Debate with a Christian

[Esquilax]

Decades ago philosophers came to realize that Empiricism is far too restrictive a theory of knowledge and even more so, is demonstrably self refuting. The proposition, "In order for a proposition (P) to be taken as true, it must be subject to verification via empirical means" is itself not subject to verification via empirical means, and thus fails to meet its own criteria and refutes itself.

So, do you guys remember the first time Disc posted this nonsense? Do you also happen to remember when I refuted it, and showed that his example proposition could indeed be verified empirically?

Because I do. I remember that real well.

So, to begin with, I'm going to toss out the idea of absolute certainty and total verification because that's a useless concept. But in terms of things having empirical justification, it's trivial; propositions supported by empirical data are, by definition, more rational to take as true by definition, as opposed to things that aren't. The latter leads to contradictions, whereas the former cannot; eventually, additional empirical evidence will always erase contradictory conclusions. If you take things as true without empirical justification, you have no way of determining whether or not they are true in any objective sense, and thus discarding any one non-empirical claim over another is... well, unjustified.

So, you've got one internally consistent method, which hosts no contradictions, and you have another which can not only play host to contradictions, but also offer no means to resolve those contradictions that is not, itself, equally unverified.

In this way, we have empirically demonstrated that it is more reasonable to accept claims as true based on empirical evidence, and entirely unreasonable to accept claims as true without empirical evidence. Therefore, Disc's "unverifiable" proposition has been verified empirically.

If Disc wishes to rebut this, I invite him to first, without recourse to empirical evidence, demonstrate which of the statements "Jesus is god," and "Jesus is merely a prophet of god," is true, and which is false. Stripped of empirical evidence, neither claim is any more compelling than the other; how do you determine which is true?