(October 9, 2013 at 6:44 am)Rational AKD Wrote: maybe you should listen for a change. if naturalism is true, evolution is driven for the need to survive. discerning truth is not necessarily the most beneficial to survival, therefore many of our reasoning skills would not necessarily discern truth as we would like to think. if that is the case, we can't trust any of our reasoning skills to discern truth.
The reason I'm having such difficulty is your argument is very obtuse, relying on a lot of assumptions and makes use of spurious conclusions.
...and this is as good as "proof" gets for Christianity's extraordinary claims.
First of all, as I keep saying, I don't think you've adequately proved your assertion that paranoia is beneficial for survival. Just because some scholar argued for it doesn't make it so. He could be wrong.
Second, even if we grant that assertion, that doesn't mean pursuit of the truth might not have also evolved as a neutral trait or as a trait that wasn't weeded out successfully by natural selection. There might, by this hypothesis, be a paranoid side of us that we've bred for survival but we can suppress this in our pursuit of the truth.
Third, and most importantly, you've spuriously concluded that because our reasoning isn't perfect, we have to throw up our hands and say we'll never know what's true or not so why bother; let's all just embrace solipsism.
For example, Sir Issac Newton believed in a lot of crazy things like alchemy. That doesn't mean we throw out his findings in the field of physics. Science doesn't care about all the stuff you got wrong. You could believe in a thousand crazy things and yet make a single breakthrough discovery that can be proven by not just thought experiments and mental constructs (*poke*) but repeatable testing and hard evidence. Science will just ignore the 1,000 crazy things you've said and remember only the one breakthrough.
The logical fallacy at the core of your argument is called "poisoning the well". It's where someone or some source of information is discredited on one subject and so you conclude that everything that comes from that source must be wrong or flawed. The reality is that a broken clock is still right twice a day. Even if our sense of reason were flawed, that doesn't mean we can't prove anything.
And that's where evidence comes into play.
Atheist Forums Hall of Shame:
"The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too."
... -Lucent, trying to defend the Trinity concept
"(Yahweh's) actions are good because (Yahweh) is the ultimate standard of goodness. That’s not begging the question"
... -Statler Waldorf, Christian apologist
"The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too."
... -Lucent, trying to defend the Trinity concept
"(Yahweh's) actions are good because (Yahweh) is the ultimate standard of goodness. That’s not begging the question"
... -Statler Waldorf, Christian apologist
