(December 15, 2018 at 11:25 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: But fundamentalists are just exemplars of a problem which (though more dilute) is found throughout the population. People are encouraged to project "confidence"... which sometimes means acting as if one is certain when one isn't.
I share your pessimism.
And as always, I find this misplaced confidence more troubling when I see it in people who really ought to know better. We expect it in creationists or other pure ideologues. We have no excuse for letting it go by when it shows up in people like ourselves.
To me, this is one of the differences between regular old atheists and so-called New Atheists. If we don't believe, we can just say we don't believe, without pretending that we also understand all the theological arguments. But some people who don't believe also assume that they are qualified to pass judgment on things they've never studied.
The worst example I can think of off hand is in Dawkins' book, where he thinks he has rebutted Thomas Aquinas. This is in a book put out by a [formerly] reputable publisher, but apparently nobody bothered to check whether his argument was embarrassingly bad or not. I mean -- he lives in Oxford, which is probably the town with the most English-speaking people in the world who understand Thomas Aquinas. Yet he didn't walk across the street to ask someone who knows better than he does. He just assumes that because the argument is Christian, it must be stupid. (Even my own editor, in a much less high-priced publishing company, called me out when I used a pre-Cantor definition of infinity. Yet nobody did such a favor for Dawkins.)
I don't know whether the false assumption of expertise is worse now, or whether we just see it more because of the Internet. But it's pretty glaringly obvious in any field you happen to know something about.
