Mark Souder Gets It. Or Not

From PZ I learned of more stupidity from a Republican Congressman. Yeah, hard to believe, but true.  Rep. Mark Souder, in a recent interview, claimed admitted that the highlight of his year was appearing in Expelled:

I personally believe that there is no issue more important to our society than intelligent design. I believe that if there wasn't a purpose in designing you — regardless of who you view the designer as being — then, from my perspective, you can't be fallen from that design. If you can't be fallen from that design, there's no point to evangelism.

First off, this is a critical thinking blog and so I am required by law to tell you this is an Appeal to Consequences logical fallacy – the truth (or otherwise) of something does not depend on the consequences of it being true (or not).  If it did, Santa Claus must be real, or Christmas wouldn’t be so much fun.  Of course, you knew that.

My legal duties taken care of, it struck me that, fallacious logic or not, Souder unintentionally spoke the truth there.  As he said, “If you can't be fallen from that design, there's no point to evangelism.”  Quite true.  Unfortunately, Souder will probably not draw the obvious conclusion from his own words, namely there's no point to evangelism.  But then, we know from Senator Mark Pryor that you don’t need to pass an IQ test to get into congress, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

Comments

[Jurjen]

Which Murphy-esque law is that again, that states "if your premises are incorrect, but your logic is correct, your conclusion will be invalid; if your premises are incorrect, and your logic is also incorrect, you have at least a chance of accidentally reaching a valid conclusion"? Seems the Congressman provided an empirical example of that.

At least, I think so, since I can't make sense of the phrase "you can't be fallen from that design," despite reading the rest of the interview for context. In engineering terms, when a design fails to function as intended, that is because the design was flawed, i.e. the designer made a mistake. It is not the fault of designed artifact.

Souder continues:

As an evangelical Christian, I believe the premise of a fall being at the core of reforming lives. I believe the concept of grace and forgiveness comes from having fallen from something.

Okay... Let's try putting evangelical YEC worldview in software terms:
God the Designer releases Man v1.0. As it turns out, Man v1.0 suffers from the "Original Sin" bug, though this is not due to the design being flawed, or even user error, but because the software "fell from its design." Despite having knocked out Man v1.0 in under six days, the Designer then takes 4004 years to come up with the Man v2.0 (aka "the Son of Man") patch. But the Designer leaves the decision to the software itself whether or not to accept the patch!

This is Intelligent Design?

[Bronze Dog]

Well said, Jurjen.