(March 24, 2013 at 4:51 pm)jstrodel Wrote: You are a fool. It is not fallacious to appeal to authority, people do it all the time.And a lot of the time, it's fallacious. Such as your example. No proof, just assertions, but they were authorities of some sort or another, and that's enough for you. As opposed to, say, the Theory of Evolution, which has such a preponderance of evidence that those authorities who are ACTUAL authorities recognize its validity.
jstrodel Wrote:You are a fool if you think the witness of western civilization counts for nothing.Straw man fallacy. When the witness of western civilization provides actual proof to bolster their arguments, call me. Or just continue to guess at my age, motivations, level of holiness, life experience, and so on. I'm sure those details will help you and all of those god-fearing scientists dig up that proof that has been so elusive for so long.
"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
