Idola Fori Fallacy

Idol fori is one of the many smokescreens that are used to cover the fact that the reasoning is based on one of the three fallacies of Agrippa's trilemma. Whenever a logical fallacy is committed, the fallacy has its roots in Agrippa's trilemma. All human thought (without Divine revelation) is based on one of three unhappy possibilities. These three possibilities are infinite regress, circular reasoning, or axiomatic thinking. This problem is known as Agrippa's trilemma. Some have claimed that only logic and math can be known without Divine revelation; however, that is not true. There is no reason to trust either logic or math without Divine revelation. Science is also limited to the pragmatic because of the weakness on human reasoning, which is known as Agrippa's trilemma.

The Idola Fori Fallacy occurs when words are used that give a false impression of reality. There are two kinds of idola fori. One consists of names for things that don't exist, such as evolution (when it is used to describe small steps of living things transforming from one kind (family or genus) to another) or big bang. The other is names for things that exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities, such as the various equivocations with words like evolution, science, evidence, or logic.

Examples of the Idola Fori Fallacy

“Life may appear to be designed, but it is just a product of random changes over millions of years of earth history.”

Words, here, are used to give a false impression of reality, to deny what can be observed.

Bill Nye, arguing against Creation Science: “. . . to be more respected than what you can observe in nature, what you can find in your backyard in Kentucky.”

In context, Bill is claiming that the people of Kentucky are able to observe the Universe beginning with a big bang billions of years ago, life springing into existence in the form of a single-celled living thing, and the gradual changes that supposedly happened over billions of years of Molecules-to-Man evolution. Giving the name, Big Bang, to an event that never happened gives the false impression that there was such an event. In addition, Bill is claiming that they, in their back yards, can observe that the Genesis Flood didn't take place. Bill doesn't seem to realize that he has moved from observation of what is concrete to the abstract world of imaginative storytelling. This is a very common phenomenon when it comes to the Big-Bang-Billions-of-Years-No-Flood-Molecules-to-Man story. There are a few other highly political areas of the scientific community where this is true as well, such as the global warming issue.