Retrospective card laying logic

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What do you think of retrospective card laying logic?

Examples:

"I wouldn't of wanted to be aborted therefore abortion is wrong."

"It cannot be possible that we are here because a random sequence of events because we are so sophisticated, therefore it must have been through intelligent design"

In other words given the cards you've been delt you base your opinion from the current POV looking back, rather than the POV of where the subject would have arisen.

i would have enjoyed chillin with god rather than being born to tell you the truth.

As insightful ever RB

I think it's absurd because making the argument at all requires the past to have happened exactly as it did. People who were aborted cannot argue for or against it. If evolution's random sequence of events had been different, there would be no people to argue for or against intelligent design. This is also the root of the argument that prayer can heal people from potentially fatal illness - you hear the stories of people who prayed and recovered, but you hear nothing from the people that prayed and didn't recover because they're dead. Et cetera. This is called the Anthropic Principle. In essence, your viewpoint is biased toward expecting the sort of things that you normally perceive as real simply because that's all that you can perceive as real.

Last edited by Coyote27 on 22 Sep 2007, 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Something of an application of the Golden Rule, no?
But, that falls apart, when not all want to be treated
in such a manner. So, since I would rather have
been aborted, does that mean that I should try
to enforce such behavior?

I know, not the point that you're making,
but that's the main problem that I see with
THIS one.



Clearly ridiculous. Our very ability to make the statement
presupposes the complexity. There could be countless
universes which are simply not complex enough to allow
for such a statement to arise.



But, we HAVE to. Our opinions are intrinsically tied to
our position as an observer. There is simply no escape.