The worth of Knowledge

[diffidus]

"Imagine measuring how hot the radiation from the sun is, at different distances from its surface. This would give you a set of measurements, but without any understanding, you could not say what the temperature would be at points in-between your measured points."

You can actually, it's called drawing a graph.

Diffidus:

But the points in-between the measurements on the graph are not empirical, they have been invented and may be completely fallacious.

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Before this descends into whatever it will descend into, like a big descendy thing, are you arguing for agnosticism and not atheism towards a creator deity/s of some kind, or, as the way you worded your post would suggest, agnosticism and not atheism towards "God" (Yahweh the malevolent)?

Diffidus:

English is an organic language and so words are continually changing in their meaning. For example, someone who is epicurean would, nowdays, be more to do with fine dining than the lifestyle of Epicurus, who led a frugal existence. Similarly, the word Agnostic originally meant, someone who believes that nothing is known or can be known about the existence of God. However, this word has evolved, so that, to say 'I am agnostic towards the idea of telepathy', means having a non-commital attitude toward it. I am Agnostic towards the question of the existence of God in this second sense. In my case, the non-commital attitude stems from an inability to estimate the probability of something that may be outside the scope of our current knowledge or measuring equipment.

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@diffidus.. They are not statements of fact as most people here define facts. It is however called axiomatic. I think your arguement breaks down because 100% certainty is not 100% fact without redefining words.

Well we could argue over the definition of words if you want. But I agree with you that most people mean 'fact' in a different way to that which I am intending. What I am interested in, is the truth of a claim made by someone. So that if someone claims that 'the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees' I can verify it. In this sense that statement can be proven to be 100% true. In the case of empirical measurement we should be able to verify that the earth is smaller than the universe. However, empirical measurement, more generally, involves an element of uncertainty. This uncertainty is where probability arises with regard to a claim.

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Finally, there are people on this site who believe that God does not exist based upon it being unlikely, due to the lack of empirical evidence. But this 'unlikely' implies a knowledge of the probability that God does not exist. Upon what set of empirical measurements is this probability estimated? The answer is none!! Atheism, on these grounds, is a huge leap of faith into the dark world of Humankinds lack of knowledge.

If it takes faith to lack belief in god, then it takes faith to lack belief in anything else. So by your argument, we all have huge amounts faith in many things. We all have huge faith in lack of belief in Santa Claus, we all have faith in lack of belief in big foot.

Try and refute my point without resulting to special pleading or argumentum ad populum. For which both are fallacious arguments.
I don't even need to put any effort into this. Your arguments were flawed from the start.

I hold that if somebody claimed that 'In Euclidean geometry, the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees', then their claim is 100% true. I have verified it and I know it to be true. There is no element of faith whatsoever.