The Resurrection

[Mister Agenda]

Of course they can.  They can also be proven through pragmatic methods, which is a lot more than you can say for religious beliefs.

Philosophy is no longer the best of human knowledge.  You are trying to tell time from a clock that has stopped.

This is one of those topics that comes up from time to time on forums like this one. 

Here is an old thread from this forum where empiricism was discussed:

https://atheistforums.org/thread-43125-page-3.html

You won't be allowed to post there, but some of the discussion is good.

These days Google helpfully offers an AI summary answer at the top of the page:

Empiricism cannot prove itself because, by its own definition, all knowledge comes from sensory experience, so there is no sensory experience that could verify the statement "all knowledge comes from sensory experience" - essentially creating a circular logic where the very idea of empiricism relies on an unprovable assumption about the source of knowledge itself; it's a classic "chicken and egg" problem within the philosophy of knowledge. 

and this one:

The idea that "empiricism can't prove empiricism" means that the very concept of relying solely on sensory experience to gain knowledge (empiricism) cannot be verified through sensory experience alone, creating a paradox; essentially, to prove that experience is the only source of knowledge, you would need to use some form of reasoning or intuition which goes beyond mere experience, contradicting the core tenet of empiricism itself. 

As with all AI we have to take it with a grain of salt, but it seems like a fair summary of the standard argument. 

It's similar with materialism. Materialists begin with the idea that only the material is real, so a materialist experiment which only accepts materialist methods and materialist results as reliable will rule out non-materialist answers a priori. 

It would seriously derail the thread to go further into this, but these are very standard arguments so if you're interested they won't be hard to find.

I don't disagree, but what can you prove with non-materialism? It hardly seems to be unique to materialism that it can't be proven in its own terms.