RE: No reason justifies disbelief.
March 23, 2019 at 7:35 pm
(This post was last modified: March 23, 2019 at 7:42 pm by Belacqua.)
(March 23, 2019 at 7:13 pm)Mr.wizard Wrote: I don't know how you could say anything about divine revelation, you haven't established that there is a divine being, that a divine being can or wants to reveal things, how revelation works, or that any perceived revelation isn't some sort of a delusion. You have to do a lot of work before you before you can claim that revelation isn't available to science.
Please try to focus on what I'm doing here.
I'm not arguing that revelation is real. I'm not arguing that there is a God who sends it. etc. etc.
I am thinking about what we mean when we talk about reliability. It looks as though most of the time when we use that word, we use it to mean "scientifically testable." So that becomes a begged question. Science = reliable and not science = not reliable.
So one way to question this would be to think about other sources of knowledge, and how they could, theoretically, be reliable in non-science-type ways. I have offered, as a thought experiment, the idea of revelation, which I take not to be a scientifically valid source of information.
If you want to offer a different example of a non-scientific source of information and talk about how it might be reliable, that would be fine too.
(March 23, 2019 at 7:20 pm)bennyboy Wrote: the process of confirming whether our inspired ideas accord well with further observations. The idea that science has (or even can) supplant inspiration shows a remarkable misunderstanding of (and possibly dishonesty about) how the mind interacts with information.
Yes, good.
I tried to say earlier that everything we know comes from what we think. And it's too simple to say that science frees us of inspiration, desire, preconceptions, etc.
I think what people here want to say is that reliable information, by definition, is that which can be given added credence in only one specific way (repetition through intersubjective empirical input) and this is what I'm not sure about.
If that is the only way to add credence to an idea, then science is all there is. But there may be other ways.