RE: Skeptics I no longer have any respect for.
January 11, 2012 at 2:41 am
(This post was last modified: January 11, 2012 at 3:16 am by theVOID.)
(January 10, 2012 at 5:30 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: @ VOID right thanks. There can be no set truth value because otherwise it woyuldn't be an assumption.
Yes, and all presuppositionalist apologetics have assumed premises, so neither the premises or the conclusions can be given credence.
Quote:That the assumption leads to substantial truth value then of course you have to dismiss it, which is a weakness of your denial I think.
Are you honestly trying to suggest that you can be confident in the truth of an argument for which you have no choice but to assume the truth of the premise?
It's no wonder why we don't take presuppositionalists seriously, it's not that theistic arguments can't be interesting and/or persuasive, it's that the confidence of the proponents (such as yourself) is so far in excess of what is possible to demonstrate that their approach to knowing about the world becomes completely and utterly indefensible and their biases explicit.
(January 10, 2012 at 5:24 pm)Norfolk And Chance Wrote: How do we know we made him up? Because he goes down everybodies chimney in 24 hours and this is obviously impossible, therefore the santa that we describe today CANNOT BE real. So, he's made up.
If you define knowledge as something along the lines of;
The conclusion of a valid argument given the best information we have about the world
Then yes, we can know that Santa isn't real.
But here's the problem, something you seem to be entirely overlooking:
There are some pretty obvious flaws with that type of definition, the main one being that at any given point in time, 200 years ago for example, there were many different valid conclusions given the best available information, some of which we now know to be false, like someone 200 years ago who knew that the geometry of space was euclidean...
I find the most consistent definition of knowledge involves proof, to me it makes no sense to say that something used to be known, but has now been shown to be false, it's far more useful to say "this was once the most well substantiated belief"
.