(April 12, 2014 at 9:51 am)Esquilax Wrote: The Tu Quoque fallacy involves avoiding actually addressing an issue in favor of simply attempting to label the arguer a hypocrite. The fallacious point being that this does nothing to mitigate the Quoque-ers involvement in the same problem.Exactly. I have in no way attempted to excuse theists for use of fallacies, so I didn't commit a tu quoque.
Quote:A confirmation bias, on the other hand, involves a tendency to favor information that confirms one's pre-existing beliefs to the exclusion of competing information. In order for this thread to be an example of confirmation bias, there would need to be a position asserted to be confirmed, and there simply isn't; the thread is asking for an opinion about what fallacies have been presented to the posters by theists that frustrate them the most. There's no possible way to construe that as a position that could even fall victim to a confirmation bias, unless you're saying that there's some form of evidence out there that these fallacies don't actually frustrate us when we hear them?No possible way to construe...seriously? I disagree. It's very easy to construe this as a claim that theists are more prone to fallacious arguments than atheists, and that would be confirmation bias.
Quote:When pressed on your erroneous claim, you went with "you guys do it too!" which is the very definition of a Tu Quoque fallacy as it doesn't address the argument you were making,No, it's spot on the point I was making regarding confirmation bias.
You're correct that I did read between the lines. Maybe your strict reading of the OP is all there is to it. So, if you and some other atheists come out and say that theists are no more likely to make fallacious arguments than atheists, I'll concede that the conrfirmation bias charge was incorrect.
