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

So what exists and what doesn't?Obviously on one end of the spectrum is the Cartesian demon of solipsism:- nought exists but my brain and something sending experiences to it. The brain in the jar, the evil genius, the Matrix - whatever you want to call it. This is the radical conclusion of total scepticism.The other end of the spectrum is to accept all experiences as accurate reflections of reality. This could be called naive empiricism.The first choice to face is should we be total sceptics? If we are, we can stop discussing it - who do we think we are discussing it with?Should we be naive empiricists? To do this requires believing that our senses never fool us. This leads to a strange contradiction. Our senses tell us that there are other creatures with senses which are sometimes fooled. Our senses tell us that we are very like some of those fallible sensory creatures. Therefore our perfect senses would indicate that our senses may be not be perfect. If we are to believe our senses, we must disbelieve all of our senses.So we need to develop a method for knowing when our senses are fooling us and when they are not, but this means making a few assumptions.1. We exist
2. one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time
3. That our mind can know the truth.These are the primary threeNow we need to know what kinds of things might give us confidence that what we perceive is how things really are. Here are some ideas we've come up with:Appeal to Authority:- We essentially outsource our thinking to another brain which specializes in thinking about a particular subject. If we know nothing about a subject, testing ideas against experts in the field is usually a good starting point - if what we believe to be true goes against what experts and authorities say it might be worth considering that what we perceive is not true. The trap here is that you should be sure that the Authorities aren't relying on older authorties etc etc (ie authorities take the time to test the truth of something against another criterion).Coherency: If our impression of the world is coherent explains all available facts consistently then it is more likely to be true than any impression of the world that is less coherent.Consensus: If everybody else agrees with your perception, then it is more likely to be true.Correspondence: If our perceived knowledge corresponds to obtainable facts about the world, then it is more likely to be true. If it corresponds with facts as they are obtained even better. If the correspondence is such that future facts can be successfully predicted you've hit knowledge pay dirt.Intuition: Sometimes the truth comes to us in some unexplainable fashion. Various ideas and concepts intuitively lead to a 'feeling' of the truth.Pragmatism: If your idea can be practically applied and it works, that is a good sign that your idea might be true.Revelation: If an entity we identify as God tells us it is true, it is true. If a person who we know has spoken with God tells us God tells us it is true, it is true. See the warning in Appeals to Authority.You have a perception that God exists and has a relationship with you. That leads you to believe that God exists and has a relationship with you. Is it sane to suggest that knowledge is nothing more than strong belief? Obviously it is difficult to know whether or not we know something, because how would we know we know it, unless we know we know we know it?Before we can classify something as knowledge rather than belief, we have to argue that the belief is true or very likely to be true. Your argument amounts to 'I perceive it so I believe it and since I perceive it the belief is true'. Which is not a good argument at all. So that can't be your argument.The only argument you seem to have is to equivocate on the definitions of 'belief' and 'knowledge', which means I can only assume you ascribe to something akin to the intuition or revelation criterion of truth. This is why I listed the some other criteria of truth so that you might see what other people would demand to call something knowledge.I suggest that most other people wouldn't call a belief true unless it met several of the above criteria. Correspondence is a good one, but that will prove difficult for modern theology to live up to. You might try for coherence, but that would obviously be subject to considerable dispute. Authority is one you could appeal to - but you seem to be intent on only appealing to one authority, yourself. Revelation doesn't really go very far, but you could try it.The central problem with your 'I perceive God, therefore I know God exists' can be made rather clear by rewording it to be something I would agree with 'I perceive an entity that I believe is God, therefore an entity that I believe is God exists'.Take this picture. I perceive it to move. This is due to brain that takes clues about movement and tells the brain that things are moving. Thus there is a startling perception of movement. So we have a belief that acorns are moving. We can see if that is a coherent belief. The belief is that the acorns are moving but there is another belief that the acorns don't change location. This is against the principle of noncontradiction and it renders it incoherent. Does it correspond to reality? We can test the motion, and we see that no motion occurs.But my intuition tells me that the acorns are moving!We are susceptable all to illusions of the mind, conceptual illusions, 'optical' illusions as well as fully blown hallucinations. We can help protect ourselves against such things by trying to apply other criteria of truth into the equation - it is not only incoherent but downright dangerous at times to believe everything our senses tell us. Nothing gets done if we disbelieve our senses. So we have to rely on discrimination techniques.Finally, apologies for disjointed thoughts - I wrote all that over the course of 9 hours during some rare quiet times at work.

