Dealing with existential nihilism

[bennyboy]

So in the end, Benny, your appeals to Science TM as the only reliable means to arrive at truths stands on feet of clay. There really isn’t any proof that classical foundationalism exhausts all the means by which people can gain knowledge. What if, instead of being the opposite of knowledge, true faith is a special kind of knowledge, in the same category as self-evident principles and incorrigible experiences. Or to see it from another angle, true skepticism has no downward limit and ultimately undermines even classical foundationalism. What if our incorrigible experiences are illusions? What if self-evident propositions are cognitive tricks aimed only at fitness and not truth? At some point a fellow must grant that he has only made an existential choice, completely without appeal to outside principles, about how he goes about understanding the world.

It's impossible to appeal to Science TM, as science is neither an institution or a religion. It is a philosophical position, that one will attempt to pursue knowledge through observation.

You can make philosophical arguments about solipsism and so on. But in the end, WHATEVER constitutes reality, you would better serve God by attempting to understand it than to avoid understanding it.

Next I submit to you ( and some of my Christian brothers) that your observations about religion look in the wrong direction. Religion is not a form of inquiry about the natural world. That is indeed the domain of the sciences and the humanities. Religious practice is a way to cultivate a relationship with the divine and truths it reveal do not progress because they are timeless answers to the most primal longings of the human heart.

Well, humanity needs to progress. Your ideas have had thousands of years to come to fruition, and still babies starve in Africa, and people attack each other over animal passions, jealousies and fears. Unless you can demonstrate that your eternal truths can benefit us here and now, or that our actions here and now really do matter to something which is eternal, your ideas are going to be ignored as irrelevant to the progress of humanity.

EVEN IF some of your religious ideas are true, the OP is about existential nihilism, and I'm pretty sure you lack the capacity to demonstrate that your view on that issue is better than anyone else's, except by an appeal to wishy-thinking.