(March 1, 2015 at 10:03 am)Dystopia Wrote: Rob explain something to me - How is believing something is true different from knowing? If I know something is true I also believe it is true. It is belief with knowledge. I know something happens and therefore I believe it is true. Aren't the two related? Maybe I'm getting too philosophical here. The way I see it, when you know something you also believe (with evidence) that it is true. For example, I know gravity is true because I've experienced it, and I also believe the law of gravity is true because there's no evidence that it's false
What would you say to this, Rob? The classic definition of knowledge is "justified true belief". So knowledge is a branch of belief, it just requires that you hold it for the right reasons. To claim knowledge that no gods exist requires more than certainty. I am completely satisfied that no further effort to find a god is needed or likely to pay off, so I am plenty certain. But to say I know that means at a minimum that I can provide a slam dunk argument. That is where the murky nature of the definition of gods gets in the way. Sure I could argue that no planet wide flood ever happened or that there was never a first human, just a line of earlier forms gradually becoming recognizably modern. But then that only addresses a literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the bible - very low growing fruit indeed.