I read the post, I didn't see how it is apparent. By postulating you are a brain in a jar you have assumed that you exist. Obviously - where else would they be? You can't test the truthiness of something without making some assumptions. The three I listed have to be assumed. And I dealt with this. The movement of acorns is as real to my senses as you claim God is to yours and yet the acorns aren't moving. God exists isn't an assumption, it is a conclusion. If you want to propose that it is an assumption you'll have to defend it as inescapable, which (seemingly) nobody in the history of mankind has managed to do.You conclude God exists because you sense its existence. You conclude that if you sense it, it exists. Thus it is not an assumption in this discussion. It might be an assumption in another discussion - but it is not an assumption in this one. How you should progress with any post. Read it through carefully, consider the key points being raised and either concede them or provide your rebutal. If providing a rebuttal, try to make sure I haven't addressed it in my post already - or if I do, deal with that too. Of course, you weren't asking me how to conduct a written debate in a forum setting - or was this just a rhetorical question?

Yes, personal pronouns and the English language are well known for not being straight with each other.In order for me to make any statement about the status of my knowledge I must assume that I exist.In order for you to make any statement about the status of your knowledge you must assume that you exist.In order for them to make any statement about the status of their knowledge they must assume that they exist.Therefore, in general:In order for us to make any statement about the status of our knowledge we must assume that we exist.I am not suggesting that you and I have to assume each other exists, but we do both have to assume that ourselves exist. I could have tried to skip the ambiguity by using 'one' - 'one assumes one exists' but to remain even slightly consistent in the post would have lead to some clumsy sentences I feel.Hopefully that will clear things up enough for you enough to respond to the rest of my post.Edited by Modulous, : added the note about 'one assumes...'

