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This one is for the atheists

46
EiMitch5/11/2015 11:28:17 am PDT

re: #29 Nyet

As for whether the existence of God is knowable: first of all, define knowledge. If you are using the word in some absolute sense, maybe its not knowable, but then nothing much is except for cogito ergo sum.

I see nothing problematic with knowing that God exists. True, we don’t have credible evidence for it, but theoretically, in another possible world there might be actual evidence for his existence.

So basically, you chose to define knowledge very broadly to include religious faith and/or hypothetical other worlds. I’ve re-read a few times, and I’m still not entirely sure where you were going with that. Anyway, that’s not the definition I prefer, and I doubt many agnostics use that definition either.

do we know that underpants gnomes, werewolves and devil possessions do not exist? If we can answer yes to that question, what makes God different?

If we’re talking about a specific deity, such as god as interpreted literally from the bible, then there is none. We know they don’t exist, because all of the objective, empirical evidence available on zoology, disease, astronomy, etc do not support the existence of any such things.

But if we’re talking about a more general concept of god, which is invisible and/or not existing within this dimension.universe etc, then there is a difference: falsifiability. That god has been defined to exist beyond all possible knowledge, (at least by my preferred definition) because (s)he/it cannot be tested nor observed in any hypothetical way. (at least not in this world/dimension/universe/etc.) And that god’s interactions with this world are indistinguishable from natural phenomena. Therefore, when agnostics say that god as popularly defined is unknowable, they’re stating an observation, not dogma.

But if you keep switching definitions and otherwise dropping context, then yeah, I suppose you could say agnostics are dogmatists. Whatever makes you happy.

Speaking of diction:

re: #43 Nyet

“Supernatural” is not an epistemological, but rather an ontological category. It doesn’t depend on our knowledge. There’s a word for an epistemological “weirdness”: paranormal. Paranormal need not be supernatural (e.g. aliens). Many things modern science has establish would be paranormal for ancient people, but they would not be supernatural.

So you reject GWS’s (and incidentally my own) definition of natural as “that which exists in this universe.” And then, bring-up another word “paranormal,” which you define as “weird,” because… I dunno, more diction to argue over? Whatevs.

I care more about how you’re defining “supernatural” in a way that is hypothetically knowable. So how about giving us an actual example? Not hypothetical, but something from the real world? Any one such example will do. Otherwise, the supernatural as you’ve defined it is no different from gnomes, lycanthropes, demonic possessions, etc. /nailed the callback!