Peanut Gallery

Philosophy is primarily an endeavor whose purpose is the destruction of human knowledge. Luckily, as it has no rigor, it's self-hampering.

The problem isn't all the rigorous ways to do philosophy; the problem is that all the non-rigorous ways to do philosophy are considered just as good. For all the rigorous answers to the problem of the absence of evidence, there are non-rigorous philosophers who strike the exact opposite position.In science there's no non-rigorous way to do science - if the way you're doing it lacks rigor, what you're doing is not science, by definition. In philosophy it's certainly possible to do it with rigor, it's just that it's also possible to do it without rigor. It's the lack of insistence upon rigor by philosophers that makes it a field without rigor. For every Dan Dennett, there's a philosopher perfectly comfortable making an argument that begins and ends "my unexamined intuition is that this is so; therefore it must be universally true." Sometimes that's what even Dan Dennett is doing.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

They appear in the same journals as the rigorous philosophy; the people who engage in it are just as likely to be hired by university philosophy departments, they're just as likely to achieve professional success and reward. Indeed, any individual philosopher is just as likely to use rigorous arguments as non-rigorous ones, because there's no preference in the field for one or the other.I'm not talking about the assembled philosophical chuckleheads of EvC, I'm talking about the academic world of philosophy, where rigorous arguments and non-rigorous arguments - i.e. arguments that can't be known to be wrong, just ill-formed - and those who make them are placed on precisely equal footing. No, there's none at all, which is why rigorous philosophy appears in the exact same journals alongside non-rigorous philosophy. The notion of "rigor" is simply optional in philosophy, which is why the field as a whole lacks it. Who on Earth has said there needs to be a "central dictating authority"? Philosophers simply need to insist on rigor in their field, like scientists do.But they don't - it's easier to be a philosopher when rigor is optional to philosophy.

This is precisely backwards, I would say. The burden of evidence is always on those who propose the existence of supernatural entities, not on those who suggest that they probably don't exist. RAZD's argument relies on the assumption that only the existence of supernatural entities explains the widespread belief that supernatural entities exist. But bluegenes has done yeomans' work providing a more reasonable alternate explanation - they're just made up. And how do we know that they can be made-up?Because bluegenes has demonstrated that they can be made-up by making some up. RAZD's counter-argument that bluegenes has to somehow demonstrate evidence that he really did make it up and didn't just identify an existing supernatural being by accident is an absurdity. Only an idiot thinks it works like that.

I swear, creationists pick the strangest posts to laud. You really think ICANT is "holding his own"? That I'm one of the "smartest guys" at the site? I'm an idiot, but I'm nowhere dumb as you, clearly.I understand the instinct for you guys to stand up for each other, but it should really be for something better than ICANT's repetitious nonsense. There has been some really good creationist contribution around here; why couldn't you pick some of that to celebrate?

Why can scientists only "see/observe" the natural elements? Aren't scientists human beings?If human beings have any capacity to detect the supernatural, then scientists, being human, will share that ability. If humans have no capacity to detect the supernatural then it what sense can you, as a human being, claim to have any knowledge about it? How can it affect the universe if its effect is undetectable?If "something happens", but the universe is exactly the same in every possible way afterwards, in what possible sense did anything actually happen?

If not by evidence, then by what basis should reasonable people arrive at conclusions, given the frequency with which the human brain has experiences that are not rooted in any physical reality?In 2000, one in sixteen Americans suffered from a profound mental illness. I would estimate that frequency to be perhaps ten times the frequency of reported experiences of the supernatural, and that's a very generous estimate. (A factor of ten too generous, perhaps.) Of course, every living human being has regular nocturnal experiences of impossible things, unmoored in any reality; we call them "dreams." Given this enormous propensity for the human brain to invent "experiences" from whole cloth - experiences that frequently cannot be discerned as fictions until much later - is it reasonable for a person to substitute experience for evidence?I think we all implicitly understand that it is not, as evidenced by the way that we do not particularly privilege second-hand accounts of "supernatural" experiences. Some people make an exception for their own experience but I see no reason why they should. Why should I privilege an experience I would otherwise discount simply because I'm the one it happened to? There's nothing special about me.

I can justify the elimination of anything for which there is no evidence by the simple fact that there is no evidence. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. And if "subjective evidence" is, in fact, not evidence, then anything "supported by subjective evidence" can be so discarded. I'm not talking about whether the picture is complete - obviously, human knowledge being contingent we know that the picture is not complete - but whether there's anything that can fill in the picture besides drawing conclusions based on verifiable evidence. The question isn't whether something exists if science has no knowledge of it. The question is: if science has no knowledge of it, from what basis can we claim that it exists? Ignorance cannot be the basis of knowledge. Not at all. I'm simply suggesting that, given the likelihood that a random person is suffering a profound mental illness this year, there aren't many conclusions that we can draw from someone's report of having an experience we can't otherwise explain. Even if the "report" is your report to yourself. Not at all. Under those circumstances it would be better for Ben Franklin to return inside and not attempt to draw any inferences at all about whether lightning is an electric phenomenon. But that doesn't seem to be analogous to your position on the supernatural; you seem to believe that the lack of knowledge and evidence about the supernatural forms a convenient void in which to pour your own conclusions about it, and then declare them proof against challenge because nothing can be known about them.When we don't know something, the appropriate response is to say "I don't know", not to jump to conclusions. Perhaps a small number of overly-credulous individuals do; they may have a mental illness or be deficient in some other way. But such a person attempting to believe all second-hand accounts of the supernatural would be put in the position of believing a large number of mutually contradictory things. After all, as many visions of Mohammad affirming Islam as the true faith have appeared to Muslims as visions of the Virgin Mary affirming the primacy of Christianity have appeared to Christians. Many have experienced the Buddha's claim that all other faiths are in error, and that one must "escape the net" or lose one's chance of enlightenment. And, of course, the secular atheist's experience of the non-existence of the supernatural in all its forms must be taken into account, as well.So we see that the truth is that all people, even yourself, reject at least some second-hand claims about the supernatural. No, but I wouldn't consider it ironclad proof that the scientific consensus that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is extinct was wrong, either. I would apply no less skepticism to my account than I would the same account by someone else. Did I hallucinate? Did I misidentify a common bird? My own certainty of the veracity of the reported experience should be no more significant or meaningful to me than someone else's certainty of the veracity of theirs. What's so special about me?

"100% confidence" in a qualified statement is, by definition, a contradiction in terms. "100% certainty", by definition, means unqualified certainty in a proposition.It's like saying "I'm absolutely almost sure."