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If someone says they are right because they are smarter or more emotionally intelligent this can be a form of gas lighting. If your opponent convinces you that they are smarter than you then they can have anything they want from you. It is similar to poisoning the well too. "You are less intelligent than me, therefore everything you say and believe is less intelligent."
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answered on Saturday, Jun 02, 2018 12:36:15 AM by noblenutria@gmail.com |
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I think it also qualifies as argument from authority if they claim someone is more correct based on their position or some arbitrary trait that doesn't actually demonstrate the validity of their argument about creationism. Generally a red herring argument since they're derailing it into a matter of intelligence instead of actually meeting the burden of proof for their assertions. Evidence is vastly in favour of evolution, given we have real time developments such as elephants losing their tusks to cope with heavy poaching, lizards in a region that suddenly lost larger competing species developing larger heads to make better use of the increased availability of larger insects that used to be eaten by said larger lizards, a species of snake getting darker in polluted areas to better cope with those conditions, vestigial organs in a number of species, including hip bones in whales, etc. The gradual change of species in adaptation to their environment and the genetic relation between species that diverged from a common ancestor is clearly demonstrated fact.
Also I feel your pain. I've been there and they never seem to listen. |
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answered on Saturday, Jun 02, 2018 12:40:08 AM by Night |
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The creationist is engaging in a litany of logically fallacious assertions and cognitive biases, among them: False premise, Foundational bias, ad hominem slurs, hasty generalizations, chronic catachresis, and psychological projection in defiance of contemporary empirical evidence and scientific studies. In essence, he clearly has no idea of what he's talking about. It is all subjective and ignorant opinion without evidence or support.
Steven Pinker explains this religious reactive bias thusly: "Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes.? Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them–or worse, who credibly rebut them–they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful." Very often this defensive "rage" ( see Dan Kahan's Yale Cognition Studies or Sherman and Cohens Identity Protective Reasoning) results in a defensive posture of lies, falsehoods, misinterpretations, selective arrangement, cognitive dissonance and "alternative facts" tailored to protects the religionist's bias and identity but without merit. For instance, claiming religionists and theists are more "intelligent" than secularists and atheists is simply not supported by empirical evidence. (See: Pew Forum on Religious Religion and Public Life released a survey on religious knowledge. When religionists slander secularists as victims of Dunning-Kruger it is but a misinformed catachresis of the term. If atheists and secularists are proven to be more informed than your average Religionists then statistically they are less likely to be guilty of "Not knowing what they don't know". Thus, Dunning- Kruger effect is much greater with religionists than secularists, making it more likely they will project their own bias on their opponent. Psychological projection is when humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. (see Projektion: Sigmund Freud, Case Histories II (PFL 9) p. 132 Moreover psychologically projecting Dunning-Kruger on a non-believer is much more likely from the theist because of their defensive posture. Their claims come from a doxastically closed mindset, rather than from an individual who has no fixed beliefs based on supernatural pleadings. Recent scientific theory suggests that theism and religion are-a residual by-product of an evolutionary useful instinctive process (see Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics) Called the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, Kanazawa's theory attempts to explain the differences in the behavior and attitudes of intelligent and less intelligent people, The hypothesis is based on two assumptions: "First, that we are psychologically adapted to solve recurrent problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the African savanna," "Second, that 'general intelligence' (what is measured by IQ tests) evolved to help us deal with nonrecurrent problems for which we had no evolved psychological adaptations." The assumptions imply that "intelligent people should be better than unintelligent people at dealing with 'evolutionary novelty' — situations and entities that did not exist in the ancestral environment suggesting that evolutionary intelligence is something that opposes primitive instincts. Thus, according to Edward Dutton, a research fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the United Kingdom. "Religion is nothing more than a primitive instinct, whereas true Intelligence means rationally solving problems as a means to overcome religious instinct. Overcoming religious instinct means being intellectually curious and open to non-instinctive possibilities,” In summary, the claim that religious people are likely to be more intelligent and less susceptible to Dunning-Kruger is a false premise without evidence. And, as the great Hitch opined: Anything that can be introduced without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Only in this case, there are mountains and mountains of evidence as to shrink the creationist's claim to nonsensical gibberish. |
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answered on Saturday, Jun 02, 2018 01:16:40 PM by mchasewalker |
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The logical fallacy is ad hominem, but I have a different position on this. I believe its only an ad hominem if the insult is not additional to any argument. If they have refuted your argument and insulted you on top, then its not necessarily ad hominem because they have refuted you and the insult was not the replacement to the rebuttal. I can understand the urge to insult people sometimes, as it can be frustrating when people misconstrue despite a perfect explanation or resort to constant fallacy. You claimed that this person put forward no argument at all, I find that a bit hard to believe. Gods existence is unfalsifiable, many atheists claim that god absolutely doesn’t exist, but they’re burdening themselves to prove something they couldn’t possibly. Its illogical to claim that which cannot be falsified is false. Its a contradiction. On the flip side, creationism is a belief in gods existence, not an absolute claim. Athiests and creationists can both be illogical depending on whether they confuse their beliefs with absolute certainty. Understanding the limitations of a belief vs fact is how you avoid fallacy. |
answered on Sunday, Nov 14, 2021 07:38:44 PM by Michael | |
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