RE: Atheism, Theism, Science & Philosophy
May 1, 2013 at 5:32 pm
(This post was last modified: May 1, 2013 at 5:33 pm by Ryantology.)
(May 1, 2013 at 4:10 pm)Love Wrote: Is there anything in life that you just "know" based on pure intuition? Or do you always require empirical evidence to gain knowledge about something?
Absolutely nothing I 'know'* comes from pure intuition or faith, because I understand that I have biases and a brain which does a lot of things without my explicit approval. Any purely subjective experience I have (and I'm sure I have as many as anyone else) I cannot trust until other people (the more, the merrier) can independently reproduce the experience and report the same results without any foreknowledge.
I demand empirical evidence before I accept anything as true because I know better than to think that any subjective experience I could possibly be trustworthy all by itself. That's just accepting human fallibility, which is one thing which confuses me about the Christian faith: it really stresses the hell out of the fact that humans are imperfect, yet it relies entirely on 100% subjective human experiences to subsist. That strikes me as entirely contradictory.
*might you say something "do you need someone to tell you that pain hurts?". No, but that's not knowledge, that is biological function. Do I need someone to tell me that sometimes inflicting pain on myself is necessary? Absolutely, otherwise I would probably die from an infection, because putting alcohol on a cut hurts like a motherfucker and I would never do that unless there was a damned good reason to. "Trust nothing which cannot be verified" would be my motto if I cared to have one. I consider it the height of folly to accept as truth an assertion designed specifically to avoid verification.