Mystery, Therefore Magic
David Kyle Johnson
Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.
Bill O’Reilly, The O’Reilly Factor (Fox News, January 4, 2011)
One commits the mystery, therefore magic fallacy (MTM) when one takes the fact that one cannot find a “natural” or “rational” explanation for some event or thing as a reason to favor or to accept a magical, supernatural, or fantastic explanation for that event or thing.
“How else do you explain it?” This fallacy gets its name from the fact that we instinctually avoid it every time we watch a good magic show. When a magician does something for which we cannot find a natural explanation, we do not conclude that the magician actually has magic powers. We conclude that there is a natural explanation - it’s just that we are not smart enough to figure it out or detect it. Even the best magicians don’t know how Penn & Teller appear to catch bullets in their teeth, yet none think Penn & Teller actually have the ability to do so. In fact, on their show Fool Us, Penn & Teller regularly can’t figure out how the guest magicians do their tricks. Yet neither Penn nor Teller ever concludes that their guests have magic powers.But “It’s magic” is not the only kind of magical, supernatural, or fantastical explanation that can be offered up for what one cannot explain. In the outside world (beyond the magic stage), people usually just interject their favorite such explanation. Unexplained noises or temperature variations are often attributed to ghosts. Others conclude that the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens because they can’t understand how the Egyptians could have built them. Thousands have concluded that unidentified flying objects are alien craft, that unknown animals in the forest are Bigfoot, and that unidentifiable objects in Loch Ness are a monster. That no natural explanation is forthcoming is thought to be good reason to interject one’s supernatural explanation of choice.
MTM is very common in religious circles since “God did it” is often the religious supernatural explanation of choice. For example, the fact that a disease went into remission is often thought to be evidence of divine intervention, as is the fact that someone endured a terminal disease longer than expected. Religious academics even fall prey to the fallacy, like Lehigh University’s Michael Behe (2006). He thinks that irreducibly complex biological systems (e.g., blood clotting) can’t be explained by natural selection and are thus evidence of divine intervention. Likewise, apologist William Lane Craig and Christian philosopher Robin Collins think that the inexplicable “fine-tuning” of the universe is good reason to conclude that God fine-tuned it.
Now it’s important to note that, quite often, those who make such arguments are mistaken about what is explained and what isn’t. For example, as Owen Jarus explains, we actually do know how the Egyptians built the pyramids and most “UFOs” have been identified. Further, there are now tons of pieces of evidence of so-called irreducible complexities that are actually explained quite nicely by natural selection. And, unbeknownst to Bill O’Reilly, the moon’s gravitational pull explains the tides.
But even if explanations for such phenomena were not available, these arguments would still be fallacious because they would still commit MTM. For example, what makes Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument fallacious isn’t the fact that we actually have explained things like blood clotting via natural selection. (That just makes a premise in his argument false.) What makes the argument fallacious is the fact that Behe thinks that (1) “God designed blood clotting” would logically follow from (2) “We have yet to explain how blood clotting evolved.” But even if (2) were true, (1) would not follow.
This fact becomes obvious once you realize that there is no way to delineate one supernatural explanation from another. If Behe’s argument were valid, the irreducible complexity would be just as much evidence of divine design as it would be of alien design or interdimensional being design - or even the idea that we live in a computer simulation.
This is a weakness to which even Behe himself has admitted.But we can see why such reasoning is fallacious by returning to our “magic show” example. Ask yourself: When you see a magic trick you can’t explain, what is the best explanation for why you can’t find a natural explanation?
Is it (a) there isn’t one because the person on stage has magic powers or (b) you are not as smart as you think (you’re not as good as you thought at figuring out magic tricks)? Clearly, it is option (b).
The same holds true when you can’t find a natural explanation for something in the regular world. The fact that you can’t find such an explanation is much more likely due to your ignorance than it is due to there being no natural explanation. The same even holds when no human has yet explained the phenomenon in question; our collective ignorance is still more likely than an absence of a natural explanation.
In fact, MTM is simply another way of committing the appeal to ignorance fallacy. A person appeals to ignorance, for example, when he takes the fact that he can’t prove some proposition true to be a good reason to think that proposition is false. When committing MTM, one simply takes one’s inability to prove there is a natural explanation (by finding one) to be a good reason to conclude there isn’t one.
Now, it’s worth noting that appealing to ignorance isn’t always fallacious. Sometimes a lack of evidence for something being true is good evidence that it is false. If you look in your fridge and can’t find any evidence that there is any milk (i.e., you don’t see a milk container), that is good evidence that there is no milk in your fridge. A failed exhaustive search for something is evidence it doesn’t exist. Likewise, a lack of any evidence for the Earth having a second moon is good evidence that there isn’t one. If the evidence of something would be obvious if it existed, a lack of such evidence is good reason to think that thing doesn’t exist. In fact, when it comes to existential matters - matters regarding whether or not something exists - an absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The burden of proof is on the believer. If you want to believe in Bigfoot, it’s your epistemic duty to show he exists; it’s not my duty to show he doesn’t. And until you meet that burden, doubt is justified and belief is not.Could there be such an exception when it comes to MTM? If you experience something weird for yourself, and you have offered multiple natural explanations that have failed, could you be justified in concluding that something “magic” (supernatural or extraordinary) is at work? It wouldn’t seem so. After all, such an explanation would have to be the best explanation, and such explanations are (by their very nature) not simple, wide scoping, or conservative. “I just can’t figure it out” would always seem to be the better explanation. And even if it’s not, which magical explanation should you prefer? God? Ghosts? Aliens? The Illuminati? There would seem to be no way to tell.
So all in all, “How else do you explain it?” isn’t a valid argument. The fact that something remains a mystery is not a good reason to invoke magical, supernatural, or fantastical explanations. In order to have evidence of such things, such explanations will have to be the best among the competing alternatives. But it seems that will rarely (if ever) be the case.
References
Behe, Michael. 2006. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York, NY: Free Press.
Jarus, Owen. 2016. “How Were the Egyptian Pyramids Built?” Live Science, June 14. http://www.livescience.com/32616-how-were-the-egyptian-pyramids-built-. html (accessed September 29, 2017).