Evidence for Believing

[Anomalocaris]

If god isn't helpful here, Inq, then you've undercut the entire premise of rationality and ontological argument.  We could certainly agree to proceed as though the bare assertion of some simple x were true, but since you've already declared that this simple x isn't a god, god being reducible, there's no point.

Another poster already offered a candidate for that simple x.  Existence.  This never really escaped attention.  Even by christian theologians, who declared god the ground of being for precisely this reason.  

...and we're still just rolling around on the floating turd of "there's stuff we don't know"...............?  Sure, why not.  Is any of that stuff god stuff?  If not, who cares?

We can logically argue about whether reality ends in a brute fact or not. As for my faith, I can't logically prove that, but I can defend it from contentions that it's indistinguishable from any bullshit.

That you go through the motions you imagine to be a defence doesn’t give your view any added credibility.   You have no credible means to distinguish your faith from bullshit.   So your credibility suffers with every assertion that it is somehow to be considered different from bullshit because you wish it to be.

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How do you know, given an continuous history of ever expanding knowledge base explaining every more of the hitherto inexplicable, what can not be explained in principle can not be explained?

Because we are limited beings with particular powers of perception in an ever-expanding environment. There is truth that we cannot observe our way to because of our limited perception, and truths we cannot logically prove because the parameters of observable reality are not set in an axiomatic system.

Any bullshit has a possibility, but only the most infinitesimal one,  of actually being closer to the truth than we could otherwise reach. .    Your "supernatural" is still indistinguishable both in its nature and in its effects from bullshit.   It has no more possibility of being true than any bullshit.      You merely combine egoism with idiocy so unselfconsciously that you could assert with a straight face bullshit that appeals to you is better than bullshit of other kind.

If I thought it was bullshit, I wouldn't believe it. So you can be sure that I'm sincere and not trying to assert some egotistical or elitist secret knowledge. Not everything that we cannot directly prove to everyone else is bullshit, and something that is consistent with facts and logic is less likely to be bullshit than something that is not.

Whether it is bullshit doesn’t depend on whether YOU think it is bulkshit.  It depends on whether your means of distinguishing it from bullshit has any demonstrable efficacy.

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No one denies there can be truth which you can not find.   One merely denies you found the truths which you can not find.

Right, but that's back to the possibility of revelation.

A means of truth finding that is not clearly defined and testable for its efficacy is the indistinguishable from bullshit and therefore not by any worthy definition any means of truth finding.

Bullshit can contradict known facts or be illogical, and implies something insincere or contrived.

A revealed truth is a clearly defined proposition that can be tested with methods of truth finding, whether it contradicts known facts. Demanding a test for efficacy of a truth is declaring that all truth is a directly observable fact.

So you are saying the highest form of overarching truth is any form of bullshit so long as someone really wants that bullshit to be true.

No, I'm saying there is truth that does not contradict any of our logical or empirical means of truth finding but is not attainable by those means.

There are infinite numbers of possible bullshits that doesn’t appear to contradict known facts.  And a still infinite subset of these can be found that would however contradict any faith you care to contrive.  Why is your faith to be preferred over any of those?

That is a hurdle you must cross.  Yet crossing it still doesn’t get you anywhere.  A bullshit that might legitimately be said to be less bullshitty than some others can still be just as totally false.   So there is no reason to think even the most legitimately preferred bullshit you can come up with has any truth value whatsoever. 

So your bullshit is even more worthless than merely totally without truth value.  It is not even wrong, as one might say who is genuinely concerned with right or wrong that might exist outside of mere imagination.  It can’t even rise as high as to be totally worthlessz