(March 27, 2014 at 3:20 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: Phobias sometimes stem from how a person views a situation, ethically. If he feels "it's wrong," there is no argument that will satisfy him.
I am of the opinion that we usually do not know the reason we take a particular stance on many issues, and since we are wired to HAVE TO KNOW, we mostly just invent motivations and then try to fit ourselves into them. A person may have completely irrational reasons to want to force the world to fit into his narrow viewpoint. Not knowing what they are, he will invent rationalizations that seem logical or at least defensible.
Not impossible to change a person's mind in that scenario, but it's not easy since we do not really know what arguments to use when they don't even know why they believe as they do.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
