Hare Krishna

[Mister Agenda]

Here's an argument I think is funny, for example:

( P ) Modern science, by their standard of achieving knowledge, has no evidence for God
( C ) Therefore there is no reason to think there is a God

What's missing from this argument is that there may be other ways of knowing if God exists or not. You certainly haven't proved that the modern scientific method is the only way to know anything that may be knowable. That's a claim science can't prove. I've heard respected scientists entirely agree with this point.

Science is great when it stays within the bounds of what it can talk about. When it starts making claims about things it can't talk about, like spirituality, or makes the claim that there is nothing else to talk about, that's like an intellectual foul.

The reason science is a superior way of knowing is that it is based on falsification. Scientific claims have to be potentially falsifiable, and then survive attempts to falsify them. This gives us an extraordinary power to sift what is closer to the truth/reality from what is farther away, and it has given us modern civilization.

Direct observation is also a good way of knowing, but we spend our early lives testing (arguably, scientifically) the limits and reliability of our senses. We verify the accuracy of our perceptions, which justifies relying on them in most familiar situations. You don't have to publish a scientific paper to justify believing you have a bed in your bedroom if you've seen it.

Logic lets us evaluate reasoning. It suffers from garbage in, garbage out, but if we have a good reason to believe a premise is true, and it's used in an argument that is valid, the conclusion will be sound. The conclusion might be true even the premise is false and the reasoning is fallacious, but that would essentially be a coincidence.

Intuition is a product of applying experience to a situation on an unconscious level. You may not be conscious that someone reminds you of the guy who sold you that bridge that time, but something tells you not to trust him. Sometimes you don't have time to go through a whole conscious observation and reasoning process and you have to make a snap decision based on intuition, which is unreliable, but better than nothing. Intuition can be invaluable in coming up with a hypothesis. Which you then very much ought to test, because intuition is only a little better than flipping a coin when it comes to arriving at a correct conclusion.

The fault with 'other ways of knowing' is that they don't give us a way of verifying that they're true. Not even a little bit. Which means it's a stretch to call what you learn that way, 'knowledge'. A feeling that you're in contact with a greater intelligence is...a feeling that you're in contact with a greater intelligence. You have no way of knowing that you're not just tapping into your intuition, you have no way of knowing that you're not just tapping into your imagination, and you have no way of knowing, if you ARE in contact with something outside yourself, what it really is. You have no way to differentiate contact with Krishna from contact with telepatich aliens. You have no way to know that Krishna is completely truthful. And you don't have to be able to verify your belief if you're content with it. If you want me to believe it, I'll need more than anecdotal evidence, because it's an extraordinary claim.