July 8, 2009
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SirNickDon & "Presuppositions, Objectivity, and Traditions"
Intro:So does SirNickDon (link) want to argue with an atheist? Not that he has to. But if he wants to know what one might say...
SirNickDon: But if I wanted to argue with atheists, I wouldn't argue about the existence of God. I would argue about the whole prove-me-wrong thing.
Ben: Is there something wrong with the "show me why something is correct" thing?
SirNickDon: Because to play the prove-me-wrong game, you've got to get into objectivism, and that, rather than the conclusion that there is no (effective) god, is the problem.
Ben: If effectively having no way to prove god exists is a problem then the underlying presupposition here seems to be that there has to be a way to conclude that God exists. What if there isn't a way? Is that presupposition unchallengeable?
SirNickDon: Objectivism, on the other hand, is a worldview that makes truth into an inert entity, a mental substance, if you will, that exists "somewhere out there," that can be discovered and grasped by means of a detached method of learning, such as the scientific method.
Ben: While I won't be defending objectivism, I will freely defend objectivity in a generic sense. I don't think truth is something in and of itself. Truth in my view is a relational concept where a mechanical brain checks and updates with sense experience versus its constructed mental model of affairs (whether internal or external).
SirNickDon: Objectivism, then, attempts to glean truth by freeing human understanding from all perspective that is rooted in particular times, places and tradition. In short, it is an attempt to gain a view from nowhere in particular.
Ben: You make it sound like there is a problem with a-centrically cross checking all traditions against everything you know from any starting position. That's sad. You won't be convincing me of anything any time soon.
SirNickDon: And here is where I would argue with atheists, if I wanted to. Here is where I would say, this is impossible. God may or may not exist, and maybe we'll get to that later, but objectivism certainly does not exist. Because there is no view from nowhere. There is no neutral ground to stand on.
Ben: I agree that objectivism doesn't exist in the way you say (as I noted above) and that we do have to start somewhere. That doesn't mean we have to stay there or that there is no such thing as "less biased" or "more neutral." It sounds like you are creating a recipe for arbitrarily maintaining a particular tradition.
SirNickDon: Knowing a thing is not a matter of mirroring reality "as it is," because we have no access to reality "as it is," apart from our perspective, which is determined in part by time, place, commitment and tradition.
Ben: We do have full access to all we confront as pattern. We don't have to know just how real everything is (Matrix style) to start cataloging it as is.
SirNickDon: That is why I agree with Miroslav Volf when he writes
The agenda of modernity has overreached itself. Its optimism about human capacities is misplaced and its assumption that there is a neutral standpoint is wrong. There can be no indubitable foundation of knowledge, no uninterpreted experience, no completely transparent rendering of the world. A cosmic or divine language to express "what was the case" is not available to us; all our languages are human languages, plural dialects growing on the soil of diverse cultural traditions and social conditions.Ben: Speaking of overreaching, Miroslav is doing quite a bit of his own. Before you said "in part" as though you were going to advocate something sensible, but Miroslav seems to go quite a bit further. It should be obvious we don't need to be perfectly unbiased to take a less and less biased position over time as it becomes more and more clear to us how to accomplish this. If he thinks he's refuted common ground, I'm sorry, in my most honest opinion, he is an an idiot. If we took any of this to its logical conclusion, it would be a justification to keep talking past each other indefinitely and would indicate there were no people who stood in moderate places on the beliefscape between extreme positions. It would also indicate that even attempting to communicate would be pointless with any other human being. That's just plain stupid.
People do change their perspective and are quite capable of understanding where someone else is coming from even if they disagree with them a whole lot. That doesn't always happen, but it does happen. It seems to me that just about anyone who says stuff like Miroslav is giving a justification for their own bias and unwillingness to communicate in any reasonable way. You can't just exaggerate away common ground even if it is difficult to find sometimes. They are waiving a big banner that says, "I'm an unreasonable person. But I won't stop there. I'm going to claim you are unreasonable, too, just because I've convinced myself that I have to be that way." It's a tad insulting and I have to believe that even they can do much better than it appears. I suppose I could be mistaken.
SirNickDon: Now, I am not saying that reason and rationality are useless, but it would be nice if we saw "our commitment to rationality as a commitment, and our tradition of reason as a tradition," as Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat put it. And naturally those within the objectivist tradition are going to reason and speak in objectivist terms. That's fine. But those of us whose commitments are shaped by the Christian tradition will reason and speak in terms of our own story.
