Atheist Epistemology

ViceRegent said:

@NonCredenti

How funny.  This admits he cannot know fact from fiction, but then immediately makes a fact claim he expects me to take as true.  How does he know atheists and theists are in the same epistemological boat?  Ho does he know that accurate information must be filter through our faculties that must necessarily be unreliable?  Hint:  he has admitted he does not.  Thus, no need to take his claims seriously.

You are equivocating. This argument relies on a number of equivocations, probably the main one being how the word "know" is used.  

Especially in the context of this presupp game, "know" can have two meanings.
1. We can "know" something provisionally. We might have varying degrees of confidence in something we "know," and we're often pretty confident, but we accept that we could be wrong so we accept it provisionally (until given a compelling reason to think otherwise).

For example, I "know" I had a salad for lunch yesterday. But my wife might say, "No, yesterday you had a hamburger. Remember? You said it was the best burger you'd ever eaten. The salad was two days ago." That might jog my memory and I would realize that I was wrong when I thought I "knew" what I had for lunch yesterday. I knew it provisionally, but changed my acceptance of that knowledge when better information came along.

2. We can also use "Know" as in absolute knowledge. (Note the use of the capital K to connote absolute knowledge.) 

For example, I might say I "Know" my name, but do I really? It's what my parents and siblings always called me growing up, but can I be 100% certain, with absolutely zero doubt, that it's the name I was given at birth? I'm an identical twin (let's say our names are Bob and Fred). My mother tells a story of when we were newborns and she used different colored diaper pins to tell us apart. One day she forgot to change us separately, and took both diapers off at the same time. She says she's certain she put the correct diaper pins on the correct baby, but if she's wrong about that, then my name is actually Fred, and my brother's name is actually Bob. Or if you're not a twin, you could have been switched at birth at the hospital. So any of us could have gone through life thinking we had one name when we were actually given a different name at birth. 

This only comes up in the issue of epistimology (the study of what we know and can know). Philosophers long ago realized that if we only experience the outside world through our senses, and if we rely on our memories and cognitive faculties to make sense of the world, and if those faculties are not absolutely perfect, then we can't claim to have absolute Knowledge. We must admit that we only have provisional knowledge. We could be a brain in a vat, with electrodes from a supercomputer sending signals to the appropriate parts of our brains mimicking sight and hearing and touch and memory, etc.. (This is the premise of the Matrix movies.)

This is known as the problem of solipsism. It is something first-year philosophy students are introduced to, then it's pretty much ignored because it's a rather useless philosophical position that nobody actually holds. Theists don't hold it, either, though some of them pretend to when they think it's a 'gotcha' they can use.


So with that foundation, this is the game: Guide the atheist down the path of admitting they can't Know anything (a la solipsism), then do a switcheroo and for anything they say after that, ask "How do you 'know' that?" The switch is from absolute knowledge to provisional knowledge. 

Thus, notice how in my initial response I said "In the strictest sense," but his response is in the broadest sense. That tells you everything you need to know about how this game works. I did not say I can't know fact from fiction. For any single fact, I cannot Know it with absolute certainty, but there are many facts I can know, provisionally, and that seems to work just fine for me and the other hundred billion or so humans who've ever lived.

@Schnuupi

Are these claims true?  How do you know?

NonCredenti said:

So with that foundation, this is the game: Guide the atheist down the path of admitting they can't Know anything (a la solipsism), then do a switcheroo and for anything they say after that, ask "How do you 'know' that?"

ViceRegent said:

@Schnuupi

Are these claims true?  How do you know?

Nailed it. 

ViceRegent said:

And I know because God says so.  

Excellent. Another opportunity to examine your claims. How does God say things to you? Do you hear voices when nobody else is around? Do these voices sometimes tell you to do things... bad things? Or do you just get really strong feelings that pop into your head and you attribute them to God?

How do you know these ideas come from God? How do you know they're not from some other powerful being, like Satan?

How do you know you're not in a coma, hallucinating, when you hear the voice or the idea pops in your head?

Even if you could know an idea was from God, how do you know God isn't deceiving you?

Since you think you know "all" things because God magicks them into your brain, why did God tell you that you reject terms that you don't reject? Did God make you forget how often you use the terms, or did God make you claim to reject them when you don't? 

Additionally...

And, I never said I know all things.  Your being a pagan has made you delusional.

Your exact words were: "And I know they are not in the same boat the same way I know all things: because God says so."  I even quoted you before I asked about it.  The post is from 5:33 AM PST, 11/16/17

I'm not saying you claim to know all things that can be known, as in a claim of omniscience. But you are clearly claiming all things that you do know come directly from God, so I was asking about the mechanism of that communication. 

Unfortunately, this is further proof that you're in the same epistemic boat as everyone else. Why did you misunderstand what I wrote, since God supposedly communicated it to you? Did God misunderstand me? Or did you misunderstand God?

And naturally he ran away.

God says so.  This is really not hard. But the pagan knows the truth; he is just too mentally ill and morally reprobate this accept the truth.

I have answered you.  You don’t get it.

But tell us how you know anything you claim is true is actually true?  You keep running, which tells me you don’t.

ViceRegent said:

But tell us how you know anything you claim is true is actually true?  

Already answered

ViceRegent said:

And he runs away.  Typical pagan.

Already answered.

ViceRegent said:

Now, can anyone answer the OP?

Sure, I did it right here.

I see this is just degrading into childish arguments, typical thing which people on your side do. You just throw out the logic and reasoning and start using excuses. You can't deny everything just because it's not what your mummy and daddy taught you. You clearly are not on this site to debate it is clear you are here just to force your beliefs down peoples throat and call them out as wrong. @ViceRegent

ViceRegent i care what they sea. Hope that answered your question. : )

ViceRegent said:

Can any atheist provide me their rational basis for knowing truth from fiction?

@ViceRegent hello my friend.

To be rational about answering your question, first we have to answer; how do we understand the word 'atheist'?

Google Dictionary -
atheist - a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.

Truth is a claim that can be verified by experimentally testing its logical consequences and finding them consistent with the claim.
Fiction is a claim that cannot be verified experimentally, or that can be found to be incorrect - yet still accepted for other reasons.

I am not sure what this have to do with being or not being atheist, however. Truth is what it is, it does not depend on your personal system of views. Same goes for fiction. Lord of the Rings is fiction, and even if you are a Tolkienist, it still does not make the existence of orcs into truth. On the other hand, 2+2=4 is truth, and even if you follow the religion that says that 2+2=orange, it does not deny the fact that 2+2=4. Both statements can be experimentally tested, and only one of them will be found to be correct.