How do we know?

I understand what you are saying perfectly. It's still wrong.We don't simply beleive what anybody says. We do accept - as a shortcut - what genuinely qualified people say (and even there we do not always accept it fully). But that is because thay are passing on knowledge acquired by other means and we have adequate reason to trust them.For faith to be a mean of knowing it should be possible to gain knowledge directly by faith - rather than simply accepting knowledge acquired by other means. And this raises the question of where the supposed knowledge in religion comes from and whetehr there are genuine qualifications which can ve trusted to indicate posession of this knowledge.Leaving aside your silly claim about special relativity (I've studied it - I KNOW that it has no noticable effect at the level of ordinary experience), I've already dealt with the assumptions of empiricism. And it certainly does NOT involve ignoring other peoples perceptions as you claim (in fact they ARE a useful cross-check and are a very valuable part of empiricism). What YOU don't understand is that the reliance on assumptions - EVEN WITH CROSS-CHECKS is considered a WEAKNESS. It is something that is to be minimised. The real fact is the OPPOSITE of what you say - the basis of empiricism is a DENIAL that faith is a valid means of knowing.And then we return to the same old strawman. I've corrected you often enough on this point, so I have to assume that you are simply lying. I don't demand scientific validation of God - I ask for evidence that faith as such is a reliable means of knowing. That you continually evade this issue by misrepresentign my position simply shows that you know that you can't provide what I actually ask for.

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Okay, cool. So to verify that faith is a perfectly good means of knowing all I must do is believe my teacher when he tells me Spain is a country and then gather the class and go see Spain for myself. I believed my teacher's words to be true and whadya know! They were. Since I gained knowledge by faith and verified it by empiricism, faith works. I know exactly what you'll say to this, but go ahead and equivocate.

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In this case, faith wasn't even necessary. If you removed faith altogether the teacher's statements were still true. If we remove all faith in religion, there is no reason for God to exist unlike Spain in your example. Knowing that Spain exists is a product of empiricism, not faith.

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EVERYTHING you know enters your head through a personal subjective perception that cannot possibly be verified.

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What can be verified, through empiricism, is that other people perceive the same thing you do. This is the highest level of "knowing" that humans are capable of. We often call this objective data, but truthfully a more accurate term is intersubjective (ie a verifiable subjective experience). The existence of Spain, for example, can be verified by other's experiences.

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How confident must we be to say we KNOW something? That is up to the individual.

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True, it is left to the individual, but this doesn't mean that certain realms of knowledge are more inherently "true" than others. Which do you have more confidence in; 2+2=4 or that Buddha reached Enlightenment?

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I am willing to accept this statement as true knowledge without verification in the same way I am willing to accept that you see blue the same way I do without verification.

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A small nit pick. We can measure the wavelengths of visible light. Barring color blindness, people perceive the same wavelengths as the same color. The perception of color is verifiable between individuals. How one experiences color, on the other hand, is not verifiable.

I am not sure I understand. Are you saying that a personal revelation from God is just a "mere feeling"?As per the topic, when do "mere feelings" become actual knowledge?