Ben: Even if we concede that rationality is just a tradition (which is unfortunately a self fulfilling prophecy merely by someone believing it), it can still easily be argued it is the most objective human tradition there is. Just because people may prefer to downplay it doesn't make it ineffectual in application when it is applied. It just means people aren't applying it for whatever reason. You can say everything is a preference in food, but some foods actually have nutritional value and others do not. You can ignore this all you want and disown the need for health in your thinking, but you will still reap the detriments of poor nutrition if you try to portray health enthusiasts as "just heeding their preferences." Rationality is good epistemic nutrition. Religion is junk food. Your knowledge base suffers depending on which you partake of as an inevitable and natural result.SirNickDon: And at this point it would be easy for the objectivist (whether or not they are an atheist no longer matters at this point) to respond that I'm simply trying to justify that thing that religious type always justify, which is the validity of myth and superstition. Surely we are past that in this day and age?
Ben: You expect to ever get past that? Good luck.
SirNickDon: But in fact, no, we are not, because ontology always precedes epistemology. Before we can discuss what methods bring us knowledge most accurately, we have to determine the nature of the knowledge we would acquire.
Ben: So you will be using rationality to determine that a-rational loyalty to a religious tradition is more objective? Okay...
SirNickDon: We must not imagine that the world turns toward us a legible face which we would have only to decipher; the world is not accomplice to our knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence which predisposes the world in our favor. We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or, in any case as a practice which we impose on them.
Ben: I fail to see how this hyperbole affects rational discourse in any practical way. Anyone can say that kind of thing and to an extent I agree. Entitlement is a serious detriment to philosophical discourse and many philosophers inevitably think they are entitled to various brands of certainty when it is obvious this is no where near the case. I don't see how any of this justifies a religious tradition over rationality or why it might mean that we can't come to better conclusions than we did before.
SirNickDon: And here is the crux of the issue. It is true that Christians and atheists do not occupy the same world, and therefore are
describing different things, and therefore talking past one another. Ben: That is often what happens, but more often than not atheists are appealing to ordinary common ground means of cross checking various inputs of belief. Things that you acknowledged in this very post as okay as long as we're on a different topic. We're just applying them consistently. It is more often the Christian who pretends like the unknown is on equal footing with the known and that such consistency should arbitrarily stop before we can possibly deliberate objectively between conflicting religious traditions.
SirNickDon: Atheists occupy a world shaped by their inherited objectivist tradition which a priori lacks anything supernatural that would order creation (ID), or direct evolution (theistic evolution), or create an old-looking earth 6,000 years ago (young-earth creationism), or intervene into the laws of physics (possibility of miracles), and therefore observe the stars, trees and rocks as natural occurrences that connive to disprove the existence of any (effective) god.
Ben: How in the world do you know whether you live in Oz, Narnia, or Middle Earth unless you go outside and look for tin woodmen, talking lions, and hobbits? Is it our fault for not finding them?SirNickDon: Meanwhile, Christians occupy a world shaped by their inherited scriptural tradition which a priori assumes a relational god who ordered the cosmos, makes love and life intelligible and therefore observe the stars, trees and rocks as "an eloquent gift of extravagant love."
Ben: Meanwhile Christians a priori assume they live in Oz, Narnia, and Middle Earth long before they run across actual tin woodmen, talking lions, and hobbits in any objective way. Doesn't sound very fair to me, especially when I never assumed the things imposed on objectivists above.
SirNickDon: And if I were to argue with atheists here on xanga, I would summarize not by asking them to give up their atheism (though by all means they should feel free), but by asking for a bit of epistemological humility.
Ben: Epistemic humility? You call assuming your cosmic conclusion more humble than merely failing to reach a conclusion based on a lack of evidence? Geez.
Outro:
"Presupposition" is a relational concept in my understanding. Once a presupposition is faced directly, it ceases to be a presupposition. One has the responsibility to evaluate what were previously presuppositions and figure out if they are justified and why they are the way they are. That doesn't mean you treat them like they have tenure just because you've been using them uncritically up until that point. Not all presuppositions are created equal. We can set them all on the mental table before us and deduce which beliefs to keep and which to discard. Some may be indispensable, but then if that is actually true, everyone should be able to see that quite easily. The problem is religious people often try to make their extraordinary presuppositions ordinary because they can't deal with the lack of extraordinary evidence at the external level. They are only "ordinary" to them in the very sense that's been rightly criticized in the first place! "Hey religious person! You just take your religion for granted! How about some critical thinking!?!?!" They move the debate down a level, and mistakenly believe they've gotten themselves somewhere meaningfully different. They haven't.
