(May 20, 2015 at 8:55 am)paulpablo Wrote: I suppose what I said about religious people being more guilty of emotional arguments is bias of myself obviously because I am an atheist.Whoops! I quoted that part because I wanted to address it, but seem to have skipped it. Sorry. I think that a religious person may be more likely to use certain biases because they're defending an entire worldview that begins from premises that have proven harder and harder to support (the existence of god(s), the existence of specific god(s), views regarding science and nature, etc). An atheist can also take unsupportable views on any topic and defend them with a host of fallacies and biases. Heck, I think that we apply a healthy serving of fallacious and biased thinking to even supportable ideas and views. But if your worldview is built on a foundation that starts with "god exists, and his name is Yahweh, and he did this and that..." then you need a fair amount of fallacious and biased thinking just to keep that going.
"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
