RE: On the nature of evidence.
October 25, 2014 at 7:38 pm
(This post was last modified: October 25, 2014 at 7:42 pm by trmof.)
(October 25, 2014 at 7:18 pm)Stimbo Wrote: Do you see what's happening here? We've gone from insinuations that we will reject outright any evidence for your (or any) god claims, to evidence that you admit cannot be acceptable evidence to anyone but yourself, alongside admissions that you have no mechanism even to verify said evidence objectively.
Congratulations: you've defined yourself into a nice, safe corner.
Meanwhile, until you present us with some justification for any of your claims that we can examine, I'm breaking out Hitchens' Razor - that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
The respondents are the ones who have asked me to define myself. I've never expressed any interest in doing so. All of philosophy can be asserted without evidence; for example, there is absolutely no evidence that anything but my consciousness is real, or any way to prove to me otherwise besides an appeal to your personal authority, which, if you are not real, is meaningless. Wow, what an interesting topic to explore the connotations of, which is what this entire post was about in the first place. If you aren't interested in philosophical dissecting a philosophical question such as this without constantly reminding everyone about your beliefs or lack thereof, then it kind of makes one question why you are commenting on a post headed under "philosophy" if you are not interested in discussing the philosophical implications behind the question.
(October 25, 2014 at 7:11 pm)Chas Wrote:(October 25, 2014 at 6:49 pm)trmof Wrote: I find your lack of assertions not credible for the same reason. There is absolutely no way to test whether either of us is right. The sooner you come to accept this and learn to agree to disagree about things, the sooner you will be able to have a real and meaningful intellectual exchange with someone you disagree with.
Your first sentence does not make sense.
And since I am not making a claim, I am neither right nor wrong. I am saying I don't accept your unevidenced assertion.
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No, that makes it testimonial evidence from a witness. If you choose to not believe it, that is one thing. But you are attempting redefine a form of evidence you don't agree with as "No True Evidence." You are asking for DATA, not evidence. I don't have any data for you.
Testimony alone is not credible evidence. It is no more credible than my claiming there are pixies in my garden.
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I assumed a being with certain characteristics for the sake of discussion. There is no straw man. I addressed a possible response and asked a further question about it.
I'm afraid you are confusing evidence with data. Testimonial evidence is evidence. You are using semiotics to assume of different definition of evidence than is commonly applied. You are engaging in a "No true evidence" fallacy.
You have provided no testimony, let alone evidence, of God's intervention in your life.
The sooner you stick to the point, the sooner you can have a meaningful discussion.
The topic of this post is asking what are your personal standards for examining non falsifiable evidence, and getting an interesting cross-section of opinions about that topic. You are trying to change the point to being about my personal beliefs and whether or not I can prove them; if I wanted to discuss that, I would have started a post about that. If you would like to have arguments about the existence of God with non-atheists I'm sure there are plenty of more suitable threads to do that on. Not this one.
