RE: No reason justifies disbelief.
March 22, 2019 at 1:45 am
(This post was last modified: March 22, 2019 at 1:47 am by Belacqua.)
(March 21, 2019 at 9:32 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Well, considering the hubris with which you condemn atheists for not being persuaded by them
Please quote to me the post in which I condemn atheists for not being persuaded. I don't believe I have done that. How could I when I am not sure about them either?
I think you've been imagining judgements which I haven't made.
Quote:No. That’s not what I asked. You asserted that empirical data could not be used to investigate god claims. Yet, most logical arguments for god rely on premises involving empirical observations about the universe. So...? Lol
Quote:What is this reliable, alternative method to science, of investigating god-claims, and how you know it’s reliable?
Quote:Traditionally, philosophers use logic based on premises that we are likely to agree on. I'm not sure if it's reliable or not. You seem to be sure it's not a reliable.
See above. Please and thank you. Why are you scared of stating your belief? You realize it’s obvious to everyone, right?
It appears that some things appear obvious to people which aren't in fact true. If people could calm down a little bit with their accusations we might be able to understand each other better.
Maybe it would help if I went back to bare-bones epistemology. This is what I believe:
~ Sense impressions in themselves have no meaning.
~ When we get a sense impression, we interpret it in the mind. Anything of which we are aware has been interpreted already.
~ The mind has structures through which it interprets sense impressions. These can be pretty elaborate. It appears that there are innate structures (e.g. the Kantian categories) which guide our interpretations. Beyond those, there is memory, association, and any number of learned categorizations, theories, assumptions, etc. (The extent to which these structures differ among different ages and cultures is an interesting question, but not of first importance here.) Usually the interpretation happens so quickly that we're not aware of it.
~ If we get a sense impression of something that isn't immediately familiar to us, we use our interpretive structures to think about what it is. To work out where it fits into our familiar world, we can fit that impression into known structures, and we can use logic to extrapolate about it.
~ If we want to know more about familiar things than our interpretive structure currently gives us, we can fit that familiar thing into existing structures, and use logic to extrapolate, to propose further knowledge.
~ Some of these propositions will be testable through further sense-experience, which is itself interpreted through our theories and structures. This is science.
~ Some of the propositions could be interpreted through theory and logic in ways which aren't testable through further sense-experience. In such cases, we just have to use logic, and the lack of empirical testing may mean we can never be sure. This is metaphysics.
There is no mysterious third way of knowing the world, as your question seems to imply. I have never said there was anything like that.
This is what I believe.
(March 21, 2019 at 10:36 pm)bennyboy Wrote: None of science's successes in understanding features IN and OF the framework of the Universe lead logically to the idea that science can answer questions which transcend it-- for example, why such a framework exists at all.
Well said.