[split] Critical Thinking Skills

[jstrodel]

You are so proud. Why can't you listen to others? You are so ideological biased. If you were humble, you would check on yourself because you are making the most basic error of undergraduate atheism. This is why people are atheists, because they are proud, they won't listen to people that think differently from them, they aren't really curious, they are curious about liberalism, they don't care if they are right, they care about winning arguments.

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Look up ad verecundiam in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam), also authoritative argument and appeal to authority, is an inductive-reasoning argument that often takes the form of a statistical syllogism.[1] Although certain classes of argument from authority can constitute strong inductive arguments, the appeal to authority is often applied fallaciously: either the authority is not a subject-matter expert, or there is no consensus among experts in the subject matter, or both.[1][2][3]

Fallacy labels have their use. But fallacy-label texts tend not to provide useful criteria for applying the labels. Take the so-called ad verecundiam fallacy, the fallacious appeal to authority. Just when is it committed? Some appeals to authority are fallacious; most are not. A fallacious one meets the following condition: The expertise of the putative authority, or the relevance of that expertise to the point at issue, are in question. But the hard work comes in judging and showing that this condition holds, and that is where the fallacy-label texts leave off. Or rather, when a text goes further, stating clear, precise, broadly applicable criteria for applying fallacy labels, it provides a critical instrument more fundamental than a taxonomy of fallacies and hence to that extent goes beyond the fallacy-label approach. The further it goes in this direction, the less it need to emphasize or event to use fallacy labels. (Schwartz, 232)

If you want to understand the world, don't just screen out the stuff that doesn't agree with what you say. Look, when I am typing stuff on here, probably 85-95% of the stuff I am typing is true. I can promise you that. I havn't told a lie in 6 or 7 years. I can be wrong, but most of the stuff I say, is from direct experience from God. I am not saying that I am better than anyone else, or I am smarter than anyone else, I have average intelligence. I am not a genius. But I know what I am talking about.

You aren't even prepared to accept the possibility that someone who disagrees with you could know something that you don't. I hope that you can escape that. I am saying this because I want you to have what I have, the knowledge absolutely that God exists.


Good links on fallacies (including some interesting stuff on fallacies theory, good to know what exactly fallacies are and how it isn't necessarily that easy to apply them. The difference between a significant atheist philosopher like Daniel Dennet or Bertrand Russell and an undergraduate atheist who accuses and defames Christianity by using logical concepts and informal logical concepts falsely because he is too lazy to actually spend the time to understand how they work):
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/

Blessings,
Joseph