Comment

This one is for the atheists

47
Nyet5/11/2015 11:53:30 am PDT

re: #46 EiMitch

So basically, you chose to define knowledge very broadly to include religious faith and/or hypothetical other worlds.

That phrase doesn’t even make sense, I defined knowledge to include hypothetical worlds? No, I used a possible world as an illustration of how a god can be knowable. Obviously, we don’t have credible evidence for god at this moment, but such evidence is possible in principle. I don’t see what is so hard about that.

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.

God as popularly defined actually interacts with this world in a supernatural way, sometimes visibly so, and so is theoretically knowable. Moreover, I was addressing the absolutist statement about any big-G-God, not only about God as you think he is popularly defined. If God wants to make himself available to us, he is able to and is thus theoretically knowable. So yes, that absolutist bullshit is pure 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.

I don’t keep switching anything and am consistent. You’ve already failed to understand some very basic points I’ve made, so maybe you just don’t get the rest of it.

So you reject GWS’s (and incidentally my own) definition of natural as “that which exists in this universe.”

I certainly do, because that’s not how the word is actually used.

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?

Wait, what? You know very well that I don’t believe in supernatural, but want me to give an example of supernatural 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!

Since I don’t believe in supernatural, it is indeed analogous to all that, as far as I’m concerned.