Anyone here a Category 7?

[vulcanlogician]

Sun doesn't rise in the east though. The Earth rotates giving rise to the illusion that the sun moves up over the horizon. Relative to the Earth, the sun is motionless.

*I think this fact is pertinent to the discussion of epistemology we're having. (That's why I bring it up.)

Content equivalence is content equivalence.

Consider, though, the nature of your objection to my knowing that gods do not exist..if it's the same as your objection to my knowing that the sun rises in the east.  I'd be justified in doubting that you know your own name by the same means.

-Which is fine, obvs, there's a wide range of opinion the subject, still, it's good to understand where we find ourselves.

Yeah, but the Copernican situation really demonstrates why I'll always be a 6/7 on all "decided" matters. First off, I don't need to remind you that I'm a philosopher at heart. So that has a great deal to do with my 6/7. But if you have forgotten that I'm a philosopher, the rest of this post should remind you 

We'll get this out of the way first: There is a 0.1^-157,000 chance that a being like Odin or Yahweh really did create the universe... that's one reason not to be a 7. (Ever heard of a cosmic joke?) Anyhoo, I'd be a 6.999999 on the scale just because of this. But this is besides the point.

Let's go back to the whole Copernicus thing. So the ancients saw the sun passing overhead each day and wondered "what moves it." Helios in his chariot? Something else? Also they had other questions concerning their wrong model of the universe. What holds the earth up? A turtle? An elephant? What holds those up?

These are the wrong questions. No answer to them (no matter what it is) would be correct. And part of me wonders if "Does God exist or not?" is likewise a wrong question.

I think it's high time I made a thread explaining my soft spot for pantheism. If anything to put to rest misconceptions that it is deism's gay cousin. It is (rather) materialism seen through a lens of divinity. A view that the entire cosmos is a god greater than any god conceived by man... and more worthy of reverence. Also perhaps to answer the age old questions: "why call the cosmos God?" -- well, why not? Astronomers have discerned that there is far more power in the actual and existant cosmos than the ancients ever attributed to Odin or Yahweh. "But it doesn't have free will!"-- yeah, well neither do you. That was Spinoza's point. A supercluster of galaxies has exactly as much free will as any human being. Therefore, he sees the cosmos as God (rather than a collection of galaxies) for the same reason he sees a man as a man (rather than a collection of carbon and water molecules).

Sorry for the tangent. The point is: 6/7 for life!