[split] Critical Thinking Skills

[jstrodel]

You guys don't know what you are talking about. A picture of a fossil is not the same as the journals and labs and tests that verify the object is what it says it is. There are plenty of pictures floating around about UFO's, do you believe them because of a picture?

Are you really this deluded? It's called source criticism, look it up. If you don't understand the concept, it is futile for anyone to discuss with you.

A lot of terms are related to source criticism:

cognitive authority; authority (textual criticism)
credibility (e.g. media credibility)
critical literacy /critical reading /critical thinking /Information literacy
information criticism /information quality /information evaluating
quality of evidence / quality norms in science and scholarship
relevance
source evaluation / source reliability
trust (social sciences); trustworthiness

OMG RETARDS DON'T KNOW CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS DON'T U KNOW THAT WHEN U USE SOURCE CRITISIMS YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THINGS YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE AUTHORITY YOU RETARD LOOK

Errr. damn.

U R DELUDED

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Jstrodel please enlighten yourself with things such as the scientific method and peer review then we can talk. Those are the processes anybody making scientific discoveries use to come to their conclusions.

Once it is obvious that you have done this, then we can talk.

What does this have to do with what I posted.

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No Darkstar, you are wrong. When someone shows you evidence that they have collected, really they are making an argument from authority, unless you see the original form the evidence takes in scientific journals and know exactly how to deal with it.

If you see an image of a fossil, that is not evidence. You must actually understand all the issues surrounding fossils before you have a direct experience of the things they are supposed to tell you about.

Now, it may be reasonable to trust that the people who are digging up fossils combined with the facts they present line up to tell a story. But they are establishing their credibility, and essentially arguing from their authority, unless you are reading the really technical stuff.

Most people will never experience real science in their life, their knowledge of science comes from appealing to scientific figures, whether it is directly an argument from there authority or some amount of information supporting the theories they support is gained, people do not really have the ability to do that much critical thinking without doing a ton of work.

What you say is true to a degree. In this day and age there is so much knowledge that specialization is required. So even an accomplished scientist in one field may have to rely on the conclusions of scientists in another field which .. as you say .. they are not in a position to fully vouchsafe directly themselves. But that is where peer review comes in. The fact that we rely on the experts in each field to provide the scrutiny we are unqualified to provide for ourselves can be seen as an appeal to authority. But even to the degree what you say is true, an appeal to the consensus of the best scientists working in a field carries more weight than an appeal to the experts in theology or literature. Someone who understands the scientific method, peer review and a little philosophy of science is not on the same epistemic footing as someone who places their confidence in the inerrancy of the bible.

An honest view of the situation. I will admit, it is not exactly the same. But there are other issues involved, such as science has no power to answer many kinds of questions, and there are other sources of authority that people rely on (such as common witness of the spirit).

Other facts involve tradition and the pragmatic value of theology to societies, the shear number of applications that many understandings of theology has had, over hundreds or thousands of years. There are no scientific methods that have thousands of years of history in for example, instructing young people on the correct way to live. Something to think about when you argue (though you are one of the better ones, whateverist), that Christianity is on the same evidential status as the tool fairy.

The person will point to a study that is 20 years old that has been successfully applied in a limited number of cases that replaced a similar theory, for instance, in medecine, that had a lot of unintended affects, coming out of using very similar methods.

I will accept that in some ways science can do things that theology cannot do, in terms of verification among non-specialized people. Theological verification happens when people experience the reality of God, and through other forms of in-query into the value of theology.

Scientific verification seems more rigorous, but when you look closer, most of the scientific theories and technological products are replaced relatively quickly, almost never longer than 100 or 200 years and technology changes even faster than that, much faster.

Religion has thousands of years of proven results. Someone will give a little junior historian littany of the crusades, the inquisition, and HITLER, blah blah blah, well there is 2000 years of history, there have been some bad things and some things you might not like much, but there is 2000 years of it, it is has mostly remained the same.

Science cannot appeal to that sort of cultural authority that surrounds it, not can it appeal to the degree of explanatory power that religious belief has in giving people credible answers to their origins and the correct way to live, which are always related.

So, in sum, I accept that the rigor of science and theology are of a different nature, but this does not prove that arguments from theological authority are meaningless, though perhaps they cannot be appreciated from an atheist statepoint, and perhaps that is to a lack of wisdom and knowledge of theology that the authority of the Christian church is rejected, rather than due to a proof along the same lines of rigor as the science the atheist clings to that demonstrates the Christian church is false or valueless.

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If you say that an argument is not fallacious because everyone uses it, that's ad populum. Are you able to accept that and move on?

Yes, if you were arguing "because everyone uses it". If you think that learning about theology or experience miracles is the same, referentially as "because everyone uses it", you are intentionally distorting language in order to make way for atheist claims.

You presupposition is the proposition "The authority of theological and mystical experience is not acceptable.", and because it is not acceptable, the argument is ad populum.

But you are not honest enough to actually represent the controversial claim that appeal to theological authorities that have existed for 2000 years or appeal to the testimony of miracles is the same as ad populum.

An honest person would argue that point, letting his pressupositions be known, you try and conflate ad populum with religious authority, trying to reduce religious claims to the same level as a random sampling of human opinions. You can argue that is true, but the fact that you didn't argue it, you just pressed and insisted that this was the nature of ad populum, using the language of a textbook fallacy proves that you are a dishonest person, rather than an atheist trying to advance atheism.

For an example of an honest atheist, see whateverist

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If you say that an argument is not fallacious because everyone uses it, that's ad populum. Are you able to accept that and move on?

Yes, but I never said that. I wouldn't make that claim.

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flying spaggeti monster

The fact that you put Christianity and Judaism and Islam, the three theistic religions, which are collectively the most important forces in history and have the majority of the people in the world adhering to them on the same level as a flying spagetti monster proves that you are DISHONEST (in the sense of lying, or deliberately avoiding the truth) and not worth debating.