practice issues, round 1

"If I can't disprove it, I can't dismiss it." I think I've said that before. Presented with a claim regarding some topic, I am more free to say "I'm not convinced" than "You're wrong." The latter is also a claim, and so must be justified with supporting facts and reasons to be valid.

And what do you do when learning something new, like figuring out when people are wrong or using fallacious arguments? Start easy and work your way up, of course. So I figured I'd look at some unusually wild claims and figure out how I'd argue against them. If some kooky idea is clearly off-center, finding its faults should be simple.

The most recent claim I approached, and the only one that turned out to be even close to easy, was Conservapedia's list of thirty-five reasons that each, single-handedly, disproves Einstein's theories of relativity.

• Some reasons are Bible passages that contradict the theories when read literally. Those aren't evidence.
• Some are counterexamples that are described as definitive in this list but less-than-definitive on other Conservapedia pages and in the original references. The site contradicts itself here.
• Some reasons are variants or duplicates of others already listed. They obviously don't count twice.
• There are claims that relativity, unlike every scientific theory that has been verified, has produced exactly zero new theoretical ideas or useful or life-saving inventions. I think I can dismiss this out of hand as hyperbole, but just to be safe, it's easy to find articles on how GPS satellites benefit from relativistic clock corrections.
• Roughly half a dozen remaining counterexamples require understanding relativity. I haven't made headway on those as I've never studied the theories beyond reading an encyclopedia or watching Nova.