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The ways to know reality?
August 25, 2012 at 3:26 pm
(This post was last modified: August 25, 2012 at 3:29 pm by Tea Earl Grey Hot.)
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that the only (and I guess interconnected) ways to properly understand reality are experience, science and reason (I'm not sure if experience and science should be considered one or separate). Do you agree? Am I missing something? Am I being too simplistic?
My theist buddy keeps telling me I'm arrogant for thinking that all there is to knowing truth is experience, science, and reason. I asked him, what other way is there for coming to the truth of a matter? He said "divine revelation." But I explained to him that you have to use experience, science and reason to make sure the person giving the revelation is trustworthy and that what he says is actually true. So it just comes back to experience, science and reason.
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"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
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RE: The ways to know reality?
August 25, 2012 at 3:31 pm
I agree. Anything that is beyond experience, science or reason is most likely codswallop.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. - J.R.R Tolkien
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RE: The ways to know reality?
August 25, 2012 at 3:31 pm
I've been alive long enough to understand "enough" about reality.
Anything else anyone else tries to teach me is utterly inconsequential and irrelevant to my day-to-day life.
There are days when scientific discovery and theists preaching become utterly meaningless. Usually when the fridge is empty and bills need to be paid.
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RE: The ways to know reality?
August 25, 2012 at 6:22 pm
(This post was last modified: August 25, 2012 at 6:23 pm by Cyberman.)
Philosophy gives me headaches, but I can share the method I myself use to know reality if you like. Or even if you don't.
If I close my eyes for a moment and things seem to be the same when I open them, I accept those things as being real. If I place an item somewhere and though untouched it's still there next time I see it, and is also the same item as before, I accept it as real. If I type on my keyboard and the same, expected characters appear on the screen as every time I hit the correct keys, I accept the situation as real.
Of course, my experiential reality may be nothing more than an illusion - my keyboard might be a real, naturalistic one that is incapable of being anything else (though as I said before, in an emergency every tool becomes a hammer) - or the keyboard might be an illusory, non-naturalistic one that just happens to behave like a naturalistic one up to now or while I'm looking. However, as a human I have to function within these limits, if limits they are, and operate on a human level. It's sort of like what Prof Dawkins has said about humans having evolved to live and function in "Middle Earth", on the level that consists of objects, forces and measurements of time that fall within human comprehension. My keyboard, for instance, is ultimately made up of subatomic particles and the forces that hold those together and which influence their behaviour - I don't need to function at that level. It doesn't make that subatomic level and beyond any less real; it simply has no real relevance to the level at which I think and operate.
And if anyone can understand what I just wrote, please explain it to me.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: The ways to know reality?
August 25, 2012 at 8:27 pm
If you learn something via divine revelation, that divine revelation is still part of your personal experience.
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"If you cling to something as the absolute truth and you are caught in it, when the truth comes in person to knock on your door you will refuse to let it in." ~ Siddhartha Gautama
