RE: Share your worldview?
February 7, 2018 at 1:29 am
(This post was last modified: February 7, 2018 at 1:29 am by Kernel Sohcahtoa.)
(February 6, 2018 at 7:40 pm)Khemikal Wrote:(February 6, 2018 at 7:28 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: My position is: I don't know the precise mass of Jupiter. The "theistic" position is "Jupiter is 1 kg." In this case I reject the theist's position, but in admitting that I DON'T KNOW... you have lumped me in with people who consider things like 1 kg. I acknowledge that it is not 1 kg. But at the same time I reject 1.898 X 10^27 kg.
-and there you delve into a or irrationality again. If you know that it "isn't 1kg" then you aren't an agnostic and the subject isn't an unknowable. You don't have to know everything to know something, and you don;t need to know what something is in order to know what it's not.
The part in bold reminds me of a proof by contradiction in mathematics. Suppose we want to establish the truth of the following statement: there is an object with a certain property such that something happens. If we take the negation of that statement (for every object with the certain property, the something does not happen) and reach a contradiction, then this tells us that the statement is true despite the fact that we never produced the actual object and verified that the object satisfies the something that happens (construction proof). Hence, in this particular instance, we know that such an object must exist, yet we do not know what that specific object is.