Thanks for your reply. Are you 100% sure? How do you know? Your statement does not follow logically. You think I'm wrong because I say knowledge is a matter of trust. But YOU are acutally adopting my argument that "knowing" is a matter of trust (or, IOW faith). Okay, I'm with you so far. And you admit that how "genuinely qualified" a person is an subjective estimation that is up to the individual and depends on the situation and the information? You might consider your wife a genuinely qualified person to tell you that she loves you (assuming you're married). You might consider Stephen Hawking a genuinely qualified person to tell you about the nature of black holes. You are demonstrating for me that we choose the one in whom we will place our confidence.You also say that you may not accept these things fully. Well then, how "fully" must you accept them before they become knowledge? you give no logical standard for this. Again, this is a matter of confidence, trust, and decision. I recall you saying in a previous post that trust did not differentiate our positions, and that it is not a matter of accepting someone else's word. Now you are saying that some things that you "know" you have accepted on the basis of another person's trusted word.Jesus was also "passing on knowledge acquired by other means and we have adequate reason to trust" Him. Of course I know you have a different opinion. Regarding the first part of your statement, consider my example of the student who learns about Spain from his history teacher: the student now has knowledge gained directly by faith because he trusts his teacher. I don't see how you can say that the student does not possess knowledge and that he did not gain it by faith. Regarding the second part of your statement: do not all three forms of learning need external sources of information to be transformed into knowledge? And doesn't all the information enter our heads through the same five senses? Haha... Where did it come from? Why God of course! I can't think of anyone more genuinely qualified or trustworthy... And there you go again acknowledging that I was right: it is a matter of trust. Okay... we can leave it aside. I don't believe I ever said we had to ignore anyone's perception, just that we cannot verify that everyone experiences things the same way we do... or that they even exist (unless you are willing to trust your senses and make that assumption; again, a matter of faith). Of course I understand! That's why I brought it up. There is an inherent weakness in your idea of truth and knowledge if you rely strictly on empircal and rational means. The ONLY reason you accept any of it as knowledge is because you accept the assumptions it is all based upon by faith. Which also adds to my point that when something becomes knowledge is a subjective decision not an objective standard or law.Also, I might point out that all my knowledge about God which forms my worldview is based on only two assumptions: God exists and His Word is Truth. Whereas your worldview seems to be based on more than two assumptions. Gah... stubborn aren't you. The basis of empiricism is observation, not denial of anything. If you accept the assumptions upon which empiricism is based, by what means do you do this if not by faith?What you are doing is saying, "I KNOW that the house upon the hill is real, but I can't say that I KNOW the hill is real." The hill supports the house; they come together. The hill is the nasty assumptions, and the house is your "knowledge" gained by empiricism. If you say you KNOW something, then you believe your assumptions even if you say you don't. Therefore, you use faith in order to KNOW things. If you did not have any faith in your assumptions, you would not KNOW anything that empiricism has given you. Actually, you only mentioned the so-called strawmen once, and then you quoted some lines of mine without showing how they are strawmen. This is a nonsensical statement as I have already shown. You are saying empiricism must validate faith (even though I have already shown that to accept empirical knowledge you must believe the assumptions). Furthermore, if a fact is known by empiricism, then it is not known by faith. Therefore, if you attempt to prove the validity of faith by empirically proving a fact known by faith, you are no longer using faith and your efforts are meaningless. You cannot PROVE a system of knowing. You cannot PROVE empiricism. We've already discussed this.Of course you don't demand scientific validation of God. You don't believe he exists in the first place. And why don't you believe? Because you have no evidence either that faith is valid or that God is real. How am I misrepresenting your position? Eliminating faith leaves only rationalism and empiricism upon which science is based. If you do not acknowledge faith as a means of gaining knowledge, how is this different than saying you must have scientific validation to know God exists? Show me how this is a strawman (you can't just say it is). Evade! I've answered your arguments line for line! Misrepresent? I'm starting to think you're only saying these things becuase you know your real position has no ground to stand on. What you ask for does not make sense. No one will think less of you if you simply acknowledge that your definition of knowledge is a subjective decision based on confidence and trust. You've already almost acknowledged this above. So I guess we don't really have much left to argue.

Thanks for your reply. Faith WAS necessary for the kid to gain knowledge. Sooner or later he must believe someone is telling the truth about Spain for it to become knowledge. Spain is not a law or a phenomenon, it is a name that exists in people's minds that stands for a government owned piece of land.Another example: During the Cold War a Russian fighter pilot defected and crashed his plane off the coast of Hawaii. He was brought to the U.S. and when they showed him supermarkets full of fresh produce and stores bustling with shoppers, he didn't believe it at first. He thought it was all a propoganda show for him. Why? He didn't trust them. Until he trusted them, he could not know that America was as prosperous as it appeared. Now you are stating an absolute truth: Spain exists. Well, what if no one believed Spain existed including the people that live there? Would this still be an absolute truth? Now if God is an absolute truth He exists regardless of our faith in Him unlike Spain. So your example is really in reverse (unless you believe Spain's existence to be an absolute truth but not God's). For the student, KNOWING that Spain existed resulted purely from faith. The student did not participate in any kind of empirical observation. He accepted the teacher's words as truth and assimilated them into his realm of knowledge. How can you say the student did not gain knowledge by faith? Here, unlike the previous example, we are not speaking of humanity as whole, but rather one person's obtaining knowledge. I'm glad we agree on this.As you said earlier, "If you removed faith altogether the teacher's statements were still true." The same can apply with God. Just because you don't have faith in God does not make him any less "true" than any other truth.

I get feelings all the time. For some of them, well, for many of them, it would be unwise for me to go along with them. Therefore, I do not consider feelings to be personal revelation from God. I'd say never unless you are talking about the sense of touch. Feelings usually result from the knowledge of something, not vice versa.

No, I am NOT agreeing that knowledge is a matter of trust. In fact I point out that that trust needs to be justified, is only relied on at all for pragmatic reasons and even then is only a way of passing on knowledge ultimately acquired by other means (and is less reliable than acquiring the knowledge yourself by those means).And no it is not entirely subjective who we trust. Your wife is the only person who can truly know her feelings for you - THAT is objective fact. Stephen Hawking is widely recognised as an expert in the physics of Black Holes and THAT is an objective fact, too. Of course there are going to be borderline cases but in thise cases you should - by definition - place less reliance in any information obtained from them. But in the case of religion do I trust a minister, a rabbi, a guru or an imam ? THAT choice is purely subjective.Your example of Jesus is perfect - it is only a subjective opinion that gives you any reason to suppose that Jesus has any special knowledge to pass on - and even then you must trust reports written decades after the fact mostly by people who weren't there snd don't identify their sources and influenced by who-knows-what changes in belief that followed Jesus' death. Not exactly a good basis on which to claim knowledge.So can you give an example of faith actually producing knowledge rather than a justified faith being used in transmission of knowledge ? The example you give clearly is the latter sort.And claiming God as the source of your knowledge does no good. The Quran claims to come from God. But you reject that. YOu have NO way of knowing that God is the source, so you can't rely on that assumption to justify claims of knowledge.On empiricism you claimed that the relaince on assumptions validated your belief while ignoring the effort made to minimises those assumptions - a fact which negates your argument. If you understood that your argument was dishonest. Yet you call me "stubborn" for rep

It looks like we've taken this argument about as far as it will go. It was a good debate and I thank you for it.

