Can anyone identify this fallacy for me:
Christian apologists sometimes use "fulfillment of prophecy" as proof that the Bible is true. Muslims and Christians will sometimes cite verses of their own respective scriptures to assert "scientific knowledge". The problems with a lot of these claims are varied but sometimes it's the case that they've taken some poetic or vaguely worded passage and interpreted it in such a way as to retrofit it to what we know now to be true.
People who believe in horoscopes or the prophecies of Nostradamus often use the same fallacious reasoning. They look back on past events and retroactively interpret the passages in order to make them fit.
Once I tested this line of thinking by an experiment. I imagined that I believed my Dilbert monthly calender would predict the events of the coming month but the joke that was featured that month. Sure enough, I could always look back on the previous month and selectively find some event that vaguely fit the joke if I interpreted the joke in the right way. The conclusion was that you could make anything seem "prophetic" if you look back at past events with sufficient bias.
This line of thinking is clearly fallacious but I don't know what it's called.
Christian apologists sometimes use "fulfillment of prophecy" as proof that the Bible is true. Muslims and Christians will sometimes cite verses of their own respective scriptures to assert "scientific knowledge". The problems with a lot of these claims are varied but sometimes it's the case that they've taken some poetic or vaguely worded passage and interpreted it in such a way as to retrofit it to what we know now to be true.
People who believe in horoscopes or the prophecies of Nostradamus often use the same fallacious reasoning. They look back on past events and retroactively interpret the passages in order to make them fit.
Once I tested this line of thinking by an experiment. I imagined that I believed my Dilbert monthly calender would predict the events of the coming month but the joke that was featured that month. Sure enough, I could always look back on the previous month and selectively find some event that vaguely fit the joke if I interpreted the joke in the right way. The conclusion was that you could make anything seem "prophetic" if you look back at past events with sufficient bias.
This line of thinking is clearly fallacious but I don't know what it's called.
Atheist Forums Hall of Shame:
"The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too."
... -Lucent, trying to defend the Trinity concept
"(Yahweh's) actions are good because (Yahweh) is the ultimate standard of goodness. That’s not begging the question"
... -Statler Waldorf, Christian apologist
"The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too."
... -Lucent, trying to defend the Trinity concept
"(Yahweh's) actions are good because (Yahweh) is the ultimate standard of goodness. That’s not begging the question"
... -Statler Waldorf, Christian apologist
