RE: How do I know the things I know?
October 5, 2012 at 10:34 pm
(This post was last modified: October 5, 2012 at 10:38 pm by Darkstar.)
(October 5, 2012 at 9:59 pm)Akincana Krishna dasa Wrote: The question I want to get to is: Where's the evidence for God? How does someone know He exists?
Nowhere and have enough blind faith, respectively.
Akincana Krishna dasa Wrote:Before going there, I want to ask: What does anyone know about anything? How do they know it? What kinds of knowledge are there, if there is any?
Can anyone help me with these questions?
We know what we can observe. Sometimes what we observe can be misleading, and a single person's experiences cannot be used as knowledge to anyone more than them unless it can be demonstrated that their experience was real rather than, say, a hallucination. Science has come a long way since the biblical era. If you try hard enough, you can create a set of fictional rules that govern a situation to make it look as if those rules are real. However, when the rules apply without fail in other situations as well, we can label that knowledge as genuine. An example of this would be to say that 1+1=2 because all addition problems=2. This works for 1+1 and 2+0, and some others, but quickly falls apart. The fact that the laws of physics, such as gravity, for example, apply in predictable and calculateable ways regardless of the situation shows that we can indeed know this.
Another question sometimes asked is how we can know anything, how can we know our senses do not decieve us always? This quickly falls apart, as we could not even speculate to know anything, especially not god, if this were true.
Then there is theoretical knowledge. I am not refering to,say, the theory of gravity or evolution, these belong to a different type of theory, one that nearly translates into scientific fact. By theoretical I mean that which we cannot, or at least have not observed. We have theoretical knowledge of the big bang, for instance, even though it may be calssified as a theory in the same sense as evolution or gravity by some, its details are somewhat less certain. We did not witness the big bang, but by applying what we know from what we
can observe, we can infer what may be in what we have yet to observe. A good example of this would be the predictability of the elements in the periodic table. Even before many of the elements were discovered we predicted what they might be like, with impressive accuracy.
The final point is one of absolute knowledge. If we do not accept something unless we have absolute knowledge of it, then we cannot hardly accept anything as true, becasue it might someday be disproven or modified. However, in most cases our knowledge of something is great enough that we can claim to know something even if we do not have absolute knowledge of it. The instances in which we are a bit less certain, we can only say that it is our best understanding.
That was a bit wordy, but I hope I was able to answer your question somewhere in there.
