(April 3, 2013 at 4:27 am)Esquilax Wrote: Oh, I dunno, I think it's pretty easy to tell who's bullshitting and who isn't in this case:
I don't really see where it matters. Knowing a person's background may be interesting and it may give some insight into their current view of things, but in the end the important thing is whether their arguments hold water or not. Which is why it gets boring when people substitute "you're saying that because you're blah blah" instead of attempting to advance a point. Way too much of that tends to go on in discussions, and the discussion itself gets lost.
It's not relevant why person_A is an atheist and why person_B is a theist, and trying to tell them why they believe what they believe is a waste of time and words that could've been used to advance an argument.
"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
