Your EvC Debate Dream Team - Fantasy Debating

Dogma tends to do that. Lets be honest, if they were well versed in original thinking they wouldn't be Creationists would they?Most people are not sociopathic liars and prefer not to make claims generated purely from their imagination without any form of evidence whatsoever. With a few notable exceptions among those who frequent this board of course, knowingly peddling fiction as fact is distasteful. Instead people who are so far outside the advance of human knowledge are likely to be that way because they have been carefully indoctrinated with bullshit.This bullshit is codified, ritualized, and habitually cemented as an attempt to remain unchanged and "pure". This is an essential ingredient because it if was open to change then it would of necessity been modified into something other than bullshit when exposed to scientific fact. The fact that it has remained crap for an extended period guarantees concerted efforts to hammer said turds into carefully prepared minds with as little modification as possible.So yes slevesque, its quite reasonable to hold certain preconceived notions about Creationists in the same sense that it is reasonable to hold preconceived notions about the knowledge of Engineering graduates. Both were subject to the formal imprinting of certain sets of knowledge, and you would be a fool to ignore that.

How do you know that any given engineering college graduate is capable of the basic mathematical operations such as would be required for an engineering job? Because you have already made up your mind that if he is an engineering graduate then de facto he must be capable of the basic mathematics as would be required in an engineering job.Just because something is a preconceived notion does not mean it is false. Now it may be that such assumptions are off-putting to some people, but I tend to treat people as if they have as passing familiarity with the basic knowledge of modern humanity until proven otherwise. It is a continual surprise when someone reveals their world view to be severely compromised in such a way. People have plenty of time to craft their posts in such a forum and are usually quite capable of unfurling their own patina of ignorance and superstition. At the very least a little exposition is required to determine which cult mislead them.Heck, its rare to the point of absurdity to see a creationist come here and post "I think that the world/universe/humanity was created by an intelligent being because of... 'whatever' " Most of the time its either "You are wrong because I don't accept 'blank' because I believe this instead," or they don't even bother with formalities and simply post a word-salad of scripture and ranting.Edited by Phage0070, : No reason given.

No, preconceived notions are expectations. Finding a handful of contrary examples does not render it false, and 1 in 5 isn't necessarily enough to render it useless. Although of course it would probably be modified into "Engineers can do basic math + Engineering education is extremely spotty." There really isn't "plenty" of debate among scientists which makes me doubt the "well-thinking" of the rest of the people out there. What you are arguing against is the blatant disregard of a debater's position and dishonesty in argument. Not preconceived notions.

Then you simply don't learn.But keep in mind that I do have good preconceived notions about people to start with; I don't expect them to be Creationists. Since you dropped the "well-thinking" and the claim never included "people who are qualified to assess the topic" then I can agree that there are plenty of people out there who don't accept evolutionary theory. Of course I wouldn't phrase it as being "skeptics" exactly, but I'll chalk that up to semantics. For that to apply we would have to expect people to be Creationists before they said a word. Somehow I don't think thats the default people trend toward in this forum.

You did catch the part about assuming that the average person has a general smattering of modern human knowledge, and that they must first show themselves to be a Creationists right? What I think you were trying to do is whine about the unpopular light your particular departure from reality is viewed in. To try to counter this you are claiming that every Creationist is a unique snowflake of belief, regardless of the fact that an integral part of what leads people to be Creationists tends to divide them into easily defined groups with specific sets of beliefs.Well too bad; Creationism is going to be viewed in a poor light for good reason. Individual Creationists are often going to be lumped into subcategories based on their beliefs because it is a useful and accurate means of determining their beliefs. Get over it.

Agnostic vs. gnostic is not the same as atheist vs. theist. An agnostic doesn't claim to have knowledge while a gnostic does claim knowledge. An atheist doesn't have a belief in a god while a theist does have belief in a god.Each pair of terms is a true dichotomy but the pairs are completely compatible with each other. You can't ever have a gnostic agnostic or an atheistic theist but you can have gnostic and agnostic atheists, and gnostic and agnostic theists.So saying that Ringo comes across as more agnostic than atheist is speaking of two different things, and thus doesn't really make sense. You are comparing apples and oranges, and contrasting things that don't contrast at all.