Sure you could discuss it all you like. However, you have no way of knowing if it is you that is instigating the discussion or if the discussion is part of the evil genius's program. You have no way of being able to discriminate any truths and there is no progress to be made in any discussion regarding it. Since no progress is possible why bother? You might find it entertaining, so go be entertained by it. Of course I am not dismissing solipsism as a possibility, but as one that is not really worth bothering to discuss - it doesn't get us anywhere interesting or useful. Naive isn't meant in the peroritive sense but in the descriptive sense. See This wiki article on Nave empiricism. I'm not condemning it through the use of its label. Naive is just meant to get across that it is a simple view, without nuance or sophistication. Yes they are options - but there are problems with them. We can still hold to them when moving into the next part of my post - its just that they can either lead to contradictory statements or no statements above 'I am'. I've not suggested you have to conclude that others-like-you exist. I have just suggested that in order to make a statement, the statement maker has to assume it exists. How do you know that it is problematic unless you have assumed that your mind is able to know truth? That's why it is enescapable. In order to dispute its truth, you have to assume its truth.
For further information, if you are up for a read, try Jonathan Dolhenty's Essay on epistemology. Well, consensus is a shitty criterion of truth for cautious intellectual reasonings. However, it is a useful guide in quick fire circumstances. If you see a man running towards you with a laser gun taking pot shots at various people, you might think 'is this happening?' When you see everyone else screaming and running away, you might conclude that based on consensus it is likely enough to be true to warrant joining them. Consensus can lead you astray for all the same kinds of reasons - making it a double edged sword. When the mind has more time to come to conclusions, just consensus is to be treated with an enormous amount of scepticism. There's no need to combine these two things, or feed them back as it were. You don't have to assume the accuracy of any particular truth-giving method. You just have to assume that it is possible to arrive at the truth of a proposition. We might not know how, and we might not ever know how - but it has to be possible to get to the truth, our confidence that we have arrived there nonwithstanding. True enough - you have to make the decision whether you believe they are accurate or not. Philosophers have developed several techniques to help make that decision. You won't be able to tell the absolute accuracy of things, but because of assumption number 3, it is at least possible to approximately reason the relative likelihood that a given proposition is true or not. To a certain extent, yes. If for example you perceived a green blues-singing rabbit appear out of nowhere, dance across your keyboard and then vanish again you are left with the decision - which of my perceptions do I trust?a: Rabbits don't sing, aren't green and don't pop in and out of existence.b: A rabbit that sung, was green and just popped into and out of existence.To determine this, we can apply various criteria. For example: can green blues-singing ex-nihilo rabbits exist? Is there any independent evidence of them popping up? Can we instigate another ex-nihilo appearance of our soulful lapine friend?Or perhaps it corresponds more with the idea that sometimes people fall asleep at the keyboard and have momentary dreams or haullucinations which seem to take place in the real world in real time, but are actually all in the mind?I'd say the latter and would be happy believing the latter proposition. We can continue applying criteria to increase our confidence that this proposition is true. At a certain point, because of language convenience you could simply say that you know you hallucinated or dreamt that you saw a rabbit. Where 'know' is asterisked with a reference to the principle of fallibilism. Ultimately, your perceptions are the highest court in the land as to what you believe to the be the case. Whether you or anyone else decides they want to call this knowledge is another issue. If you want to call it knowledge you'd have to explain how you came to the conclusion that it is true. You'd then be faced with a choice, do I hamper communication by calling something 'knowledge' when my audience would not accept it as knowledge - or do I concede that the criteria of truth I'm employing is suspect in my audiences mind and I will get my point across better by saying 'strongly believe' instead.You can't show us correspondence with your perception and reality - and that is going to be your biggest obstacle to calling something knowledge. I can't see how it would be coherent with other facts that people already accept as true and it doesn't seem to be a way for you to apply that knowledge in a fashion that could be said to 'work'. Without those, most epistimologists would argue that you do not 'know' anything about God at all. If they were suitably philosophical they would concede that you think you know things about God. But it raises problems about what it means to know something. If a friend of yours had a head injury and started believing completely that you looked like iano, but you had been replaced by an imposter - would you be comfortable condeding that your friend knows that you are an imposter? Would that not be saying that your friend's proposition is true?No, your friend is suffering from Capgras delusion - and you can either agree that he knows you are an imposter or you can say that he really believes it, but that it is a false belief - and you can reason with him about it. You can point to the literature on Capgras delusion, you can say it seems to be caused by a disconnect between the face recognition part of the brain, with the associated emotional response part of the brain. You agree that he thinks you are an imposter but that is because his brain is telling him that you look the same but it isn't making happy-iano-has-come-to-visit-me signals so the brain is also saying that it is not iano, but someone that looks like iano.He might accept this intellectually but be unable to shake the conviction that you are an imposter. No, and you can't argue that it is even likely to be true because the only criteria of truth that you can appeal to are suspect ones. Thus you can only say that you really believe it is true, just like technically your friend should say.When do you get to say it is true? Well you aren't the judge over whether it is true, reality is the only judge. You get to say I think the proposition is true because...your only justification seems to be you believe what you perceive. That is a week justification for a variety of reasons, one being that your friend above cannot lay claim to truth based on his perceptions so just based on your simple perceptions it isn't really sufficient to call something 'knowledge'.If you want to say that I percieve that God exists, and here are all the ways I have ascertained this truth, and here is why I believe that these ways do lead to truth and doesn't lead to a torrent of possible false positives. If you want to use communal language to describe this, you have to play by the rules of the community - if they don't count it as sufficient for knowledge then the word knowledge is not applicable. For these situations a different word has been forged: belief. By the standards of 'know' that the rest of the English speaking world uses you can't argue that you know God exists, only that you believe that he does. The issue you have is in ascertaining if your perception of God is correct or if it is not just a perception many people have and they give this perception different names, but that it is just a ghost, an internal illusion like deja vu or an 'optical' illusion (which are also internal illusions).I can determine if my perception of an illusion is true (or false) by using accepted criteria of truth. It turns out that the acorns in my example really do seem to be moving, but using any solid criteria they aren't actually moving. Which perception is true? The perception that they are moving, or the perception that they are not?I think the case that they are not moving is, in fact, on much stronger grounds than the case that they are moving so that is what I believe to the case. If I wish to communicate this to someone else, given my confidence in the criteria I have used, I can say 'I know the acorns aren't moving'. Obviously if we explored the proposition in depth, it would have to have a disclaimer regarding fallibilism - but for linguistic pragmatism, 'know' communicates the necessary details.

