Benjamin Cain
1 min readMar 22, 2023

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I think it's known as the Gish gallop, and it's a fallacy of distraction. Or it's like those bad mortgage-backed securities that were piled into tranches around 2008, to hide their faults, which led to the subprime mortgage crisis.

In the case of bad arguments, you'd let all the verbiage leave the impression that you've said a lot, but the devil's in the details, so if every word of what you've said is garbage, we'd need an extra argument for why we should expect that something other than garbage is likely to emerge from so much garbage.

Lawyers speak of a circumstantial case in which there's supposed to be some such emergent property. The defendant is judged guilty even though each peace of evidence is weak or inconclusive by itself. When combined, though, the pieces add up to a picture that can best be explained by positing the person's guilt. In that case it's a question of probabilities.

The theist's problem is that theism doesn't explain any collection of evidence better than a secular alternative because theism is ludicrously empty and anachronistic. God would be beyond nature and thus beyond knowable probabilities.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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