(July 29, 2009 at 4:36 am)Anto Kennedy Wrote: One question though, why criticize others (theists) for their beliefs when 1. You do not know that they are wrong in their beliefs, and 2. you can provide no truthful alternative?I do not criticize theism as a general concept (i.e. belief in god); the most I would do is criticize their belief in that it is based on no sound evidence. I personally don't think one should believe things based on only assumption or logical deduction. I think the most demonstratively "correct" way of knowing things (and by "knowing" I mean a high probability of existence) is the scientific method, mainly because of the technological leaps we have made through its use.
So whilst I would not criticize the belief in god directly, I would perhaps criticize their reason for believing.
In a more specific sense, I criticize the beliefs of religion (both theistic and atheistic) that simply do not hold when the evidence is brought into the conversation. Ideas like Noah's Flood, the 6-day creation, etc are not the stories we get when we implement the scientific method to find out what really happened.
As I've said before, I'm more philosophically inclined to say that humans have no "knowledge" of anything, at least absolutely. Science does not prove things, it provides a probability (often very high mind) of things actually existing. This can be said to be relative knowledge, although I would argue that we can no more say something is relatively correct than we can absolutely.
In conclusion, knowledge is a real brainfuck.
