Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.A lot of woos, fundies, and so forth love to go on about alleged agendas we have for presenting various things, whether it's claims that we're shills, pure evil, or whatever. Of course, any skeptic worth his salt should know where this is going.
Facts are facts, and evidence stands on its own. It doesn't matter what my goals are if I present good evidence, or if I point out a fundamental fallacy in your arguments. Like it or not, sometimes the truth can be favorable to someone else's goals.
Yes, having an agenda can bias a person, and bias needs to be minimized so that we can get an accurate picture of reality. That's what science is all about. Pointing out a suspected agenda isn't a one-step instant dismissal. You still have to produce better arguments and/or reveal logical flaws or faulty assumptions on your opponent's part.
3 comments:
Of course, the person throwing the agenda accusation around doesn't have one, noooo.
Good heavens no! Woos with an agenda? The very idea!
They just want to teach the controversy of alternative methods to reaching higher states of irreducible complexity, thereby practicing transcendent research into supernatural phenomena!
We skeptics are just hindering them with our negative mind-rays, which we received unknowingly from unethical medical experiments performed on the population at large by the big pharmaco-military-industrial complex.
I don't think I was trying hard enough to make that work as satire.
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