(July 14, 2022 at 1:48 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(July 14, 2022 at 12:49 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: 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.
Read Professor Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, especially, the Poverty of Agnosticism section. No one (or, at least few of Us) is claiming to be in Category 7. Yes, some Revelation may be true -- it's the signal/noise ratio that is the issue.
