(January 24, 2012 at 8:03 pm)Undeceived Wrote: Just what part of what I said was contrary to science's understanding of evolution? Don't appeal to authority or tell me "the evidence is out there." What evidence do you refer to? Explain evolution in your own words. Why do you believe it, apart from scientists telling you to?
Your question is wrong. It's not that you don't understand parts of evolution, it's that you don't understand evolution. Based on what you've said, you don't appear to have a fundemental understanding of the science behind the well-evidenced process.
Chuck did not perform the 'appeal to authority' fallacy because his dig against you was against your lack of understanding as opposed to telling you that you should believe in something because a third party said so.
Unlike your assinine religious beliefs, we don't need scientists to tell us at all. We can find the evidence ourselves given enough time, energy, money, and field research.
However, we atheists listen to their peer-reviewed research (the act of peer reviewing effectively eliminates the 'appeal to authority' fallacy by using a particular scientific research or hypothosis paper to evidence a particular conclusion) because what it reveals about the reality in which we live is based in reality backed by things we find and not what a few scam artists refer to as 'revealed truth' i.e. appeal to authority or "the bible says it, I believe it, that settles it" sort of ridiculousness.
In other words, your arguements against atheists - every one I've seen - is based on one or more fallacies at its very core.
Science has none of those things.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan