Is science the only way to knowledge?

[Angrboda]

But I never "claimed the existence of God, which I know to be true because of x, y, and z." If I do believe in some higher power, it's not because I'm certain there is one, but because given the data we have, the best explanation is a creator/designer/agent than any non-creator/non-designer/non-agent hypothesis currently available. Being the believer in science that you are, I hope that comes with properly representing views.

I would be interested in seeing the data you find so compelling as well as how you justify your inference based on that data. If you feel up to muster on it, as you seem to, why don't you start a thread on it and make your argument?

[Bob Kelso]

That's highly dependent upon a person's perspective don't you think?

I believe that science is the only way to knowledge, you could argue that math is as well but I include math as a part of science.

There are other instances of knowledge outside of science to be sure, through literature or personal experience but these things are subject to different viewpoints and very different answers depending upon the person.

Admittedly I'm out of my depth when it comes to the philosophy of knowledge, what it truly boils down to and in what way all knowledge can be obtained (like through science) but this is my opinion.

[Creed of Heresy]

I know it doesn't look like the case on this forum, but most western atheists see science and reason (the latter sometimes, depending on the day of the week) as the defeater of religious belief.

That's not what you said the first time. YOU said that most atheists think science answers, in the present tense, answers all questions. Not "can answer," not "will answer," you said answers. As in, DOES answer. If you had said that most atheists think science CAN answer all questions, then yes, I would be inclined to agree there, but as you stated it, no. As for the defeater of religious belief, well...see below.

Naturally then you have Richard Dawkins calling his intellectual ponzi outfit the "Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science". Yeah. You have Dennett and Krauss and the like seeing science as the harbinger of truth. You have atheists (and even theists) who position issues such that it is "Science versus Religion". Or they point to evolution as a defeater of religious belief. Sam Harris even grounds his bogus moral theory on science.

"...Intellectual Ponzi outfit..." I don't think you understand what a Ponzi scheme is, nor how that term is a complete non-sequitur for the context in which it is used... As for science vs. religion, you dismiss the conflict far too easily for something that has been progressing ever since the days of classical antiquity, or so it seems, anyways. The thing is, as time has gone on, and we have learned more, the science vs. religion notion has become more and more in favor of science against religion. Evolution is not so much a defeater of religious belief as it is of religious claims. You can show someone how what they believe is inaccurate or wrong, but if they're deluded into thinking they are right and will hear no other reason than their own, well, you can't defeat it. But you can't call them logical. All you can call them after that is solipsistic and close-minded.

So it's undeniable that science is The Source of Truth™ for most atheists.

Source of truth? Or the enabler of truth? Either way, you said most atheists feel that science has all the answers...and are continuing to state as such. You are exposing the strawman fallacy harder and harder; you tried to set up a far weaker stance and attack it and claim based on these other ideas that it's invalid. Unfortunately, what you attacked was, indeed, not the truth. You based the premise based on what you thought was knowledge, but the truth of the matter is, what you might call knowledge, is not what another might call knowledge. The answers given to the poll are subjective to what each person considers knowledge. The discussions have shown as much as well. I've made a couple people rethink their position, and they have made me rethink and analyze my position, as is typically the case with people who are not delusional and set in their ways...unlike a certain individual I am currently replying to.

The atheistforums.org bubble is not a big enough sample size to give you that impression probably because most people here have an IQ under 60. But don't let that color your view of atheism as a whole, alright?

I know you believe that. But given your history as being someone on this forum who has demonstrated repeatedly to be completely solipsistic and convinced they alone, out of 6.5 billion human beings on this planet, are absolutely correct and cannot even conceive of the idea they might be wrong in their stance at all...well, I also know what you believe is a load of biased bullshit.

Don't try for kicking me in the nuts when you don't have a leg to stand on, bambino.

I don't want to even touch your horse-shit on knowledge. It's a laugh how you think you can develop a theory of knowledge that claims to test it's hypotheses when you don't even know what foundationalism is.

