Reification Fallacy



The reification fallacy is committed when a subject or idea is given mental, physical, emotional or other human characteristics. A common fallacy in presenting or discussing scientific evidence are the following reification statements:

(1) That's not what the evidence says (2) Let the evidence speak (3) You are disagreeing with the evidence (4) Scientists seek a consilience of evidence (5) The evidence indicates/suggests/points/elicits/calls for/etc

This fallacy asserts that evidence has independent objectivity outside of the human mind, when evidence is passive, inanimate matter and cannot speak or act on its own. Evidence must always be interpreted, analyzed, compared etc by a human mind. It is the human mind that speaks, disagrees, finds consilience, indicates, suggests, calls-for etc. Evidence has no capacity whatsoever to do any of these things. People do that.

Considering that evidence must be interpreted, we now understand that the interpreter is shaping the evidence toward the interpreter's bias. There is no such thing as an objective interpreter.

This fallacy is a logical trap for creationists and rears its head regularly in debates and discussions. How is this fallacy managed without appearing as if the evidence itself is being rejected?

The Book of Proverbs says this

''Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.''

This "don't answer/answer" approach is very effective in dealing with reification. If we answer according to their folly (their fallacy) we are agreeing that their initial assertion has a basis. If we don't answer within the context of their fallacy, but rather answer the fallacy itself, we gain the higher ground.

A possible response might be: "Evidence is passive, inanimate matter and cannot speak for itself. So I am not disagreeing with the evidence. I am disagreeing with the interpretation of the evidence coming from biased human minds."

A common practice of creationist believers is to examine a scientist's white-paper or abstract and filter the observations from the interpretations. Secular proponents of evolution rarely do this, rather they glean the interpretations and use them as interchangeable with the observation. When this is pointed out, we invariably see that the observations can be easily interpreted to support creationism, and are often better explained in the light of creationism. In short, the scientist's interpretation is flawed and the secular argument are based on these flaws, not the observations themselves.

In Genetic Entropy, John Sanford make a compelling argument that Darwinian natural selection does not apply to genetics in any form whatsoever. In fact, the genome is invisible to selection because it must occur in all-or-nothing form. Natural selection has no ability nor visibility into individual genes. An individual of a population is accepted or rejected in-total, not through gene-level selection. Likewise, genes appear in unbreakable linkages which are part of unbreakable clusters, many of which may be buried in several layers of functional activity. Natural selection has no visibility to any of this, so any mutations (good or bad) that appear on a given individual (a) cannot be presumed to pass to the next generation and (b) cannot be naturally unhooked from their biochemical moorings in support of selection. Humans can engage in selective breeding, but this is an artificial injection of human intelligence to the process.

We can see the obvious fallacy in play here: Accepting that natural selection is actually selecting anything, or for that matter, accepting that natural selection is a reality. The reality is that the genome is the acting agent and the environment is passive.

Ad hoc