issues to give the impression of weighty evidence, but with an unstated presumption that a large complex of underlying ideas is true, and failing to consider opposing data, usually because they have uncritically accepted the arguments from their own side. We should challenge elephant-hurlers to offer specifics and challenge the underlying assumptions. .

Keith Allen, in his book "The God Conclusion" shows the use of an elephant-hurling by one of the Walter ReMine's opponents when he said:

...the evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed that my opponent can't see it

and rebut the argument:

...more to the point I am passionately distressed that you can! Also what about the overwhelmingly weak (actually zero) evidential for transitional forms between pre-Cambrian and Cambrian?.

Examples

• In debates on the Internet it is common to find a debater who fill out links to articles to give the impression that his criticism is well founded.
• "Evolution is obvious in fossils"

See Also

Warning: This argument represents a Fallacy of elephant hurling.

Use the {{fallacy|Fallacy of elephant hurling}} template to insert the above warning on a page containing an example of the Fallacy of elephant hurling fallacy. The template links the warning label to this page.

• Logical fallacy

External links

• Elephant hurling at astorehouseofknowledge