You know what I think is cute? I think it's cute how you believe that I do or do not know something when it hasn't even been touched upon, brought up, or otherwise gone to that extent. My experience with things and ideas is an ever ongoing process, learning and testing and adapting ideas to how I view and understand the world. Foundationalism, however, is indeed something I know of. It's also something I sneer at because I have long since come to understand that no belief is so absolutely and clearly certain that it doesn't require another belief to support and validate it. I've heard many, many positions from many, many people who have tried to make the exact claim that indeed they do have a belief that is blatantly obvious to all without need of other beliefs to confirm it. If such a belief existed, I think we human beings would suddenly find ourselves with a lock-step universal and singular ideal that could brook no argument.

And yet we don't. And all the ones that claim to need no support to be blatantly, absolutely, self-servingly obvious, when they get enough power? They realize that indeed there are those who do not believe this to be true. They believe their OWN beliefs are absolutely, unequivocally true. And then what happens? Jealousy and ego and close-minded solipsism leads to war and bloodshed and violence in the name of MAKING people believe that their belief is absolutely true. I don't need to point out what irony this is. It's pretty obvious...as long as you have a sense of humor like I do.

Seriously, how do you test the hypothesis that you're not a brain in a vat? That your cognitive faculties are working properly? That everyone around you are actual people instead of p-zombies?

Given that in order for a hypothesis to actually be a hypothesis in the scientific sense requires that it can be tested, I literally by definition can not test such things. So, as such, and as I have stated quite clearly before, I can only assume or not assume as such either way. The way I base those assumptions is, quite simply, the likelihoods of this and the examination of the data at hand. I can see everyone else, and they are both similar to me and yet also different than me, in simple, moderate, or extreme ways. Either this is one hell of a simulation, or it's not, and we are all experiencing reality together. I say this because typically, the argument comes from "believers." Whether or not this is your own stance in the following is not taken into account when I say this; this is just the reason for the above, which is my more dismissive, "not really caring about this" response. They say everything must come down to a reason. There must be a reason to everything. Those of the Abrahamic religions claim that their god has already given them their reasons for existing; it's because god loved them. Before we existed, god loved us. Now, I'm going to get into a bit of a tangent. Read if you'd like, or not. I'll put a hide tag on this so you can choose to read it or not.

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This thing about everlasting love is contradicted by how god's love was insufficient to stay his hand from being jealous about us worshiping idols or "false gods" and thus smiting us a whole bunch of times, or that god is apparently just letting people burn in hell as opposed to taking up his mighty godhammer and banhammering Satan from existence. It's also weird that a human being in life can choose to reject god's love and Jesus's sacrifice and in so doing damn themselves. He gave us the ability experience, he gave us free will. It stands to reason that some experiences might lead them to believe that god does not exist...or he does not love them. He expects that people are just supposed to believe god loves them, even if that which he allows them to/makes them subjectively experience would give them reasons to believe in the opposite. He might allow them to suffer so bitterly that they feel unloved by god...he might make them suffer as much, in fact, to "test" their love for him. He does this knowing that through free will, humans will feel differently. He does this knowing that subjectively, "results may vary." And when they die, it seems to be, at least from theistic texts, he doesn't bring their souls forth to witness him and show them their lives, and why he created them, and why they had to experience what they did. He seems to not want to forgive them, he seems to want them to be immediately sent by hell by their rejection in life. He doesn't give them a second chance to see it for themselves out of their life. He doesn't seem to want them to make a final decision, wherein they can look back on it, then on him, and make one final choice based on free will to say "I forgive you for the pain, if you forgive me for my inability to love you before." He just says that life is the only way to make choices of free will, and you've damned yourself, goodbye. The reasons just simply don't make any damn sense.

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So anyway, what would the reason be for everything being a sim or everyone else being a p-zombie? At least from the Abrahamic standpoints, it doesn't make sense. Now, from the purely philosophical standpoints, the p-zombie seems to make no real claims for a reason for this; it's outside of our ability understand it. Fine, I guess. This provides nothing of substance to really merit any interest or intrigue in, so it doesn't really make any metaphysical sense, but whatever. The thing is, this idea of p-zombies has been shown to make no sense. I'll assume, since you seem to be at the least somewhat learned in philosophy, that you are aware of Daniel Dennett's thing about p-zombies with second-order beliefs, and you might also therefore be acquainted with physicalism. You'd therefore be aware of what my answers to the p-zombie question here are, or my stance at least in regards to them, and how at that point, we'd be at a point where we'd be doing little more than to agreeing to disagree. As for simulation/brain-in-jar things, well...in due time.

Listen, I know I've been a little harsh with you, but you gotta admit you deserve it. Making grandiose claims about religious knowledge when you're a little peon on an internet forum who has read approximately zero books on religious knowledge and knows about as much about what he's talking about.

I've been in heated debates over such axioms, "being harsh" is part and parcel to it. More what irks me is what level of assumption you go to in regards to me and everyone else just because there are other viewpoints than your own with their own reasons for having those viewpoints. You are cemented in your stance that your philosophical axioms are true and cannot possibly be wrong. The problem is that key, italicized word. Philosophical. Topics in which there either is no way to answer the questions within them, or the answer to them is not yet able to be given. As I've stated before, "I don't know" is a perfectly legitimate answer to a question without having to take conclusive stances on it. The fact that I can say "I don't know" is one that exists because I am interested in learning things. I don't often take concrete, absolute standpoints. It is specifically why I hold to scientific knowledge, as opposed to religious knowledge. Because what I believe I know can be wrong, even if tested by the scientific method itself to become something I think I know. Because later, what I thought I knew via the scientific method might later be shown, again by the scientific method, might have been wrong. It always leaves me able to learn something new, to correct myself, and to not be so self-centered and arrogant as to think I, a "little peon on the internet," am completely, 100% correct on everything.

That's another thing that irks me. Something that I will address below, because it's something you said.

It's easy to earn my respect, buddy. You don't even have to know what you are talking about. You just have to show a willingness to doubt the proposition that you know enough. Have enough humility to realize that maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than the simplistic garbage that you've been made to believe.

I'm not your buddy. Nor do I really care about whether or not you respect me. See, unlike you, my own respect is far more demanding. It, too, does not require someone to know what they're talking about. It, too, requires someone to understand that they may be wrong, and to adapt to that, and correct it. But what else it requires extends beyond that. There are levels of what my respect for someone is given. My absolute respect? There are quite a few conditions that need to be met before it's given to that level. But, see, what you have said here is another thing that irks me, and in fact irks me far more. You state that your respect is given only when people display they may be wrong and will adapt to that. Yet, I've followed several threads in which you and others have debated. I haven't seen such a willingness from you to do that which requires you to respect someone. Some of the points you've made in this reply are things that others have shown to be fallacies and erroneous, in either some possibility or even high likelihood, yet, you're still using them. Some of them are things you've been given pretty clear reason to doubt to be valid...like the thing involving qualia and philosophical zombies. Yet...you're still using them as if they've never been addressed.

What do you think that tells me? Perhaps now you might see why I'm so dismissive of you so often. It's hard to want to really engage in someone to any extent, to want to spend time discussing things with them, when it seems like no matter how long you do, they maintain a stance of supreme arrogance, assumption, derision, mockery, and bull-headed solipsism, wherein you have to put in effort on the order of magnitudes greater to show them when they might be mistaken than it would take one who is so willing to change what they think based on the information and viewpoints provided, and in the context to which the information is given and received.

I mean. You have accused me of not wishing to change my own stance, to being deluded and self-assured of my rightness...yet I'm the only one in this entire thread who stated they wanted an "I don't know" option for the question that was asked, the only one who pointed out that the question was not specified and thus the answers themselves misleading, which, by the way, is a form of intellectual baiting, which is pretty damn petty and disrespectful. It's essentially rigging the argument in your favor to try to provide a founding for your own self-assumed intellectual prowess as opposed to genuinely wanting to engage others in an equal exchange of ideas. It's prohibitively difficult to want to really give a shit what someone's intellectual stance might be or to see what they have to say, or whether or not they respect you, when they do crap like that.

You want to genuinely see if I'm "worth" your respect? And if you are worth mine? Then be intellectually honest; start the discussion on even footing, not in something that gives you an early advantage on your own terms.