Obviously if someone can claim to see your presuppositions and be talking about their own, they don't have the right to claim they are simply at the mercy of them and expect to be taken seriously. The fact people are coming from different perspectives and understand things differently is rather n00bish to point out. That's just a given of any contentious conversation, but that doesn't mean that's how it's supposed to stay. A Christian is typically asking for permission to just keep thinking like a Christian arbitrarily as though that's supposed to get them somewhere in a conversation with a rational person. "Yeah, I already knew you were a Christian. And I already knew that might likely mean you wanted lower the bar so that your religious tradition doesn't have to pass an outsider test. Now that you've accomplished this underwhelming feat, what exactly is there left to convince me that your perspective is more likely true?" Is someone just supposed to randomly give up their position? That's what it sounds like.
In my book, once considered, presuppositions are ordinary beliefs you are directly responsible for just like any other belief. Criticizing bias in others counterfactually provides a method for avoiding it yourself. All you have to be willing to do is to take your own advice wherever that leads and not sit back reveling in everyone's equal and opposite bias as though that's supposed to represent the pinnacle of intellectual integrity.
Ben
Comments (28)
Good solid argument.
Ben 1, Error 0
Nice, sir.
I had read NickDon's entry. It left a bad taste in my mouth, what with the "intellectual" tone and whatnot, but which left me wondering what the hell was his point more often than not. You have clearly fleshed it out, and then proceeded to...how shall I say this...demolish his "arguments."
I didn't have the energy or the frame of mind to be able to put all this into his post. Bravo, good sir. Bravo indeed. I hope you posted the link to this on his post.
Man you guys are making me dizzy. I think I going to go blog about wheelbarrels or something....
It's odd to me. I have a strong bias to give everyone the chance to explain their point of view.
Yet it seems the most intellectual Christians only argue that it is okay for them to believe things without a more objective justification.
I think this is contrary to the idea of morality. Which, my biases tell me, assumes there is an objective reality about our actions we should be pursuing.
-Alexander the Zounderkite
Honestly I found his rational to be interesting, but wrong. The ironic part of his post (intended, I'm assuming) is that he was talking about "not wanting to argue with atheists". Yet, by simply writing his refutations, he was.
Your post is definitely the more accurate.
I read the opening and the conclusion. Couldn't do the whole thing, so forgive me if you hit this in the middle. But your opening argument was actually something that I touched on in my Infinity posts. The existence of God cannot be proven or disproven. It is a metaphysical claim. You can come to the conclusion that "God exists" is a perfectly reasonable belief, moreso than believing "God doesn't exist," or vice versa.
You can say, "Show me why something is correct," but you can't do that with metaphysical claims. There is no tangible "Here it is" answer. Either that or the "Here it is" answer is so complex and massively extensive that it doesn't qualify as a "Here it is" answer. Which is why we have to use logic and reason, and we have to start at a common ground. That common ground might be we both want to know about infinity, or we both might want to know where all things come from, or we both might want to know whether or not God exists.
In your conclusion, you state, "The problem is religious people often try to make their extraordinary presuppositions ordinary because they can't deal with the lack of extraordinary evidence at the external level." On the contrary, that is exactly the problem I see with atheists! Because you want the "Here it is" answer with God, you are taking something extraordinary and wanting to see it ordinary, and you won't accept it until you see it in ordinary terms. There is only a "lack of evidence" because it's not evidence on your level.
The problem is religious people often try to make their extraordinary presuppositions ordinary because they can't deal with the lack of extraordinary evidence at the external level.
Again, this is where an atheist and a believer in God disagree about interpreting what's considered extraordinary evidence as put forth in cosmological, teleological,anthropic principles, IC, and other ID arguments.
@gabrielpeterIn your conclusion, you state, "The problem
is religious people often try to make their extraordinary
presuppositions ordinary because they can't deal with the lack of
extraordinary evidence at the external level." On the contrary, that
is exactly the problem I see with atheists! Because you want the "Here
it is" answer with God, you are taking something extraordinary and
wanting to see it ordinary, and you won't accept it until you see it in
ordinary terms. There is only a "lack of evidence" because it's not
evidence on your level.
Agreed, as I also stated above.
