Argument from Incredulity
Other Names
Description
When you have no reason to believe something, the correct response is to withhold belief (the "I don't know" position). But even if you have no good reason to believe something, there is a natural human tendency to believe it if you have reasons against an opposing view.
If you find yourself justifying your view by saying "I can't believe...", "I can't imagine..." or "I can't understand how..." then you are probably falling into the trap of incredulieving.
Example
Golden rice is just a way for biotech companies to enslave poor farmers. I can't believe that these huge corporations would do something just for the good of it with no profit motive.
Famous Examples
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I think it takes more faith to be like you, an atheist, than like me, a believer, and it's because of nature. You know, I just don't think we could've lucked out to have the tides come in, the tides go out, sun go up, sun go down. Don't think it could've happened.
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I truly cannot imagine men with men, women with women, doing what they were not physically created to do, without abnormal stress and misbehavior.
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To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
(Charles Darwin 1872)
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