RE: Does the head follow the heart in matters of truth?
March 15, 2018 at 8:46 am
(This post was last modified: March 15, 2018 at 8:48 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
It has been shown using brain scans that people do have an emotional preference first that they consciously rationalise afterwards. But we all know that when people refer to matters of the heart it does not mean that emotions really are situated in the central part of your cardiovascular system. There are many neural functions that we are not aware of except for what they tell us and emotions are the same. For example, if you show me an apple I am not aware of the edge detection going on in my brain, the feature classification, pattern matching or how I can still recognise it as an apple even if you move it from left to right, away from me, rotate it or partially obscure it. I still see an apple.
In the same way people are emotionally drawn to certain decisions or ideas and they won't necessarily know why. This is why christians find it so effective conditioning children from birth. Often when I am debating with theists I can see that they 'just know' that they are correct even though they can't actually formulate why. Actually they just feel that way because of their conditioning. But it means that they feel comfortable making lots of presuppositions and are astounded when I ask what seems to them really stupid questions. For example, what a god could possibly be. They just can't get their head round why anyone would question their presuppositions or definitions and get frustrated when they can't defend them. It must seem like we're playing word games or hiding behind semantics to avoid acknowledging what to them is an obvious truth and many of them do accuse us of that. But that's because they have been so strongly conditioned for such a long time and so much of their belief system relies upon these presuppositions. Kick away the foundations and the rest crumbles. This makes it even harder emotionally to acknowledge that they have made certain assumptions.
Being aware of what assumptions you have made yourself and deliberately asking if they are in fact correct is a vital part of developing critical thinking skills. This is why faith is the antithesis of critical thinking.
In the same way people are emotionally drawn to certain decisions or ideas and they won't necessarily know why. This is why christians find it so effective conditioning children from birth. Often when I am debating with theists I can see that they 'just know' that they are correct even though they can't actually formulate why. Actually they just feel that way because of their conditioning. But it means that they feel comfortable making lots of presuppositions and are astounded when I ask what seems to them really stupid questions. For example, what a god could possibly be. They just can't get their head round why anyone would question their presuppositions or definitions and get frustrated when they can't defend them. It must seem like we're playing word games or hiding behind semantics to avoid acknowledging what to them is an obvious truth and many of them do accuse us of that. But that's because they have been so strongly conditioned for such a long time and so much of their belief system relies upon these presuppositions. Kick away the foundations and the rest crumbles. This makes it even harder emotionally to acknowledge that they have made certain assumptions.
Being aware of what assumptions you have made yourself and deliberately asking if they are in fact correct is a vital part of developing critical thinking skills. This is why faith is the antithesis of critical thinking.
