(March 23, 2019 at 7:35 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(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.
You miss the point, in order for revelation to be considered a reliable source of information we would need to know that it is real and how it works. You might as well say we can reach reliable conclusions through magic.