The Wife of Bath Explains Why Logic Doesn't Work on Creationists

There is an irreconcilable difference in ways of thinking between religious and skeptical minds. There is also a false dichotomy in the opening sentence of this post, but ignore it for a minute. Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath also has nothing to do with evolution, but ignore that too.

I'm only using gap-toothed Alys because she's a medieval character whose tale most English-speaking people have read and studied enough to function as a good example. In her prologue and tale, she engages in some philosophical warfare on a topic that is no longer often argued. We fight proxy wars now over specific issues, but a little deeper down, our culture still struggles between the powers of auctoritee and experience.

"Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, were right ynough to me
To speke of wo that is in mariage."

Go get your Middle English dictionaries out. She's talking about the power and primacy of two opposing sources of knowledge. Auctoritee isn't just authority; it's received knowledge. Throughout her time at center stage, the Wife of Bath attacks the idea of auctoritee in favor of experience. The clergymen and more pious pilgrims are infuriated by her, and it's not just because a woman is speaking up (though that's an undeniable part of the scene). She is making the case that her experience, her vast, repeatedly tested experience, is a better source of information and truth than the authoritarian canon.

It's easy to look at creationist arguments and pick out logical fallacies. Often it's not even necessary to refute their awful lack of basic science comprehension (oh, by the way, the animation is still coming, but I'm making changes first), because the entire argument rests on ad hominem attacks and arguments from authority. Then, a few minutes later, when your forehead is sore from banging against the brick wall, it's equally easy to throw up your hands in frustration that "Logic doesn't work on these people!"

What's more difficult is to see how that mind works. Creationists don't keep trotting out logically fallacious arguments because they are so intellectually dishonest that they are willing to continue relying on an argument they know is wrong. Their entire position rests on the philosophical assumption that authority and received knowledge are superior to logic. The fact that an argument from authority is a logical fallacy is completely irrelevant. To a mind that relies on auctoritee, the fact that logic declares auctoritee fallacious is proof that logic is inferior. Logic negates its own reliability by excluding the one source of truth that must be reliable.

I used the phrase "religious and skeptical minds" earlier, and I chose the word "minds" deliberately, rather than the word "people." Even an otherwise skeptical person can and will take things on faith, compartmentalizing a lapse of pure logic from the rest of his thought. Even the Wife of Bath struggled with this. Though she presented an attack on auctoritee, throughout her prologue and tale, she cited (though often by misquoting) classical authoritarian sources to support her supposedly purely experience- and evidence-based argument. The combination is effective, if not strictly rational or consistent. After all, far more students read the Wife's tale than the Pardoner's.

If you make a stand for evidence against authority, expect those religious minds to object, but don't ever forget that they are not playing by the same rules.