@LSP1 - @gabrielpeter - There is only a "lack of evidence" because it's not evidence on your level.
Copout. It's not HIS level. It's not an arbitrary standard. We are talking about basic standards of reason, coherence, and evidence. You wouldn't take at face value the claims of a door-to-door salesman, would you? And the worse case scenario if you fall for a bad product is you lose a few bucks. Therefore, before committing your LIFE to a set of propositions, any reasonable person would demand at least some evidence for those propositions. Tsk, tsk.
I wish I had more time to respond to everything here, but since I'm busy I'll just respond to two comments:
"While I won't be defending objectivism, I will freely defend
objectivity in a generic sense. I don't think truth is something in
and of itself. Truth in my view is a relational concept where a
mechanical brain checks and updates with sense experience versus its
constructed mental model of affairs (whether internal or external)."
You make the notion of objectivity sound inherently subjective, as if it were based on the interaction between sensing and your internal mental model of the world. I would argue instead that what is sensed/felt/measured (i.e. "evidence") is the objective truth (or an aspect of it), while mental models will always be subjective. Human understanding of truth will always be subjective in the sense that we are incapable of fully grasping the entire truth, and can only obtain glimpses of the truth through observation and through past experiences, which are then filtered/corrupted by hidden and non-hidden assumptions/conjecture, and reasoning.
Perhaps it's easier said this way: I believe in two levels of truth, one which is purely objective (e.g. the universe), and one which is contrived within our individual minds (your interpretation of truth, e.g. our understanding of the universe). The second one is subject to deterioration, as it can be easily influenced by feelings and desires, such as fear and pride, and through social interactions, such as opinions, peer pressure, religious institutions.
With regards to claims such as the existence of God, we cannot conclude through direct experience (as we would experience eating an apple), but can only derive it through the hidden filters that we all carry within our feeble minds. In that sense, "epistemological humility" is needed here; to assert that your understanding (and consequent conclusion) is more "objective" than that of others could indicate being corrupted by pride.
Even if we concede that rationality is just a tradition (which is
unfortunately a self fulfilling prophecy merely by someone believing
it), it can still easily be argued it is the most objective human
tradition there is. Just because people may prefer to downplay it
doesn't make it ineffectual in application when it is applied. It just means people aren't applying
it for whatever reason. You can say everything is a preference in
food, but some foods actually have nutritional value and others do
not. You can ignore this all you want and disown the need for health
in your thinking, but you will still reap the detriments of poor
nutrition if you try to portray health enthusiasts as "just heeding
their preferences." Rationality is good epistemic nutrition.
Religion is junk food. Your knowledge base suffers depending on which
you partake of as an inevitable and natural result.
Question: what do you think our rationality was programmed to perform? Are we programmed to understand the truth, or programmed to compute based on our senses, external information, and prior memory, the optimal way to survive, procreate, etc? In other words, is epistemology an understanding of what really exists, or an interpretation of what exists to give us the best results functionally (in some sense)?
If the former, then we are at least in agreement about the existence of truth, independent of epistemology. If the latter, then I agree that "irrationality" (however it is defined within this context, I'd define it as using a suboptimal thought process to produce a less desirable outcome) is junk food, as it ruins your ability to generate the results that helps you achieve your goal. With respect to that, I wouldn't necessarily call religion "junk food", as through it some people achieve greater success with regards to happiness, peace, love, humility, a deeper understanding of human nature, whatever it is.
(And I'd rather not get into the whole discussion about whether our whole discussion here has no truth value as truth is simply a mental concept, a product of evolutionary mechanisms--a statement which is, of course, neither true nor false. etc etc ad absurdum)
Looking forward to your responses.
I'm humbled. I've never had a post re-mixed before.
As to the argument, you're quite possibly right.
@In_Reason_I_Trust - well put
bravo, ben.
"The problem is religious people often try to make theirextraordinarypresuppositions ordinary because they can't deal with the lack of extraordinary evidence at the external level. They are only "ordinary" to them in the very sense that's been rightly criticized in the first place! "Hey religious person! You just take your religion for granted! How about some critical thinking!?!?!" They move the debate down a level, and mistakenly believe they've gotten themselves somewhere meaningfully different. They haven't."
Don't make me deploy the links.
@MasterShoe11 - Huh? I haven't a clue where you are coming from to know even how to begin to be intimidated. If you have some worthwhile links in relation to the topics here, by all means. I'd love to see them.
thanks,
Ben
@WAR_ON_ERROR - This is some of the, in my opinion, "extraordinary" evidence for the validity of Christianity. Interpret it how you will.