Yes, welcome to metaphysics. There are some good arguments out there, but no absolute proofs. Sounds like a roundabout way of saying, one cannot experience the objective since experience is necessarily subjective. How do you know that it appears to be problematic unless your mind is able to know truth? Only partly. Since we have established that we cannot know if we have truth, we must modify the meaning of 'know' to represent a communal agreement over the confidence one has in the truth of the proposition based on agreed upon criteria of truth. The three primary truths don't kick start anything - you just have to accept them and note that you are accepting them if you are going to proceed with epistemology. After we have assumed our mind can know truth, we can develop ways of getting at it. If we don't make this assumption no methodology follows.Nothing 'calibrates reason', it is essentially part of assumption three that reason can be used (since our minds can know truth, and our mind reasons). You shouldn't be thrown by approximates and relative likelihoods in respect to the truth, they are ways of getting across the principle of fallibilism and tentativity. Well, obviously we don't know anything in the sense of having absolute guarantees on the truthhood of a proposition. In lieu of these guarantees we say we know something when we have applied certain applicable criteria of truth to the proposition. If we communicate that we know something, it is because those that we communicate with would more or less agree that I have used the appropriate criteria of truth to come to that conclusion. Right, but people you are communicating with don't accept your unique brand of 'so long as' because it ushers in optical illusions, hallucinations, delusions etc etc.According to common usage, what you have is called a belief. That is not relevant to the point about communication I was making. You can choose to use words that your audience translates in a different way if you want - but don't expect them to understand what you are talking about. Yet you agree that, when not talking about God, certain criteria of truth are just more reliable than others. You know that there isn't a star inside your computer, because it is incoherent with what you know about stars and computers. It doesn't correspond with reality (no gravity issues) and so on and so forth. I am perfectly happy to include fallibilism and tentativity into my conclusions about certain propositions, but sometimes it just isn't worth stressing them. Well, I know my friend Luke exists, so it would certainly be possible for God to get to that same level of knowledge. To qualify God would need to be more than a voice in my head or an image in my brain or a feeling in my gut. I can't prove Luke exists 100%, but hallucinations are rarely so detailed as Luke is. For instance, Luke can tell me something I didn't already know about 14th Century European politics - it could be an hallucination combined with amnesia - but then Luke could slap me so hard it bruises. Everyone I come into contact with agrees there are bruises, and that Luke gave them to me.So yes, there can come a time when you just have to say, if this is an hallucination it is so realistic, questioning it is absurdOn the other hand, if I thought there was a ghost in my house I might notice that it only seems to come about when I am on my own, at night, during a windstorm. I have good reason to conclude that this actually might be something conjured by the superstitious brain. It's language, iano, you are forever doomed to be its slave. If you want to say something you had best make sure you use the words that your audience understands.The criteria of truth are not a convenience - you use them, I use them others use them. Philosophy has long concluded that we are limited in how confident we can be in the truth of any given proposition.I think it has been shown that the only way you can get to call your belief in God a knowledge is if you allow every madman and drug user the same licence to call their perceptions knowledge too. If that is your conclusion, that your knowledge of God is on an equal footing with 'The CIA have implanted a chip in my brain that controls my thoughts' and 'The clouds laugh purple as the earth quakes', then so be it.Personally, I see no linguistic utility in using 'belief' as synonymous with 'knowledge' - it will just engender confusion. Granted, we can never know if a proposition is true - so we cannot know that we know anything. However, we can have a convention whereby we agree that if someone can have a high confidence in the truth of a proposition - they can be said to 'know' it. Incidentally, I don't think you can have a high confidence in any truths of a proposition regarding God.We don't have to play a game of you either know nothing, or we know everything. We can simply say that we can reason towards truth and away from falsity, and that having applied the criteria of truth, we can confidently say that we know x or y. Human knowledge, courtesy of fallibilism, stops being something that has to be 100% guarantee of the truth of the proposition, and becomes something of a matter of degree.

