Credible/Honest Apologetics?

[Belacqua]

Is it a first principle that empirical evidence, interpreted in the light of current scientific theory, is better than revelation? This again seems unprovable and unfalsifiable, but lots of atheists hold to it. How could you falsify the idea that some revelation is true?

The only way you can claim revelations aren't falsifiable is to discount revelations that COULD be falsified. For instance, discard prophecies. Only revelations about things that can't be disproven by evidence, observation, or reason are unfalsifiable...and THEN there's the problem of contradictory revelations. Consistency in diverse regions would be weak evidence that there's something to them when the knowledge they purport would be othewise uknowable, but we don't have that. Revelations are inconsistent, so even if one of them was 'the right one', we'd have no way to know if we consdier revelation to be over evidence and reason.

I'm not arguing that revelation is reliable. I'm addressing what is and is not falsifiable. Since it's impossible to prove that all of what gets called revelation is garbage, we can't say that knowledge through revelation has been falsified. It has not been shown that, theoretically, it could not occur. We have no proof that it hasn't.

As I said, there may be good reasons to assume that something doesn't exist even though it's not falsified. But I assume that people would need standards of judgment -- i.e. principles they believe in -- in order to reject something that hasn't been falsified. You list some of those principles. So I think we agree that to be an atheist requires adherence to certain principles concerning how we know things.