RE: Please correct me where I am wrong
May 20, 2015 at 8:41 am
(This post was last modified: May 20, 2015 at 8:41 am by Tonus.)
(May 20, 2015 at 2:23 am)paulpablo Wrote: From what I've seen, there are many situations that atheists are guilty of just being wrong about stuff, logical fallacies, getting emotional about arguments and letting it get in the way of their conclusions.Cognitive bias appears to be a feature of the human mind. Our brains have a whole raft of different ways to help us to make sense of our surroundings and of the things we learn and understand. Those biases are always at work, and I don't think anyone is ever free of them. But we can work towards a rational point-of-view on some things if we can identify the biases and strip them away.
Before I go into what fallacies and over emotional arguments I think I've seen on here and on other forums I just want to say why I think religious people are usually more guilty of these things.
I think that the most important thing is to recognize that there is a rational approach to almost any question or topic, and to work to find it. The most efficient is to identify biases and fallacies, then quickly dismiss them and focus on the question or topic. But it's very tempting to focus on the fallacies and biases instead, which then becomes a topic of discussion in itself.
"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