(April 19, 2014 at 11:03 pm)Heywood Wrote:(April 19, 2014 at 10:24 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: I don't think this is the case at all. We understand that any "truth"(*) discovered by science is always provisional in nature, and always subject to revision by later discoveries.
(*) The whole notion of "truth" in this concept is a bit nebulous in the first place. "Truth" is in the wheelhouse of philosophers, not scientists.
If you provisionally accept premise 1 and 2 as being true then it follows that premise 5 is provisionally true. If your atheism depends on a provision that something you think is true....might not be true.....isn't that atheism of the gaps?
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "true". As I said, I am uncomfortable using that particular word with respect to science, as "truth" is not something science is concerned with. I think it's conflating two subtly different concepts. I set the epistemological bar pretty high for what I'm willing to call "truth" or "knowledge". I don't think we're on the same page here at all.
Also, given other's reasonable analysis of your premeses, I don't think that we can conclusively say that 5 logically follows. For some values of "true", perhaps.
Incidentally, I don't believe that you have any idea what my position with respect to atheism even is, since as far as I can remember, I haven't stated my position recently - and I can definitely say that it's evolved since I've been here. The closest I can come to describing what my position is would be "ignostic apatheism".
P.S. it's probably not obvious but I'm actually more interested in the meta-issues with such arguments than the arguments themselves.