The worth of Knowledge

[diffidus]

Goddammit, again???? Diffidus will you just change your religious views to theist and get it over with? This is becoming abbhorently banal. You have yet to prove why a space god with superpowers is more likely to exist than a unicorn so until you do that, your argument is bunk.

I was reading an interesting account about how the Human mind works with regard to belief. It goes something like this: when a person sees a fact or an argument that agrees with their belief, it is immediately taken on board without hardly any critical examination. When a person sees a fact or argument that goes against their belief, it induces a state of anger. It is difficult to challenge one's own beliefs, but alarm bells are raised within me if I find I am becoming angry over anothers point of view. It maybe that they have a real point. I sense anger in your response.

I will try to answer your question as best I can.

I think that with regard to the various ideas that you suggest, such as unicorns and the like, there is an error of classification. While the following is not wholly comprehensive, it does provide a certain coverage:

Class 1: Claims related to the existence of little red riding hood, peter pan etc. These can be dismissed on the basis that nobody is claiming that they exist, in fact, the authors of the fairy tales freely admitted that they were pure inventions of their imagination.

Class 2: Unicorns, the Greek God Pan etc. These concepts have become mythology. It is in the nature of a myth that they do not exist and that nobody now claims they do.

Class 3: Loch Ness Monster, Yeti etc. These are claimed to exist by some people and even now there are regular sitings. For these we should keep an open mind, but the probability of their existence is very low. We can assert this probability due to measurement. These creatures are not undetectable, in principle, using current technology. For example, Loch Ness has undergone search using submersibles and sonic radar. No sign of Nessy has been found. This does not rule out his existence, but we know from the area of the Loch and the claimed size of the monster, that the chances of it being outside the search zone is small.

Class 4: Gods existence, the human soul etc. Claims related to these, such as 'God exists' are still widely held by people. Evidence is presented by people in the form of personal accounts. But the really important point, is that it is not possible, at present, to estimate the probability of the claim being true or not, due to the inherent nature of the thing under consideration. It could well be that, as Humankind's knowledege progresses, we may be able to settle these issues, but at present we cannot.

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There seems to be a pre-ponderance of people on this site who claim that the only worthwhile form of knowledge is empirical knowlege based upon measurement. This is not true.

Take as examples the following statements: ' It is an absolute fact that in Euclidean geometry, the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees', 'I think therefore I am', 'The earth is smaller than the universe that contains it', 'The law of cause and effect is based upon faith and cannot be proven'.

These are all statements of fact, but cannot be proven by emprical measurement. Emprical measurement is useful, but only a part of what is required to make a scientific assertion about the world. 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. To do this, you have to employ a different type of knowlede that is based upon abstract reasoning. Without this type of reasoning, empirical observation would be virtually useless.

This is why some statements can be made with 100% certainty that they are true, while others are doubtful.

There are even people on this site who believe there is a real difference in meaning between the statements 'I believe that God doesn't exist' and 'I don't believe in God'.

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.

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I wrote up a response to this that broke down your arguments but then my computer froze so I will sum it up. First, some of your facts, such as a triangles angles equaling 180 can be proven like this -
http://www.mathsisfun.com/proof180deg.html

Your argument fails, however, because you make the assumption that empirical evidence is the only thing atheists use to come to their conclusions on the probability of god. We factor in concepts such as the nature of life, the nature of the universe, and the nature of the deity, while weighing the evidence. This is the third time you have tried, and failed, at proving that atheism takes faith. The more you post, the more you prove that your position is just lack of conviction, and not the intellectual high ground you try so hard to make it sound like.

Diffidus:

What is 'the nature of life'?