Oh, and also, rationalism doesn't mean what you think it means.

Assumption on top of assumption on top of assumption. My answers thus far have been to things I've not been able to clearly define the questions to. It's not my fault the entire basis of this whole intellectual clusterfuck was at the very start poorly defined. I have been asked what I define as something being rational, and what can be defined as rational, and how can I claim how something is rational, and what I define rationality and what my rationality is. I haven't been asked what rationalism is on a clear enough basis to have answered the question as to what it is. Rationalism, the methodological form, is something that makes the approach that truth is not sensory-based but deductively-based. Someone who is a rationalist is someone who thinks that absolute truths that need not be supported by any outside sources exist, that innate knowledge, obvious knowledge, which requires nothing from the senses, which requires no testing, exists. Cogito ergo sum.

As I have said before, I base my claim of "knowledge" on scientific approaches, because I test that knowledge. And I can correct that knowledge based on new information. Given that I've stated this before, I have no idea why you would assume I am completely stuck in my ways and unwilling to change my standpoints and/or viewpoints, but, hey, you're a presumptive audacious proletarian internet troll who stoops so low into his juvenile, ungracious, condescending immaturity that he's gone to an extent to put GOD DUZNT ECKSIST as his forum title, ATHEIZM ROOLZ!!! as his "religious views," and a quote from a guy who is a religious-thriller writer working for a self-declared conservative newspaper and wrote that particular quoted entry by taking the source he quoted completely out of context and turning what was essentially a scientific attempt to discover what part of the brain creates[i/] the sensations of godly, spiritual, or otherworldly experiences...UFO experiences included.

And you accuse [i]me of being a peon? When you stoop below my level before you even post? By the very nature of your own profile?

You state that you are a foundationalist. This explains a lot, especially your dislike of Richard Dawkins and the RDFRS. Must be really obnoxious, and must really stoke your ire that there's a form of thinking out there that's provided your lot with a question you really can't answer as absolute truth despite your claims that such an answer exists. See, there's that thing up above. Simulated reality. Brain in a jar. I've argued my senses are the way I come to claim knowledge...but then I've mentioned that I do so under the scientific method, which means I do things to test it and poke at it and change my understanding based on what comes up through doing that. How DO I know, however, whether or not I am in a simulation or a brain in a jar? Well, I am dismissive of the simulation idea because of the infinite regress issue, among many other things, and the brain in a jar thing, well, I have no way of knowing that either. Both are unknowables.

So, I ask myself...does it matter? I can't prove absolutely that this isn't a simulation, that I'm not just a brain in a jar, that it is an absolute truth that I am or am not. It's an unknowable, so I dismiss the idea. It simply has no bearing on reality. It's introduced without evidence, I dismiss it without evidence, simple as that. Even my own senses, I have to take their authenticity with a grain of salt. Are they absolutely true? Well, they seem to be. To me, at least. I can communicate with others. They can confirm or deny if I'm seeing or hearing what they're seeing/hearing. But can I know for a fact on my own that they are? No, not on my own. I have tested them reliably with others, and do so consistently, but if there is an inconsistency (and it's happened often enough) I have to think about what it was that created the inconsistency. I can use my other senses to figure it out, or test the inconsistency to see if it becomes a consistency. Those sensory inconsistencies always correct themselves by not happening again, or becoming explainable through validation from others. A hundred people with me didn't see that flash. A dozens scientists tell me in great detail after examining my eyes that there a nerve misfired or something. Only way I can know that it was true or not. It always requires validation or correction, though. So...my senses are not always an absolute truth. They sometimes can lie to me. But most of the time, they are true. But absolutely true? I can't know that. Does it matter if they are or not? Most of the time, no. But if it's negatively affecting me, correcting their error will then matter, so I should correct the error.

