No reason justifies disbelief.

[Belacqua]

Please tell me how you are going to distinguish, without using any empirical means, the difference between a schizophrenic hallucination of god, and a divine revelation. Remember, no empirical evidence may be used to draw the distinction here.

I'm not particularly interested in revelations. I'm focussing more on what we mean when we talk about reliability. 


If you say that revelation isn't reliable because it can't be confirmed by intersubjective empirical evidence, then you're saying that it can't be confirmed because it isn't science. Because intersubjective empirical evidence is how science works. 


So what you're really saying is that only those things which work like science are reliable, by definition. Which means that by definition, "reliable," for you, equals "scientific." 


Which means that you're not open to non-scientific modes or reliability.

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Please demonstrate this through empirical means.

We have countless "revealed facts" which turned out to be BS and none which turned out to be correct.

What a puerile argument. Take the number of failed "end-of-the-world" revelations that have passed without incident. Gonna brush those all under the rug?

Do we have countless "revealed facts"? I don't think we do, because all those things which were interpreted as revealed facts failed. Which means they were illusions.

Does this mean that ALL revealed facts are illusions? Maybe. But in the desert people often see mirages where there's no water, and this doesn't mean that no oases exist. 

False positives abound. But this doesn't rule out the existence of real revelation. 

I don't believe in real revelation, but we have to be careful in our logic. Don't people say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or something like that?

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How do you tell the difference between an illusion that seems like a revelation and a revelation?
That's right. There isn't one.
So by their nature they are unreliable.

I don't know, I've never had a revelation. Have you? I've had some illusions.

If a person had a real revelation, there might be a way to distinguish, but since nobody we know has had one we can't judge. The preponderance of false positives make it difficult. 

Let's say that those people reporting revelations are unreliable. But we can't say that revelation itself is unreliable, because we don't have any data on that. 

You're getting it now. 
To be reliable it must be testable somehow. That's why its reliable.

Thank you, this is getting back to my main point. 

We say that by definition only those things which may be confirmed with intersubjective empirical data are reliable. And since only science uses intersubjective empirical data, we're really just saying that only science is reliable. So we're really not that open-minded to other systems.