Link
Link (Link)
Link
Link
Matthew 24:7- Link
Psalms 2:3- Link
"So you will be using rationality to determine that a-rational loyalty to a religious tradition is more objective? Okay..."
It seems we come back to this particular idiosyncrasy with increasing frequency.
"Obviously if someone can claim to see your presuppositions and be talking about their own, they don't have the right to claim they are simply at the mercy of them and expect to be taken seriously. ... ...A Christian is typically asking for permission to just keep thinking like a Christian arbitrarily as though that's supposed to get them somewhere in a conversation with a rational person."
It seems so obvious, but your talking about it in this way is quite helpful to me. I'd not come at the problem with this approach before, I don't think. It's quite useful, in that more than a couple Christians have taken this odd "there just isn't any common ground" tact with me recently.
Great post.
@gabrielpeter - If we took, "The existence of God cannot be proven or disproven." seriously, it would be perfectly legitimate to be an agnostic. I'm not entirely sure why you've rejected this in the past when I've tried to point it out. In fact, that would be the correct intellectually honest conclusion in that event.
However, even that aside, as a Christian, you believe in things from the Bible like angels, demons, witchcraft, the power of prayer, the Incarnation, miracles that accompany the gospel message, and a broad spectrum of "here it is" kind of worldly things that do not require us to be extraordinary philosophers and logicians to figure out the Christian worldview is most likely true. So in order to avoid the obvious here, you have to ad hoc all of that away in Bible times.
In addition, even both of those major considerations aside, if Christians really are trying to establish common ground and make good arguments to the better explanation from evidence, then that's not really the topic of this post. There really are fideists out there who believe argument and evidence is hopeless and that's what this post is addressing. Obviously there are plenty of metaphysical discussions to have with Christians that don't fit into that category.
Ben
@SirNickDon - Thank you for saying so, and if your views change someday as a result of this, please let me know wherever that takes you. I'd be curious.
Ben
@LSP1 - Well there are certainly failed attempts at proving something in the realm of philosophy that might actually be considerable as extraordinary evidence if the arguments were successful. But as I told Gabe above (link), there are plenty of opportunities for your worldview to shine very easily, so there is no reason to quibble about that kind of thing. It's not like I rebut metaphysical logic with "where's the extraordinary physical proof" when there are plenty of direct counter philosophical means available at those levels.
Ben
@nullspace - Thanks for your comments. It seems there is a missing distinction here between "truth" and "existence." When I speak of reality, I do so using the conjunction of sense experience as compared to my mental model of it. I was not denying reality in favor of subjectivism. I can sort of see where you might get that impression though.
As for your second comment, I see no reason why evolution would have to have such a narrow focus for our mental faculties. Couldn't we imagine it to select for mental versatility? It is not hard to figure out that a well rounded ability to conceive of just about anything the wild can throw at you might come in handy over your not-so-well-rounded peers, right? Maybe it starts with tool making and language, but who knows what other grinds the gene pool gets put through. So there's no conceptual reason to limit what evolution might have selected for in the past if such selective pressures went on and on for millions of years across many different kinds of circumstances.
Ben
@nullspace - Oops, forgot something. I said, "Rationality is good epistemic nutrition. Religion is junk food," meaning that religion is epistemic junk food. Just because your knowledge base suffers doesn't mean other things have to as well.
Ben
@WAR_ON_ERROR : Thanks for the response, but I still find difficulty understanding what epistemology means in the context of how our brains evolved. (I hope this isn't going too off topic now.) If you were to consider "epistemology" in chimpanzees, the extent to which they are capable of abstract reasoning would be limited to pattern recognition, basic addition, etc. I highly doubt they are capable of questioning the meaning of life, and truth (which is, after all, a logical/abstract concept, a product of advanced reasoning). However, chimps are more than capable of surviving in the wild, building tools and forming societies, and from that gaining an "understanding" of nature which may be vastly different from that of ours, much less based on reasoning than on habits or instincts. Similarly, a spiritual hermit who is one with his surroundings, is perhaps capable of sensing and knowing when a storm is coming, or when a threat is imminent, with higher accuracy than that of current meteorological scientific methods (we know how inaccurate those can be).
