Why won't some people answer Yes or No questions?

I think it's b/c they can't come up w/a well tho't out, straight and intelligent answer. They realize this, so they use their religion as a shield........

 

The question you asked of your co-worker is not a yes or no question. The person you asked wouldn't know either.

Is the answer actually 6,000? 6,022? 6,700? 5,873 and 4 months?

Even a religious scholar wouldn't know the exact answer.

But, a more appropriate question you could have asked of your co-worker is, "does he believed that the earth is around 6,000 OR SO years old?"

And if he said he did, he would be correct.

Same with the question you asked yourself. Is the earth 4.6 billion years old is also not a yes or no question.

Is it 4.9B? 4.57B? 4.73B?

But, if you ask yourself, "Is the earth AROUND 4.6 billion years old?", that would be a more appropriate question.

And if you believed it was around 4.6 billion years old, then you both would be correct.

 

What do you mean?

KIDDING!

My answer will just beg the question, but it's this: we have now largely divided ourselves into two camps: one is rural, Christian, and conservative, or identifies as such, revering tradition mistrustful of abrupt change, especially when the game plan is unclear, and the other is ... urban, liberal, cosmopolitan, college educated and atheist. How this all happened I don't know, but both sides fear the other. So when a question is asked that forces a person to concede legitimacy of the other camp's point of view, then his whole world is threatened. I don't know what the hell happened but things are bad. We are losing friendships and suffering depression and arming ourselves for what both sides fear is an oncoming civil war, a real civil war, not like the War of the Southern Secession. I mean reds versus blues in the streets, each side having given up on the other on social as well as economic issues.

Whoever posts in this thread, ask yourself honestly when was the last time you heard someone from the "enemy" camp write something that you thought was convincing in any way? And di you openly acknowledge this?

 

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Perhaps life is not a dichotomy.

 

So your view is that only conservative religious types are guilty of this? I don't know that this was the OP's thesis, but the second I saw you write that I instinctively put my guard up and got ready to dislike you. I know it's wrong, but that's what's happening to us. (I'm catholic, by the way, and the catholic church fully accepts the theory of evolution, and it always did. We do not believe the Earth is 6000 years old. It is only 5000 years old. That. was. a. joke. ha. ha.)

Early contributions to the development of evolutionary theory were made by Catholic scientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel. For nearly a century, the papacy offered no authoritative pronouncement on Darwin's theories. In the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution

 

I think because they know the truth, but it conflicts with what they were taught all their life, so they do not want to answer

.

 

Your example of asking if the earth is 6000 years old, yes or no, is not an absolute yes or no question other than to you.

This is an old philosophy of religion question. The wisest system to create would be one that is aged and evolved. For example, first life couldn't all be eggs and seeds, because those animals when born would have nothing to eat but each other and then no offspring. There could be no babies without aged parents.

As the saying goes, GM can build a new car, but only a god could make a 1983 Chevy with 186,312 miles on it running on bald tires and with a woman nagging at the driver in the front passenger seat and 3 kids fighting in the back. So the earth could be millions or billions of years old - all created 6000 years ago.

To the contrary, no one yet has given ANY rational explanation of how something came to evolve from nothingness, now how gravity, light, magnetism, energy etc also all evolved out of nothingness. So, do you believe at some point there was a "creation" of the universe, yes or no? Or do you believe in random magic, yes or no?

Then again, you don't REALLY know if ANYTHING tangibly exists. Maybe you're just insane. You need to stay away from metaphysical questions with "yes or no" perspectives. It ain't really that simple.

 

dishonest people and people with confidence problems, can't handle a Yes or No answer.

 

Don’t worry about Life you won’t survive it anyways.

 

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Or...some foolish people just exist in life clinging to polar opposites.

 

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Your attempt at humor is juvenile but still comedic..

 

Hmmmm, I don't know that the question "how old is the Earth" is the same as "who created the universe, if anyone"? If we believe in the legitimacy of science at all, we have to accept that human remains have been dated, by very competent scientists, as much older than 6000 years. Easily.

http://ncse.com/cej/3/2/answers-to-creationist-attacks-carbon-14-dating

 

Where did I even hint that I was talking about 'only conservative religious types'? "Religious types" could mean Jews, Muslim....any religion.

And btw, I am a Conservative and damn proud of it....and also a Christian, but don't care for man-made, organized religions. I think they're just all about power and $$$$$$$$.........and lots of it.

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I don't think Jake's humor is juvenile, but very accurate.......

 

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That's cool. It would be boring if we all thought the same.

 

And who says that a creator didn't create it to be that way?

You?

 

You very likely hit the nail on the head with your answer.

 

Well, you're right about that.......

 

With the thumb on top of the nail for sure.

 

Sean Hannity is a master of yes or no question abuse, and is always asking questions like the old standard one, "Are you still beating your wife? Just answer me in one word! Yes or no!"

 

It sounds like one to me.

 

Yes or no; Have you stopped beating your wife?

Leading questions (or the fear of them, legitimate or not) is generally the reason. A straight answer in this kind of context will typically lead to follow-up questions further trying to push the answerer in to a corner which won’t necessarily accurately represent what they actually think. Of course, that is often because most of us don’t have as solid and consistent a view of the world as we’d like to imagine we do and such answers raise those scary uncertainties in our own minds too. Admitting that we don’t know is difficult, especially in the context of debate about deeply help beliefs.

 

Sean Hannity uses that cheap trick a lot with people whose first language is Arabic, and with the language barrier it takes them a while to figure out what he's doing.

 

that is not a yes or no question, cause if you never beat your wife, you can't answer yes or no

 

Very few questions are simple yes/no, especially in this kind of context. That’s the point.