I know God exists & the court of highest appeal is me.

Changing the words doesn't really alter my central queryI can say "I conclude we (the world an others in it) exists because I sense we (etc) exist" or say "I assume we (etc) exist because I sense we (etc) exist".I cannot test the assumption/conclusion itself so the word change alters nothing. Remember.. The senses that tell us there are other creatures aren't evaluated for truth. You seem to ask that we assume this sense is true so as to arrive at "we exist" - that being a start position for evaluations of stuff downstream. God belongs to this category of sense to me. Not the sense category of whether acorns move or not.I must indeed apply tests to a aspects of God just as you must to aspects of acorns. But neither of us is querying the existance of God/acorns in the first place. We have assumed they do exist in order to get going. The assumption "we (etc) exists" is not inescapable. I could also assume I am a brain in a jar. But I assume God exists for the same reasons I assume we (etc) exist. It is apparent to me that he/we does/do.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

Modulous,I'm just wondering if their isn't confusion arising out of "we exist"In your initial post you said there were some assumptions we should make. The first was:1. We exist.If you meant "we" as in "I and the world around me" then your tests can be applied downstream but not to the starting assumption. The assumed authorities cannot contribute to verifying the assumption I mean.If you meant "we" as in "I alone" then the rest of the world isn't assumed to exist and there can be no appeal to authority.I was/am assuming you meant the former but could be wrong.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

I'm up against it at the moment Straggler. But I'll get back to this in the next day or so.

You've started out by establishing a continuum of possibilities to be considered in approaching the existance I assume I have. Rather than dismiss the extremes postions as quickly as you do, I'd like to look at them with a view to retaining them as possibilities.Regarding solipsism. There is no need to "stop discussing" should I decide that the solipsist extreme reflects reality. The discussing would be with someone, with something - or even with oneself. So long as there was a desire to discuss, so long as it was interesting for me to do so, then there is no need to stop. One is permitted to extract ones own meaning out of this existance.In labelling the other extreme naive empiricism, you appear to be condemning it before it even gets off the ground. Surely a fairer description would be perfect empiricism, where everything that I perceive to be the case is the case. That I perceive others similar to myself and they perceive other than I do, doesn't mean that anyone is wrong, it simply means reality has a rather Alice-in-Wonderland quality about it. Were I to suppose myself at this extreme, I would have no reason to suppose my senses fooling me. And would have no requirement for a way to determine that my senses were fooling me.Both extremes are options - as is somewhere short of either extreme. I have already assumed that I exist and exist somewhere on this continuum between extremes. I have also (assuming your assent) pushed your contention back: I am no longer compelled into concluding that others-like-me exist or that my senses might not be reliable.The assumptions held by me aren't held in order that I can find out whether my senses are fooling me or not. They are assumed because they assist me in establishing a position on the continuum which I feel accurately reflects reality. If others, who also assume they exist on such a continuum, shared these assumptions (in whatever degree they did) then our positions could be said to be closer to each other than if we didn't. None of us could yet claim to be nearer than the other to whatever the true reality might be.Whilst sharing the first two assumptions with you, the last assumption proposed is particularily problematic - given how you later propose truth to be arrived at. The various "confidence raisers" outlined would likely trip over the same basic obstacle I am going to illustrate - so I'll just look at one simple example: This is situation where a method is assumed to be truth-giving (or likely to be truth-giving). Outside the assumption however, all that can be said about common perceptions, is that x number of people perceive something in the same way. Whether their common perception is in anyway a true reflection of whatever the reality might be or not, is not indicated.Feeding this method of truth-giving back into the (edited) third assumption gives us this: Which places the onus back at me to decide whether my assumptions and perceptions are accurate or not. It seems to me that there is no way to escape some general conclusions:- derivatives of my assumptions and perceptions cannot be utilised to indicate the accuracy or otherwise of my assumptions and perceptions. That certainly includes derivatives: such a assuming others exist or assuming what they assume to be truth-givers to be truth-givers.- if I do deem a particular perception of mine inaccurate it is because I deem another perception of mine accurate. It might be clear that there isn't a way for me to escape the fact that my assumptions and perceptions are ultimately the highest court in the land as to what it is I know to be the case or not. It should be equally clear that everyone sails in the same boat as me. They are their own highest courts for what ever it is they reckon themselves to know.I obviously wouldn't argue that what I know to be the case is true. I would only argue that I know God exists and that if my perception is correct then he does exist. And if it isn't then he might not exist.Edited by iano, : No reason given.Edited by iano, : No reason given.