It seems to me that human beings, having put great faith in our understanding of the world through the lens of science, is increasingly ruling out all other ways of understanding the world as "junk food." It's a natural survival mechanism: we trust in regularities for survival. A reductionist side-effect is that, events that are reproducible with high probability are sometimes declared to be the only "truths" out there. Religion, which is often a very personal experience (I don't believe in religion that is simply taught or forced upon by social pressure, but one that is experienced and internalized.), is discarded as a result. After all, if God has a mind of his own (as many religions claim, he is a living being), the effects/acts of God cannot be humanly reproduced or evoked at will. But this does not rule out God from epistemology; it simply rules him out of the scientific method.
I guess the main difference between what we call "nutrition" and "junk" has to do with whether God exists and is knowable, of which we all have our respective points of disagreement. =p
@Derek_Timothy - Thanks. To their credit, if their supernatural deposit of psychological fidelity to their belief system really is from God, then it might make sense to defer to the edifice of that rather than logic and evidence we can examine ourselves. The problem is that we can't verify or cross check that this really is a supernatural deposit of psychological fidelity in the first place, so the whole house of cards comes crashing down when different kinds of religious people step forward asserting the same confidence. If we could, we wouldn't bother attaching an "ism" to the "fide." It would just be part of a balanced epistemic meal.
Ben
@MasterShoe11 - Finally got around to looking at your links. I'm afraid I'm going to have to take your suggestion and interpret it how I will. You've heard of confirmation bias and paredolia, right? I see there's a ton of claims to sort through there on one or two of those sites, but I don't really have a high confidence that any investigation into those kinds of claims is going to turn up anything definitive.
Ben
@nullspace - Sorry I took so long to get back to you.
"I still find difficulty understanding what epistemology means in the context of how our brains evolved."
I don't understand how you can arbitrarily say that monkey epistemology and human epistemology at their base neurological level are fundamentally different. Why would they need to be? They have to remember things, right? A dog remembers things. It "knows" where its food dish is. That has to happen somehow. Maybe it is different, but how do you know it is?
One of the things that seems to be overlooked when it comes to evolution is the escalation factor. Anything after single celled organisms is rather gratuitous in terms of survival don't you think? Bacteria are doing quite fine three billion years later. However, that climb out of that world got there in lots of specific baby steps in specific environments and competition with other organisms in ways hard to predict. That necessarily means not every element in the gene pool will directly and explicitly relate to survival. *Ultimately* (aside from just genetic defects) everything will, but there can be many iterations of complexity that have more universal applications. Why do we need arms and legs when other organisms get along fine without them? We can ask similar questions about a zillion other things in the biological tree that have nothing to do with the mind. However, when the competition doesn't have some kind of helpful extremity, all of the sudden in that context we can understand why a species might move beyond just immediate survival. And the same thing goes for more advanced brains.
"Similarly, a spiritual hermit who is one with his surroundings, is perhaps capable of sensing and knowing when a storm is coming, or when a threat is imminent, with higher accuracy than that of current meteorological scientific methods (we know how inaccurate those can be)."
Well if that is true, then we can have a contest of miracles, Elijah style. Science can show up and go against that spiritual hermit 100 times in a row and see who can predict the weather with the most accuracy. We may not be able to understand the hidden methods if there is some spiritual gift there, but certainly we can test the efficacy quite easily.
"It seems to me that human beings, having put great faith in our understanding of the world through the lens of science, is increasingly ruling out all other ways of understanding the world as "junk food.""
I think it's on the relative scale. The point isn't that science is infallible or knows everything there is to know, it's just that everything else is that much worse.
"A reductionist side-effect is that, events that are reproducible with high probability are sometimes declared to be the only "truths" out there."
True, sometimes people do go all positivist on us. I'm not one of them. I'm content to say I just don't know.
"After all, if God has a mind of his own (as many religions claim, he is a living being), the effects/acts of God cannot be humanly reproduced or evoked at will. But this does not rule out God from epistemology; it simply rules him out of the scientific method."
It is entirely possible that God speaks to people through unconfirmable subjective religious experiences that don't even have to not contradict one another. It's also possible it's all in people's heads.
"I guess the main difference between what we call "nutrition" and "junk" has to do with whether God exists and is knowable, of which we all have our respective points of disagreement. =p"
I see no reason why a god wouldn't be knowable in principle. Jesus is certainly supposed to have walked around and performed magic tricks for three years 2,000 years ago, so I don't see what the problem is. We just don't have that kind of evidence for no particular reason.
Ben
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