(December 21, 2017 at 12:58 pm)alpha male Wrote: Logic fails in other instances. I could logically conclude that disabled people are a drain on society and should be eliminated. In that case I defer to emotion and faith, which tells me otherwise.Logic and reason can lead you to conclude otherwise as well. Remember our first debate? It was all about how I thought that you could arrive at moral conclusions through logic. Besides, there are two non sequiturs in your statement:
1. It does not follow that just because people are disabled that they are a drain on society.
2. It does not follow that people who are a drain on society should be eliminated.
Some kind of emotion or prejudice (or logic which you didn't include) is required to get to the conclusion that X should be eliminated.
Quote:Regarding the physical, we tend to rely on observation and science rather than logic.
Logic is what prompts us to value science and observation in the first place. (I can elaborate this point if need be.) There is no instinctive mechanism of the brain which makes us respect the findings of science, we do so because it is logical to do so-- ie. there are good reasons to.
Quote:A rabbit's foot isn't analogous to conscious lifestyle choices aimed at producing a desired effect.
Neither is religion. Compare:
"There is an invisible man in the sky, and I'm going to quit heroin."
with
"There is no invisible man in the sky, and I'm going to quit heroin."
Quote:1. We don't know the percentages of Biblical scholars' positions on any issue. People pretending we do are, well, pretending.
They are citing credible sources, and you kind of being dickish by refuting them out of hand. It's a bit too much to ask them to research all of it themselves when it takes hours and hours, not to mention a wealth of resources to do so with significant findings.
Quote:So, to publish articles and books, they need to invent new ways of looking at it. A book or article concluding that the conventional wisdom of the past 2,000 years is correct is less likely to be published than one challenging the conventional wisdom.
This is called "publication bias" and it is the direct result of the way academic journals work. There is a movement in philosophy to put a stop to this mode of research, and I support it. Flash in the pan scholarship is being hoisted above genuine boring-as-shit academics, and it's wrong. That being said, it rarely leads to false information. But it does emphasize the wrong things.