The last of (your) the three statements with which you agreed said this: If you accept that you cannot establish it being the case that there is an objective reality as described, then it doesn't matter that the possibility is ignored. A possibility that cannot be established is hardly a possibility worth investigating or testing for

Sorry for the delay in getting back to your challenging post Mod. It’s not that I want to discuss solipsism particularily. The point is that I have no way of knowing (in any absolute sense) where it is I stand on the continuum between extremes. Heck, I don’t even have a way of knowing if those are the extremes. My plumping for the nature of reality I plump for hasn’t to do with my thinking this is a better way to truth, it happens to be the place that I find myself. A place that I am attached to by a whole raft of undemonstrable assumptions. I didn’t realise how much I rely on assumption until I realised how much I rely on assumption.You haven’t come right out and said it, but I take you accept that you yourself have no way of discriminating any truths using the mechanism discussed thus far: not partily, not likely, not approximately. By truth I mean any absolute truth that might happen to exist and by ”truth’ I mean some relative-to-something-or-other-truth.As far as I can determine, that which is discriminated by the apparatus you describe belongs to the category of 'truth'. I don’t know that it is problematic but it does appear to be problematic.We both seem to agree that to know something you must have truth. Now I could assume my mind can know truth and that would be fine in so far as it goes. But without a way to distinguish truth as truth, my knowing truth would be an blind event. That is to say: something that I know could well be based on truth - but I wouldn’t be able to tell. As mentioned above, I can’t see how the assumption kick starts anything much. It seems the key issue is determing the “truth”giver as truthgiver. My point was to illustrate a problem inherent in all methods of so-called truth-giving. They rely in some way on the correctness of our assumption for their truth. Rendering them ”truth’givers not truthgivers. I don’t see the connection between an “assumption that” and “a method to”. You introduce reason here as the instrument of calbration of approximity but don’t say what calibrates reason (would it be reason?). I’m also thrown by your use of words such as “approximate” and “relative likelihood” in respect to truth.If access to truth is so central to knowing and truth is only approximated then so must knowledge be approximated. Meaning we don’t know anything (in the sense that the English speaking world uses the word know)?? I don’t conclude it true because I don’t suppose to have a way to conclude true*. And I don’t suppose anyone else has a way to conclude true either. As soon as assumption is the foundation, concluding truth has to have a rider attached “true so long as . ”. Which is more or less what I am saying about my knowledge. It is knowledge... so long as . What is suspect about my criteria of truth is suspect about your criteria of truth. Namely that you have no way of arrriving at it. If you say you know then the same provisio must attach to your knowledge as it does mine. You perceive your existance a certain way and make assumptions about that existance. Truth relies on those assumptions and perceptions being the case - not on any wranglings the epistimologists or philosophers (you assume to exist) happen to conjure up to circumvent the fact that you can’t tell. I would say that my friends know something subject to his perception being true. I would be of the opinion his perception is false but failing a truthgiver I can go no further.A hypothetical for you Mod:Suppose God exists and suppose that God demonstrates his existance to someone. Would you accept that the person now has knowledge of Gods existance or would you still insist that a person could only say (to themselves) that they believe that God exists. If the latter, would you not be saying that God cannot demonstrate himself to someone to the point of them knowing he exists?The issue here is the persons escape from the bootstrap argument. The person is shifted from self-dependency for arriving at truth to God placing them at truth. I don’t see how what you are doing is all that much different than what I'm doing. You’ve erected a whole series of fences over which you are supposed to jump before you can say you have attained knowledge. But you don’t seem to realise that any knowledge you say you have (including knowledge that these fences constitute a route to knowledge) relies on your perceptions and assumptions being the case. Perceptions and assumptions about your existance, others existance, the level to which reality reflects whatever reality happens to be true.Attempts to solidify the certainty of your perceptions are all bootstrap to one degree or other which, whilst complicating the maze slightly, don’t alter the ultimate conclusions to be arrived at. These are:- You know things, subject to your perceptions and assumptions being the case.- You have no way to establish that your perceptions and assumptions are the case.We might both agree at this stage that absolute truth is an essential ingredient in true knowledge and failing a means of arriving at absolute truth (which is not attained by our simply assuming we can know it in potential fashion) we know nothing in fact. Or at least, if happening to know absolute truth due to our perception aligning with true reality, cannot know that we know it.*There is the special case of God deifying man by which a man could make the leap into knowing that he knows the truth. But I haven’t really gotten my head around that one yet. Suffice to say, it doesn't involve man pulling himself up by his shoelaces