When arguing fails on the basics

Just got into a discussion over on challenging_god, which soon went well beyond the original question and into silliness. Why? Because it soon became apparent that the other person (who was only to happy to pour on the condescension) simply didn't have a clue what she was talking about. I don't mean fine points of doctrine, or history or anything like that. This is the kind of 'didn't have a clue' where you discover after a few exchanges that the other person is simply operating on deeply and critically flawed premises.

And she didn't even seem to be arguing the religious side of things. Or rather than the usual fundie dogma, she had some odd ideas of religion, which she kept trying to interject into a discussion of a specific question, and then wondering why I said she kept changing definitions. But in this case it was the idea of logical inconsistency.

She could not wrap her head around the notion of logical inconsistency. Her idea of 'omnipotent' means insisting that an omnipotent being could, for example, make a square circle, or make 2 + 2 = 5. Hello? No, sorry - logical inconsistency! Come on, Aquinas put this to bed in the 12th century, folks! I remember my Aquinas professor getting SO frustrated with someone in that class who tried the same thing. He finally kicked him out for the day, telling him he was insulting not only him (the professor) but Aquinas and God himself by insisting on such a ludicrous position.

At least that fellow was trying to argue out of pure, dogged faith. This idiot was trying to say that since God created physics, he could flout its conventions. For one thing, since when does math depend upon physics? I couldn't get her to grasp that numbers are not physical things, that there are constructs, abstracts. Any way I presented it she kept insisting that logical consistency is some human construction, as though if there hadn't been humans, there would be no numbers. Well, not by the names we use, but there would be multiples of things, and then there would be numbers. And then 2 of a thing and 2 more of a thing STILL can't be 5 of a thing. And no being, no matter how powerful, could make a square circle.

This sort of thing always stops me in my tracks. OK, I'm an education junkie, I admit it. But it always amazes me how many people just don't have a grasp on basic logical principles. 'A' and 'not-A' are mutually exclusive. Basic, right? Well, not out there in the world, apparently. How is it that otherwise smart, capable people can miss this stuff? I mean, she wasn't dumb, just tragically ignorant of certain key concepts. I say tragically because her ignorance extended to her smug and unwavering certainty that there is nothing else out there that she might not get.

If rampant ignorance is growing (and it seems to be!) where did this stubborn pride in ignorance come from? Where did people who don't know how logic (or math, or whatever it may be) works get this idea that somehow they are superior in their understanding, despite essentially having none? Is this part of the cult of mediocrity, that thinks 'elite' is a pejorative, and ignorance is noble? Is it just the result of a deeply deficient education system? Are people just too damned busy getting business degrees to bother learning anything about how to, I don't know, think?

What will this mean over time? Will we, as a species, lose all that we gained in terms of thought and reason? OK, over dramatic, perhaps, but still. What happens when we have our machines to think for us, and we don't have to learn to use logic. (I wonder the same thing when I see kids told to use calculators instead of having to learn how to do basic math.) What if our machines fail? What if we can't remember how to think for ourselves? What if our leaders cannot think? (We saw how well that worked for 8 years!)

The discussion I had today is not a surprise (sadly). It is sort of depressing, though, to be reminded how ignorant people can be, and how stubbornly they can defend that ignorance.