(July 21, 2012 at 9:40 am)Felasco Wrote: How do you know we're capable of understanding reality, when we don't even know how big reality is? You're making a sweeping claim about an arena we can't define in even the most basic way.
We are capable of understanding reality because if we weren't we wouldn't be able to use and manipulate it to our purposes like we do every day.
(July 21, 2012 at 9:40 am)Felasco Wrote: We don't know if we are qualified to analyze all of reality or not, given that we don't even know what the phrase "all of reality" refers to.
"All of reality" could be just a bit more of what we already know about.
Since we don't know of any part of reality we are not qualified to analyze and since we have shown ourselves to be capable of analyzing every part of reality we have discovered, that is a reasonable conclusion.
(July 21, 2012 at 9:40 am)Felasco Wrote: Or....
"All of reality" could be 4,987 billion trillion times bigger than what we already know about, and most of what we don't know about could be fundamentally different than what we do know about. It could be that too. We have no idea, none at all.
But, despite not having a clue about what the phrase "all of reality" actually refers to, many of us, theist and atheist alike, are perfectly content to make sweeping claims about this arena which we can't define in even the most basic way.
And this is the species that is supposedly qualified to know what does or doesn't exist in all of reality.
You are the one making the sweeping claim when you say that we are not qualified to know. Your argument is "we do not know everything, so we are not qualified to know anything". Here's a quote that is very much relevant to that:
"Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."
