Epistemology

[Pete]

It's you who keeps insisting that all our definitions are wrong or don't cover everything. I've defined evidence over and over and you keep going back and back to it for no apparent reason.

You sound like your upset. I didn't mean to upset you if that's the case. Anyway, I disagree. Please show me where I said that your definition is wrong. I would never say that a definition is wrong. I appologize if I led you to believe I meant otherwise. At best a definition is not how it is defined a textbook or a dictionary etc. In fact I don't believe that its logical to say that a definition is wrong. All I've been doing is merely exploring the consequences of how you've defined the term. Do you object to that?

Here's an example of what I mean: suppose one has a light emitter, a light detector and a clock at a certain point of space in an inertial frame of reference. Call this location the "origin". Let there be a mirror at another location a distance D away which is oriented such that a pulse of light emitted at the origin will be deflected back to the origin. Now suppose that a pulse of light is emitted from the origin, is relected off the mirror and travels back to the origin. The time between the light being emitted and detected is T. Suppose that the results are such that 2.9978 x 10^8 m/s = 2D/T. Do you believe that this can be taken as evidence that the speed of light as measured in this frame of references is c = 2.9978 x 10^8 m/s? While I'm waiting for your response please elaborate how people know of evidence? I.e. do you actually know that there is no evidence that God exists? Since I assume you'll say that no evidence exists then what do you base that on? Is if the lack of you never finding, hearing of, seeing etc of such evidence? You've heard that E = mc2 right? Do you believe its true? On what do you base this belief in? I take it that you've never actually been in a laboratory and carried out all the experiments that led Einstein to make this conclusion? So if you have never actually carried out experiments etc. then how do you know what evidence there is or isn't? My point is that we normally take such things on authority and that is often our source of knowledge. In that sense I ask you what evidence you yourself have of various things you consider to be facts? In fact this is what I was getting at when I asked what people considered to be sources of knowledge. Authority is just one thing people accept as being a source of knowledge. There are others of course.

---

Personally, I do think all theists are "creationists"! If a you believe evolution is right (which you say) then you have just moved the creation point back a bit to produce the first "spark" of life.
Surely, if you don't believe life was "created" then there is no need for a god at all.

When I use the term creationism I mean exactly how it is defined in What is Evolution, by Ernst Mayr. He defines creationism as follows

Belief in the literal truth of Creation as recorded in the Book of Genesis.

I myself didn't move the creation point back to the first spark of life. I moved it further back to the Big-Bang, and perhaps even before that. If you believe that its nonsense to speak of before the Big-Bang then I disagree. There is even a new theory becomming popular amoung string theorists called the Pre-Big bang Scenario. Very cool stuff.

Pete