# Argument from incredulity

*Also called: Personal incredulity, divine fallacy*

- **Cluster:** Burden and ignorance — Not knowing treated as knowing
- **Page:** https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/incredulity/
- **In Arabic:** https://fallacy.wiki/ar/fallacy/incredulity.md
- **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

## What it is

Concluding that something is false because you cannot imagine how it could be true.

## In the wild

> I cannot see how it works, so it cannot.

## How to answer it

Note that the limit is on the imagination, not on the world.

## Origin and naming

Also called the argument from personal incredulity and, in Robert T. Carroll's Skeptic's Dictionary, the 'divine fallacy' — the leap from unexplained to supernatural. The pattern is ancient: early peoples who could not explain thunder attributed it to a god's rage. The modern name makes the error exact: the limit is in the imagining, not in the world.

## More places it shows up

- I can't imagine a bacterium surviving in boiling acid, so that study can't be right.
- The merger numbers don't make sense to me after one read, so the analyst must be cooking the books.
- I can't picture how this building would survive an earthquake with columns that thin. The architects are gambling with lives.
- Evolution says a fish turned into a bird? I just can't see it, so scratch the whole theory.

## How to spot it

- Notice when disbelief itself is offered as the sole ground for rejection.
- Notice when the speaker substitutes a hard-to-picture image for an actual mechanism.
- Notice when the demand for an explanation arrives after the verdict, not before it.

## Nearby

- [Ad lapidem](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/ad-lapidem.md)
- [Appeal to ignorance](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/appeal-ignorance.md)

## Read more

- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity)

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From fallacy.wiki — a bilingual field guide to 91 logical fallacies, published by phi holdings. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse freely with attribution to fallacy.wiki.