Oh, Those Evil Claws

            I never knew that even praised intellectuals and world leaders were prone to fall into the claws of logical fallacies. I never said anything about politicians. But Gandhi? Really? Mahatma Gandhi's famous speech at Kingsley Hall in 1931, ladies and gentlemen, and the logical fallacies that appeared in it:

·      Gandhi talks about his belief in God and says, “That informing power of spirit is God, and since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is.” Fallacy of ignorance: Since he can’t prove there is anything else that is that informing power, then all else fails to exist and he recurs to the idea that it is God.

             

·      “I see it as purely benevolent, for I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is life, truth, light.” False analogy: Or something of the sort. Just because life has light and truth and, well, life, doesn’t mean that God is all of those things. If that were even the case, he would also be the darkness in the midst of the light, or the untruth misted between the truth, or the darkness engulfing the light. Just because they exist because of God doesn’t necessarily mean that God is those things.

·      “Where there is realization outside the senses it is infallible”. Maybe it’s just me, but in order to have a realization, to understand something or have some sort of earth-shattering epiphany, there has to be some type of background knowledge beforehand. And knowledge is something absorbed through words spoken by a master intellectual ergo resorting to the sense of hearing, or the reading of an enlightening novel, by the sense of sight, or the listening of a professor explaining quantum physics while the equations are implanted into the visual chamber of your brain. If I have a sudden realization that I actually adore cooking, it’s because I have experienced it, or something close to it, via the senses. So his statement is ludicrous, breaching the territory of Reductio ad absurdum.  The idea of doing such a thing, the possibility of it, is inconceivable.

·      “To reject this evidence is to deny oneself.” False analogy: How is rejecting the presence of God, the fact that many people in different countries have testimonies regarding Him, even comparable to denying oneself? It’s not. There is not proof to his statement.