Yes, it was an absolute statement. It was not an absolute proof. There is no absolute proof of my statement which was phrased in the absolute. The clue is in the words. First, they were written by a self-confessed subjective being. Second, the words 'sounds like' implies 'to me it sounds like', which is in turn explicitly subjective. No. We simply cannot escape assumption number 3. There's no need to smuggle it in - it's the vehicle we have to ride in order to cross the border. Knowing that this is the case, we can start to map the terrain of the land of epistemology. We realize our craft limits our ability to be entirely sure that our map relates to the terrain, and we accept then the principle of fallibilism. We can say that if the map tells us there should be a hill here, and we find a hill, then there is a good chance that our map is good. If everything we know about the local geophysics indicates that a hill is an entirely reasonable, or even inevitable feature, we can say our map seems to be good. If we can use what information is on the map to navigate to new places implied by the map - then our map seems to be good.All the while we keep in mind that our map might be wrong, and so we continuously test the map against the terrain in as many ways as we can devise to increase our confidence. If a cartographer tells us that there is a forest of Uranium undulating in a sea of sulphuric acid 4 million miles away from the nearest chartered territories, then we might be sceptical. If they say they know it is the case because they have an inner feeling or they heard a noise they attribute to the forest or read about it in a book by an author they really trust has previously chartered that territory but whose navigational maps seem to be stylistic at best - downright incorrect in other areas which have since been relentlessly mapped by many different cartographers, and there is a blank space covering about 3,999,000 miles of the claimed journey...can we really agree that this counts as 'knowledge'? It depends what you are referring to. I know that my screen name is Modulous and that people tend to call me Mod, which is the name I go about with in the skinworlds - if anything is to be called knowledge something like that is. That humankind should be free to pursue life, liberty and happiness is a belief that I hold.I am absolutely sure that I cannot answer that question objectively since I am a subjective being. Well, when you make an external communication - you have to make sure you're speaking the same language as the intended recipients. If the recipients are using words differently, try and find a new word to use that fits the usage you intend. If, even with the ambiguities inherent to natural language, the people you plan to communicate with are totally unreasonable - then the only sane choices are to try and teach them to reason, or not bother communicating at all.Do you think that it is unreasonable to use the word knowledge to mean a held proposition that is true as best can be determined by various criteria of truth? I don't 'believe in logic'. That logic and reason can be successfully employed by the human mind to come to truths about the world is a starting assumption one cannot help but make if one is to hold any proposition as true. One cannot deny this assumption is true without assuming it is true first. Thus: it has to be if we're going to discuss epistemology.If, for example, the assumption is false then iano cannot know God indeed nobody can know anything. Of course, since this statement implies also that I know we cannot know anything, I am actually assuming that I can reason towards truth, which I started off as assuming was false. Since I have not claimed knowledge or belief in logic or reason - then the charge of mystical incantations thankfully does not follow.

Do the following words, copied from the post you replied to, sound like somebody who intends to tell you that they believe in nothing?

quote:

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That humankind should be free to pursue life, liberty and happiness is a belief that I hold.

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