Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
OK .... I'm going to rephrase what you are saying to make certain I am understanding you.
A scientific or atheistic view expresses something as a fact only if there is unbiased evidence that the thing is a fact. And the only reason for believing something is true is that unbiased evidence.
|
Well, every observation has some bias so you have to take that into account. In science you hold things true if you have enough evidence for it. "Is a fact" is a confusing term that makes people believe that you must know something for certain to claim that it is a fact. All scientific claims are fallible and you do not no for certain that they are true.
Quote:
|
The problem with that (again, I hope I'm understanding you) is that even with atheism, there is no unbiased evidence regarding the existence or non-existence of god.
|
Atheism is a lack of belief. And there are no good evidence for the existence of god so lack of belief is the reasonable position. For some definitions of a god it can be shown that the definitions are inconsistent and therefore nonsense. So there you have positive evidence for holding the non-existence of a specific god for true.
Quote:
|
I understand what you mean (again, I think) about not being able to know anything for certain. That's part and parcel of Schrodinger's idea about, like it or not, the observer being unable to observe without altering the experiment
|
I only said that the fact that you do not know "not A" for certain is no argument for holding "A" as true or for drawing conclusions about what being true means. What I commented on was the tendency to mix up epistemology and ontology.