The Fault With Logic...
Hey guys. I wanted to discuss this for a while, believe it or not I respect the opinions of TWC posters highly... Ahem... ok, enough kissing ass... Let's discuss the matter at hand.
Logic, our atheists here will claim that this is the ultimate form of interpreting information. I agree to disagree, I don't think all of the world's problems can be solved with pure logic alone as you'll see why in a second.
Logic in its purest form is concrete, mathematical reasoning and analysis. When people debate here on TWC, the arguments do not really follow rigid system, it is more abstract and full of fallacies, I am certain every poster on TWC D&D have made logical fallacies before. If you truly studied logic (I studied proofs in 9th grade geometry if that counts) you will see that it follows a strict system of definitions and axioms, all based on concrete facts.
Let me just state this off the bat, if you use logic to make 100% of your decisions, you should agnostic right around now. Why? Well, you can neither prove nor disprove god with logic and any attempts to do so will result in... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance. In short, neither atheists nor theists can claim to be arguing from logic when debating god.
As you can see, you can never make decisions from pure logic unless your facts are 100%. This is great for doing math but really inconvenient when discussing philosophy and morality as there are few facts regarding moral absolutes... You can say that stabbing someone will cause pain but you can't argue that causing pain is wrong just from pure logic... A=B does not mean B=C...
Another fault in logic is that you cannot really predict future events with pure logic unless it is a frequently occurring event and you can establish facts... For example:
Your 16 year old daughter an 18 year old boy. His car smells like dried semen, there are beer bottles in his back seat and condoms in his dashboard... They ride off into the night.
If you were to deduce what events would unfold throughout the night using pure logic, you would tripping in a fallacy minefield... As far as logic is concerned, you cannot say for certain what events will unfold as doing so would result in arguing from ignorance as well as an assortment of other fallacies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies...
Logic will never be able to predict the future unless it is calculated using purely established laws (like in physics)... I do not think any father will be content when he finds his daughter home all drunk with ripped clothes... He can blame that on logic...
So, I would even go so far as to say pure logic is useless when debating morality... The only thing it can do is dish out statistics and tell me killing someone will hurt. When you need real answers, you call...
Intuition... Yes, this little thing never ceases to amaze me. I like to think of intuition as a combination of logic and emotions all jumbled up in your head, mixed with patterns you have seen before in your lifetime. It is that gut feeling that tells you not to let your daughter out with that strange boy... It does a better job of analysis then both emotion of logic. It can predict the future with more accurate results and the cool thing is, everyone is born with it. Think about it, you can go to a logic class to improve your logic but I have never heard of an intuition class... 99% of my decision making is intuition, it just happens on the fly. I need time to calculate logic, I don't always have time when I'm making split decisions...
People think that debate is all about logic, I think it has more to do with intuition. You can clearly out logic someone by performing the correct calculations but you cannot prove that you have a better intuition. In fact, that's all debate is, trying to prove that your intuition is correct when really it's subjective. I think that if you really want to learn something, you need to approach it with an open mind and really explore it with your own shoes, that way you will gain more intuitive insight into truth in general...
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Ummon
). They are willing to alter their political, economical convictions and their ideas about sexuality, evolution and ethics because of this silly book.
