“I/We don’t understand or comprehend how X happens, therefore X is done by supernatural beings with powers I/We don’t comprehend”.
For example, disease and natural disasers are caused by god (or were considered caused by god before the 20th century, and still are by many people). Crop circles are caused by aliens. The economic collapse was caused by the illuminati.
Is there a name for this?
False dilemma?
Argument from incredulity (Argument from ignorance - Wikipedia)
Religion…?
“God of the gaps?”
Anthropomorphic fallacy?
Might be “argumentum absurdum” - a holdover recollection from logic class . . . .
Well, it is only really a fallacy at all if it is presented as being a proof of the existence of supernatural beings.
Otherwise, it is just a hypothesis.
In the modern world, where we are (or should be) familiar with all sorts of examples of non-supernatural (scientific) explanations of things that were once thought to have supernatural causes, it is not likely to seem a very plausible hypothesis (to anyone who is intellectually honest and reasonably well informed), but 3,000 or so years ago, before even any tentative naturalistic explanations, let alone successful ones, had been dreamed up, it would have been as good a hypothesis as any. Indeed, something along these supernaturalistic lines would have been, to all intents and purposes, the only sort of explanation that anyone was capable of coming up with. In doing so, they would not have been committing a fallacy (unless, again, they insisted that their hypothesis must be true). They would simply have been guessing wrong.
The OP’s argument isn’t just saying “X is tricky, maybe God did it.” That’s not an argument, that’s a hypothesis. And a valid one.
But there is something wrong with the OP’s statement. The actual fallacy involved as stated is more in equating “I don’t understand” with “nobody can understand.”
I had a hard time putting my finger on the error until I realized why I was having a hard time: there’s two errors. The first is that the argument relies on the unstated premise “nobody else can think of a natural explanation” otherwise the conclusion doesn’t follow.
Even “nobody can offer a natural explanation for X, therefore the explanation for X is supernatural,” however, is incorrect – that’s a good, old-fashioned argument from ignorance.
Edit: on second glance, I realize that the OP’s “we” in the argument was probably supposed to indicate “everybody.” In which, case, yeah, that’s just argument from ignorance.
The concept of ‘god of the gaps’ seems to explain what I am looking for. “X does not make sense based on the framework of the world as I understand it, therefore X happens because of supernatural forces”.
I’m guessing the opposite is pseudoskepticism, which seems to be an argument from incredulity “X does not make sense based on the framework of the world as I understand it, therefore X isn’t happening”
I failed debate class in college, most of my debates just ended up with me pulling a mini-copy of the constitution from my pocket and throwing it at my opponent while yelling.
I was about to suggest “god of the gaps”, FWIW Wiki claims it is a form of “Argument from ignorance”
To be specific, “god of the gaps” is a name for arguments similar in form to the OP’s. It’s not a “fallacy” in itself, it’s a nickname for a specific type of argument.
“Argument from ignorance” is the logical fallacy that “god of the gaps”-type arguments generally commit.
Pretty accurate, I think. Pseudoskepticism is usually more a criticism of intellectual laziness and poor attitude rather than erroneous logic, but this is solid statement of the logical error that pseudoskeptics are committing.
I think it is a combination of an argument from ignorance and a false dilemma.
The first part could be an argument from ignorance (“I can’t understand it so it doesn’t have a natural explanation so it must have a supernatural explanation”) but the second part, involving a postive inference of “beings” is not.
The second part is a false dilemma. It posits that the only options are “natural explanation” and “supernatural beings did it”. Actually the options are “natural explanation” and “unnatural explanation”.
What on Earth is an “unnatural explanation”? Can you provide any examples of unnatural explanations that are not supernatural ones?
The relevant converse of “natural”, here, would be “non-natural”, which, to all intents and purposes, is equivalent to supernatural.
Nope, you’re mixing things up I’m afraid.
Argumentum (or reductio) ad absurdum is taking a given proposition to its logical conclusions and, as they turn out to be absurd, proving the original proposition false in retrospect. It’s not necessarily a fallacy, in fact it’s a useful tool in formal logic.
In internet debate logic however, it often is injected with a slippery slope here, a heap of straw there and a whole lot of bad faith. And nobody but the writer ever thinks of the children. It’s positively shameful.
This is going to involve buggery at some point, isn’t it ?
The flaw in the OP argument is in confusing something that is currently unexplained with something that is unexplainable. And then to attribute anything unexplainable to some extraordinary unproven entity.
I’m not about to bother with definitional arguments. I used the term “unnatural” because it is the obvious negation of “natural”. If you like “non-natural” or “supernatural” then whatever. Substitute at will. It doesn’t make any difference to what I said.
“God of the gaps” isn’t a fallacy, it’s just a derogatory name for the Argument from Design, one of the main supposed proofs of the existence of God. If all you wanted was a derogatory way of referring to that specific argument then it’s fine, but bear in mind you can’t use it to refer to crop circles and aliens, or to the recession and the Illuminati, or any other similar examples.