| setsunatenshi said: to your points... 1- Sorry, not acceptable. If you're quoting someone, unless you're making it up in your head, you must have read such quote somewhere. And since you just posted it right here it must mean you extracted it from somewhere. Unless you keep a diary on your pc with random quotes to use in arguments, the 'i'm sure you can find it on the internet' is not a valid response. I'm not saying you're lying, but surely you extracted it from somewhere and I'd love to see it's from either a book the man wrote or some reliable news source (not a creationist website). 2- The word choice implies that you have no information whatsoever on a certain claim which would make it a virtual coin toss wether you believe something or not. In the real world there are no such coin tosses so you can't actually chose what you believe. You see (i hope) tons of facts confirming one claim or the other and either you get convinced of something or you don't. Chosing your own beliefs seems like you're actually shutting yourself down to what reality is. Imagine someone 'chosing' to believe pigs can fly when there's no evidence to even 1 case of this happening. 3- Again, please provide me the link for this quote, it seems absolutely taken out of context and/or totally made up. I assure you there's no debate in the scientific community wether evolution does or does not happen. And this is not a discussion, this is a fact.
1 last thing, please check raygun's post above. It's basically repeating my first point in this discussion. Please don't take this as a win/lose discussion. It's just to get you better informed. This way you won't have to 'chose' your beliefs. They will be a consequence of the information you'll possess. |
1) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1463-6409.2007.00308.x/abstract
2) You said quote: "Chosing your own beliefs seems like you're actually shutting yourself down to what reality is"
I am not sure what you mean by this.
If a person made some nonsense up like, "I believe my dog can figure out algebra" and actually believed it, then yes. I agree.
If you mean that to believe in something with no scientific proof pf existence like a deity, aliens or ghost then billions on this earth must indeed be shutting themselves down to reality.
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You said quote: "The word choice implies that you have no information whatsoever on a certain claim which would make it a virtual coin toss wether you believe something or not".
I am now totally lost here, please truly forgive me.None the less I will try to respond.
I sat on a jury once. We had all available "information on a certain claim" as you said placed before us. The jury was split. No one tossed a coin. Everyone examined the evidence and came to their individual conclusion. The word choice meant in this case each member of the jury got to choose if he or she believed the defendant to be guilty or innocent depending on the evidence.
This is same if it is a court case, a scentific theory or simply something a someone told you. You are given the information and you choose to believe it or not. I really cannot lay it out any more simple than that.
I believe if I jump of a the roof of a 30 floor building onto the pavement below I would most likely die. I did not believe it when many scientists said with some authority that the largest possible terrestrial planet based on physics can only be 15x earth's mass ( I think it is 15x, either they way they now belive they were wrong), I believed the minority who said "No, you can possibly get such planets much bigger than 15x earth's mass" based on the theory they laid out. - I cannot produce evidence of this debate as it was in an astronomy journal.
I get to choose what I believe or do not believe base on how I analyse the evidence. I do not toss a coin. Nothing is going to change that.
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I have to leave it here for now. I have been writing this (between doing my work) for quite a while now and it is fast approaching home time and I need to carry doing what pays my bills. I will finish my response later tonight, time available or tomorrow. I will post this now so I don't have to start all over again and to let you know I am still "listening".
Just before I go let me point out that I do not take this as a win-lost argument. I respect your arguments and most of all appreiciate the tone in which you present them, unlike so many others. Not sure of getting me better informed though.