And then we get to the point I know you're itching to scratch. What about God? All these other things are unprovable yet you accept them as reality! Why not God, then?? Well first I can validate through others whether or not they're real, and I can do so with great consistency as needed. A god? Well the consistency of a god or gods has been shown to be highly inconsistent throughout history. Even in modern gods, the inconsistencies are fucking phenomenal in their number and variation. Every damn time someone claims they experienced god, the details are vague, inconsistent both with the individual and with others who claim to "share" those "experiences," and the explanations for why they happened are easily attributable to scientific explanations that actually ARE consistent.

And so, with no consistency in the claims of god, with no experiences of my own, with no way to test a god's existence, no way to validate him through others [because again, the inconsistencies], it comes to the question of "does it matter if there is or is not a god?" The answer is "nope." No evidence to support a god. I dismiss the idea without evidence. Is it an absolute truth I can rely on others for proof? Well, the gullible idiots like yourself who believe in a god or god-like presence who show that inconsistencies can come even from others shows that no, no I can not.

But then, I can even claim that my senses ARE an absolute truth despite all that...except when I am dreaming. My senses are all in effect when I dream, but they're untrustworthy during that time. I can distinguish reality from dreaming, but usually only when I awaken, except for the times I lucid-dream and CAN determine what's going on. They are not an absolute truth all the time.

There. You have some idea of my stance, yet it's even more complicated than that. It keeps shifting, and changing, the more I learn, and the more I experience. Unlike you, I do not hold anything to the idea of an absolute truth. To me, things are either more true or less true. I must always be ready to accept new evidence that logically proves I am wrong. As far as unknowables go? I simply dismiss them as ideas. "I'm conscious!" "Prove it." "I can't." "You're a human, right? You have a brain and all? And there's brainwave readings that I can compare to mine?" "Yes?" "That's proof enough since I can do the same, consistently, with everyone else, with discrepancies being easily understood and explained." "Oh, cool."

"We're in a simulation!" "Prove it." "I can't." *I think for a bit* "I can't think of a reason why this would be one, either. I dismiss this claim."

"There's a god!" "Prove it." "I can't." "Why do you claim there's one?" "Because someone said there is one, and so do [number of believers here] people!" "Have any of them had personal experiences?" "Yes, a great many!" "Can you collate the information on the experiences in detail that is consistent with each other?" "No..." "And do those [number of other believers here] people believe in your god? In one god? In multiple gods or godlike figures? Do they have consistent experiences with that god, or those gods? Are they consistent with your claims?" "No." "I dismiss this claim."

There, I'm fucking done with this post.

[Polaris]

Does science teach you compassion? The opposite actually...

[Faith No More]

Does science teach you compassion? The opposite actually...

Science teaches you cruelty?

You're an idiot.

[Polaris]

Does science teach you compassion? The opposite actually...

Science teaches you cruelty?

You're an idiot.

Survival of the fittest (brought to fruition as eugenics), limey.

For example, since you're white, by natural selection, you come from a genetically inferior stock since your genes don't survive against competition well. Just imagine using that same rationale with social darwanism.

[Faith No More]

Survival of the fittest (brought to fruition as eugenics), limey.

For example, since you're white, by natural selection, you come from a genetically inferior stock since your genes don't survive against competition well. Just imagine using that same rationale with social darwanism.

Science teaches us that survivial of the fittest is the mechanism that nature works through, not that is the mechanism that humans must work through.

You're still an idiot.

[Polaris]

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Survival of the fittest (brought to fruition as eugenics), limey.

For example, since you're white, by natural selection, you come from a genetically inferior stock since your genes don't survive against competition well. Just imagine using that same rationale with social darwanism.

Science teaches us that survivial of the fittest is the mechanism that nature works through, not that is the mechanism that humans must work through.

You're still an idiot.

At least I can spell.

And what you just described is not taking the advice of science. It's offering a liberal arts view on how to view life.

[Faith No More]

At least I can spell.

Well, then, perhaps you have one thing going for you.

Still, I don't know what good the ability to spell will do you when you're dumb enough to drown yourself in a drinking fountain.

[Polaris]

At least I can spell.

Well, then, perhaps you have one thing going for you.

Still, I don't know what good the ability to spell will do you when you're dumb enough to drown yourself in a drinking fountain.

Coming from one of the dumbest members on this site, please excuse me if I take that with a shaker of salt.