--- Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
(SNIP)
> The underlying organic causes of PJS are unclear,
> but there may be
> occupational factors that enhance one's chances of
> coming down with it.
> Lawyers do seem to focus one-sidedly on "winning" by
> rhetorically presenting
> and selecting evidence that gives not the slightest
> suggestion of any
> difficulties in their own position, while glossing
> over any aspects of their
> adversary's position that might suggest that their
> categorization of it is
> mistaken. Years of practicing this kind of
> thinking, might possibly give
> rise to the formation of new pathways in the brain,
> pathways that short
> circuit some of the synapses that might otherwise
> produce more careful
> analysis.
While lawyers focus on winning (actually persuading
people to arrive at a particular opinion) and do
behave in the way you suggest in trying to persuade,
the suggestion you describe about what happens to
their looking at the world I think is simply wrong.
To the contrary, lawyers, if they are good, are well
aware of the defects of their own position and the
strengths of their opponents'. Good lawyering and a
good legal education, IMHO, does more to foster
hard-nosed analytical skills than most graduate
programs.
That of course, does not mean that lawyers are
dispassionate presenters of evidence. That is not the
way an adversarial legal system works. Lawyers are
highly trained advocates, so if PJ wants to demolish
"Darwinism" he is not going to give any credence to
any data on the other side and undermine as much as
possible the evidence that does exist. It is more a
function of lawyers, generally, being trained to be
adversarial rather than their analytical skills or
becoming blinkered. Now, it may be that he is
blinkered, but it is not a function of his training as
a legal advocate, IMHO.
> Likewise, those who spend many years writing the
> equivalent of lawyer's
> briefs against a particular position--and scientists
> like Dawkins or Sagan
> and sceptics like Shermer would fit this description
> as well as PJ
> does--could also fall prey to PJS.
Well, I think in the case of Sagan, Dawkins and
Atkins, they don't really understand what it is
they're critiquing -- Sagan's Demon Haunted World
makes that quite clear, as does anything by Dawkins
abundantly speaks to his ignorance and his
schadenfreude. I think Shermer and others (like
non-scientist Dan Barker) fall victim to the fact that
they feel particularly embarassed or duped by the
particular set of beliefs they thought were inherently
what Christianity is and react strongly and IMHO
equally irrationally towards the beliefs that *they*
used to have as if those beliefs are what Christianity
is.
> So, ironically,
> can even distinguished
> theologians like Peacocke (sorry, Michael, but I
> think this may be true),
> who seem unable to slide even a razor blade between
> someone like Michael or
> me and Henry Morris--I've had a few talks with
> Peacocke myself, including a
> very memorable one at Lewis and Tolkien's pub in
> Oxford when Peacocke all
> but equated me with Jerry Fallwell and I literally
> fell off my bench with
> laughter at his sheer folly. What Peacocke knows
> about the history of
> science and religion, and about theology for that
> matter, prior to roughly
> 1900 or at least 1859, would appear to fit onto two
> folio sheets; the same
> can be said of Peter Atkins, who literally believes
> that the middle ages
> ended in 1900.
Peter, IMHO, is a pastiche of a caricature of an
atheist. Talk about passing strange.
(SNIP)
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Received on Mon Mar 15 11:11:28 2004
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Mar 15 2004 - 11:11:28 EST