Dawg,This thread was about how we know, but I'm thinking we should back it up and look at what knowing is. I'm thinking along the lines of UG Krishnamurti and Wittgenstein, or at least my poor understanding of them. I'm thinking that knowing is knowing how to do something. That we can never know what "Spain" is, but we can know how to get to Spain from where we are, how to speak Spanish, how to identify the Spainish flag, etc.From this point of view we can look at knowledge as how to do something and how to get results from doing it that we might want. So faith is not seen as "true" but as more or less effective to deal with X. If X is disease then I'd say within the last 50 to 100 years science and medicine are more effective than faith is healing a long list of diseases.Getting to heaven is a different order of doing but because the sentence structure is analogous to "how do I get to Carnegie Hall" the old joke kind of gives a clue, still no one claims to know where Heaven is located in the Universe or if it is located in the Universe.
So I would assert that knowing about heaven has it's value in knowing how to reduce anxiety about death and dying.Enough said for now. Are you interested in a discussion on this?lfen

Sadly the end of my previous message somehow was lost.Nevertheless we have established that there is no argument that faith is a valid way of knowing. In every example used there are relevant facts that are the true basis for confidence in the belief in question. Faith itself is hopelessly unreliable - something you are clearly well aware of.Let me leave you with one final refutation.Every espistemiology seeks to find grounds to justify belief, and the strength of belief is properly based on the grounds available to support that beleif. To say faith is a valid way of knowing is to state that strength of belief is self-validating. It is not an epistemology, it is a denial of epistemology.

Hi Ifen,I probably won't be able to participate in another good debate for the next week and a half as it is now the week before finals and I have a ba-million things to do. But perhaps a few days from now I could add to such a thread.

You have the last word, but I couldn't let you get away with these ridiculous false spin victory statements. Nope... we haven't... ...And I've shown how this is irrelevant... And how the level of confidence needed to "know" something is a choice determined by the individual... ...I can speak for myself... And I clearly never said this...Anyway... have a good'un

Hi Dawg,I'll give it some time to simmer. Study well and good luck on finals. Hope you get a well deserved break over the holidays.lfen

THere's nothing false about what I said.You never managed to make a case for faith being a valid way of knowing.As I pointed out in every example supposedly based on "faith" it was always other factors that were the true grounds for confidence in the belief. Thus NONE of your examples demonstrated that faith was a valid means of knowing - yet you dismiss this as "irrelevant".You never explicitly admitted to the unreliability of faith. However you repeatedly evaded the question of reliability - so you clearly know that you could not show that faith was reliable enough to be counted knowledge. And you never adequately dealt with the examples of false beliefs held on faith I provided. And you yourself appealed to "disinformation" to explain inconsistencies in religious beliefs - but never identified any valid way to identify valid information from disinformation. But then faith cannot provide such a thing, can it ? So there are ample grounds for considering that you are aware of the unreliability of faith - including your own admissions.The fact is simple - you have no case. The unreliability of faith in itself is quite sufficient to refute your claim. In evading that issue you admitted defeat. The rest of this thread is simply your refusal to accept that truth.

I think I agree. However, would you then be willing to say that the same way you know gravity is the same way you know god? Which includes theists by default as a portion of the "significant number". However, the "fact" is that theists are not using consistant "presuppositions" to reason and understand the two worlds....that's the problem belief is established on reason and understanding of perception....what are theists perceiving differently than atheists that leads them to the conclusion that both ARE real while using different "presuppositions"? There has to be "give and take" in order to reason. As any other human, on average, theists have to be perceiving their world(s) like atheists...imo, the difference is that theists use a different set of presuppositions and a different line of "reasoning" based on perception (as you pointed out it's a biased alpha). Wait a second, once again you are posing as though the same presuppositions that define this world are somehow strictly limited to atheists....I think theists define this world using the exact same presuppositions....the last part is a blatant lie....they are just NOT scientifically verifiable...the difference is we don't decide to name it god. Appealing to something that cannot be tested or information gathered from puts it out of reach to both atheists and theists.You are misrepresenting ALOT of posters on this forum because I've personally seen many people clearly state that it is not the existance of god that they have a problem...I think it's all the crap in THIS WORLD that theists like to extrapolate on based on this UNKNOWN.Based on another thread, I forget the title, using your current rationale you would be required to entertain the likelihood of leprechauns....there is no way that either theists OR atheists can prove/disprove them.