Why Something Rather Than Nothing?

[bennyboy]

In philosophy assertion is a complicated concept. People write entire papers on what is an assertion. The jist of it is....if it is a statement based on belief....it is an assertion. If it is a statement based on actual knowledge....it is a fact.

No, this leads to nasty semantics, as many or most Christians will immediately claim that their beliefs represent knowledge, and many philosophers will claim that nothing is knowable in an absolute sense, and that all statements of fact therefore represent beliefs. The problem is that some people will take this an an excuse no longer to distinguish between good ideas and fanatastical fictions.

If you say, "God created the universe," you are stating what you consider knowledge about cosmogony. Whether you really know this, or whether it is an unfounded belief, is irrelevant. Your intellectual state has nothing to do with it-- it's your language, in stating that something is so. In English, we have plenty of language designed for communicating intent. And the rule is, if you say X is Y, it will be taken as a statement of what you consider to be fact. If this is not true, you must simply say, "In my opinion. . . " or "I believe that. . ." or "It seems to me that. . ."