RE: Thoughts on Atheism (and a plea to the religious)
July 8, 2012 at 5:06 am
(This post was last modified: July 8, 2012 at 5:07 am by CliveStaples.)
(July 8, 2012 at 5:01 am)FallentoReason Wrote: And so far it looks like it makes sense to have the faith these things are true, because so far they seem to work and we are able to make predictions about reality that do come true.
I always like bringing up civil engineering because that's what I'm studying. Your house is a testimony that these assumptions are pretty dang useful.
But "My house is a testimony that these assumptions are pretty useful" requires those same assumptions. "If you make these assumptions, then what you get is consistent with those assumptions." Well, of course.
And if you assume that everything you observe is a figment of your imagination, all the 'evidence' would be entirely consistent with that, too.
Quote:Fair enough. Shall we say it has a 'justified ego' in that case? By definition if experimentation consistently lines up with a hypothesis then you know that is true. The claim is justified.
Except that how you interpret the results of the experiment require you to assume the truth of what you're trying to confirm. So it's all just circular reasoning.
It is an established result that logic can't be used to prove that logic is consistent (for sufficiently advanced systems of logic). Science can't prove that science is valid.
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
