Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking [Paperback]

I agree entirely with another review that said this is entertaining and insightful, but with sadly many mistakes. While agreeing with everyone elses quoted mistakes, I thought I would add to the catalogue.

Homeopathic dilutions. The general statement that Whyte makes that homeopathic dilutions can be so dilute they are extremely unlikely to contain even a single molecule of the solute, is correct, but the specific example he gives is arithmetically wrong. In an X20 solution, 1cc of solution would contain 10 to 100 molecules of the solute, if we take the solute to have a molecular weight of 60 to 600g/mol, a plausible range for a nature-derived chemical. Although for a macro-molecule like a protein, with much larger molecular weight over 6000g/mol, then there would be on average fewer than one left in 1cc. 1cc is a small quantity; if we are interested in proving none left in larger quantities, then rather larger dilutions are required.

The Trinity. Whyte argues that the Trinitarian Christians' doctrine that God is Three and God is One must be false, by appealing, it appears, to axiomatic set theory. I think it is actually just a pedant's joke. I think Trinitarians are guilty of no more than Humpty-Dumpty-speak ("a word means what I say it means"). There are plausible alternative interpretations of what Trinitarians mean when they say that, which are consistent with axiomatic set theory, and reflect more closely what they actually mean. In other words, Whyte is forcing on them a kind of "contractual interpretation" of their metaphorical words to impose upon them a belief they don't in fact have. A classic straw man argument that he so deplores.

Popper and the falsity of God. Whyte wrongly implies that the Popperian notion of a theory takes the position that an untestable theory is a false theory. (Popper coined the horrible word "unfalsifiable" instead of "untestable", a bad PR move; but, along with many I prefer to use the synonym "untestable", whose meaning is clear.) Whyte goes on to argue that since the existence of God (provided one says little more than that) is an untestable theory, it must be wrong. This is a misunderstanding of what Popper said, as well as being logically wrong - and Popper was nothing if not logically rigorous. Indeed I agree with Popper himself that the Popperian notion of a theory is not so much a philosophy as a logical necessity. Sadly, it is not uncommon for professional philosophers to misunderstand what Popper meant here, probably because many professional philosophers lack sufficient understanding of science. What Popper actually says is that an untestable theory is (a) vacuous, since it makes no prediction, so in a scientific sense we don't need it - - and (b) not a theory at all, rather a belief, tautologically, since it is untestable. In other words, all Popper tells us is that belief in a God is religion not science, which I think we already knew. That is why "creation scientists" get up real scientists' noses so much. Richard Dawkins is much better on this. He distinguishes carefully between deist and theist notions of religion, deism being the vacuous belief "there is a god, he created the universe and its laws" and no more; whereas theism (additional beliefs such as those in the bible/koran) adds a lot of magical baggage which typically becomes testable and hence inconsistent with science. Dawkins understands perfectly that the deist position is logically unimpeachable, and restricts his arguments to theists who believe a lot more. Compare this with the situation in Axiomatic Set Theory, the basic axioms of mathematics, (which Whyte implicitly uses). The Axioms are (tautologically) untestable. But it doesn't mean that these axioms are "false". If that were so, we would get a contradiction from using them, and we don't. We can even pick and choose which axioms we like, as with different geometries using different axioms.

This is a nice little introduction to logical thought, which is in itself none too taxing. After reading it, you'll be spotting logical mistakes in no time. However, as noted by a previous reviewer, Whyte does go on about religion quite a bit, which to my mind is the weakest aspect of the book.

The main problem is that he never really goes very indepth (which would have been interesting), preferring instead to take pot-shots, and then move quickly on. His assertion that there can't be an all-powerful God if evil exists is particularly poor, presented as it is without any sort of discussion about what "all-powerful" means (many if not most Theists do not believe God to be "all-powerful" in the way Whyte suggests), or what "evil" means. Instead, he blithely states that people who believe this have been "convinced by one of the many bogus theological attempts to show this belief consistent with the existence of evil", and then pretty much leaves it there. This, and Whtye's other attacks on religion are generally straw man arguments, and so are bad form for a book on logical fallacies. Admittedly, the book is short, and so it would be hard to give a detailed examination of the religious themes, but this is the very reason the book would have been stronger without them; if when writing a book on logical fallacies you can't mention something without it sounding like a logical fallacy, you should probably not mention it at all.

Still, Whyte is frequently humorous, and he does write in a lively, engaging style. If you don't mind putting up with Whyte's personal religious opinions being presented as gospel (pun intended), I'd recommended this book as a good starting point, with the proviso that those interested will progress to something a bit more substantial.

Jamie Whyte admits to being an inveterate writer of outraged letters that never get published. "Bad Thoughts" reads a little like an expanded version of those letters, being in parts a little disjointed as he moves from one subject to another. But it is always entertaining as the combative Mr Whyte gets stuck into various kinds of sloppy thinking. It's worth the money for the section on "Begging the question" alone. I have found the book to be of surprising practical value whenever I find myself in debate with people with whom I disagree - and now examples of the kind of dismal thinking which he highlights jump off the pages of newspapers all the time. Don't let them get away with it!