You miss the point. In the example the elephant is blue ─ painted blue, if you wish ─ but your book says the elephant is pink ─ painted pink, if you wish.
You assert that because your book says it's pink, it is not blue and it is pink.
No, I did not. The only thing you have proved is an abysmal lack of reading comprehension skills.
I said that if one simultaneously believes (or claims) that all elephants are blue and that he (or she) has a pink elephant in his basement, then he is making
incoherent statements. An incoherent statement is false. Not once did I talk about any book. That's your pathological attempt to project Christianity on me.
I know what the Nicene creed says. And you know that it doesn't define God in any way useful to the question, How can we determine whether phenomenon X is caused by God.
Here we have another case of special pleading. You want to know how we can determine whether phenomenon X is caused by God. Fine. But when I ask how you know that the fuzzy outer portion of your picture is caused by an electron, you claim that I don't know what I'm talking about. What we are noting here is
confirmation bias. Statements or pictures that support (or you think support) your claims and theories are given inordinate weight whereas those that tend to refute your claims and theories are ignored.
And you further know that you don't have such a definition, the definition of a real god such that if we found a candidate we could tell whether it were God or not.
That's an interesting statement. But is that statement
verifiable? Please indicate the process you undertook to verify the truth of that statement.
In 'my system' there are no absolutes, which matches reality where there are likewise no absolutes. And because science reaches its conclusions by empiricism and induction, its conclusions are always tentative. Nonetheless, science continues to make progress, in a manner with no equivalent in religion.
In your system there are no absolutes? Really? So if I said: "The cause always precedes the effect, temporally" you would say that this is not absolutely true? Would you also say that the statement "In 'my system' there are no absolutes" is not absolutely true?
I have no idea why you regard the absence of absolutes as a 'flaw'. Do you think the idea of absolutes is Jesus? Or is coherent? God isn't omnipotent.
You say this because you have no understanding of the word 'omnipotent.' Huge debates were carried out centuries ago as to exactly what was meant by 'omnipotent' in the concept of God. Theologians debated whether God could create a rock he couldn't lift or how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. You seriously want to revisit all of that?
He can't make a perfect copy of himself, for example. And if God is omniscient then he knew every letter of this conversation, every thought process in your head and mine, every temperature gradient along the wires that connect our computers ─ and he knew that before he made the universe 14 bn years ago, meaning that theological freewill is a nonsense, and you and I have not the tiniest possibility of deviating from what he infallibly foresaw.
God didn't make the universe 14 billion years ago. That's all part of the falsified Big Bang theory.
And if God is omnipresent, then for 14 bn years or so he's spread himself across maybe 10^24 stars and all their planets, and all the evergrowing space in between, which seems like a wonderwork of inefficiency for any god, let alone a personal god.
I fail to see the relevance of this discussion. It's more of a personal rant than anything that has to do anything with me.
I've already pointed out to you that "Under the correspondence definition of truth, truth is correspondence with reality" is true, and is the only claim I've made.
Go back and re-read your original post.
I didn't make the claim that all knowledge comes through sensory input. We're born with an extensive kit of instincts, for example.
Sure. Like we all instinctively know that God exists, right? Or perhaps some of us have different instincts than others? Maybe you were born without that instinct. How do you know that the instincts I have are the same instincts that you have? How do you know that what you instinctively 'know' corresponds with reality?
But we get our information about the external world through our senses. Information is not knowledge until the brain processes it.
Not necessarily. People can arrive at truth through pure reason. The entirety of math is an example.
Nor can you say the blue elephant is pink because your book says so.
There's no book. Can't you read and understand?
So your Jesus is truth method is incapable of telling us whether S: Freetown is the capital of Liberia is true or not. All facts not mentioned by Jesus, including your own name, are likewise unknowable. The time your plane leaves, the existence of Moscow or New York, the presence of oxygen in the air, the truth or falsity of any statement at all about the world since 30CE or so, is unknowable, you say.
Depending on one's philosophical bent, one might argue that all of these are irrelevant pieces of information. To a Christian, salvation is the end all be all of existence. Such a Christian might argue that the time one's plane leaves has no effect on one's future relationship with God. Accordingly, even if one cannot know what time one's plane leaves, or if one misses it, or even if one unintentionally takes poison and dies, this does not affect one's afterlife.
It therefore means you're never in a position to contradict anything I say ─ you have no way of knowing whether it's correct ('true') or not.
No, not "you" as in I. A Christian.
Like the report of an angel sighting you previously mentioned, the claim is capable of investigation, to reach a fair conclusion from the evidence.
No, the claim is not capable. Claims do not have capabilities. People have capabilities. Even computers have capabilities. But claims do not have capabilities.
In this case, since there will (I take it) be no examinable evidence, and the matter is satisfactorily explained by your acculturation, you'll need something extra by way of satisfactory demonstration to get a conclusion in favor of your claim.
This presupposes that evidence is important. What evidence do you have that evidence is important?
You appear to be unaware that the word 'Earth' and the phrase 'the earth' can refer to the planet Earth.
No, you seem to have missed the entire point of the thread. The Bible defines Earth as 'dry land' and then says that said 'dry land' was flat. Then you want to argue whether the globe was spherical at that time. This is, by far, the most idiotic argument I've ever heard.
It's highly relevant to the bible tale of Genesis creation. We can even put a rough date on when Yahweh was invented.
This presupposes that Yahweh was invented. How did you verify that Yahweh was invented? You do believe in verificationism, don't you?
On the contrary it's the crux of our discussion. You refuse to look at the elephant to determine its actual color, because you prefer the answer in your book.
There's no book. Can't you get that through your thick skull?
You're a really sore loser, aren't you. I show you a lab image of a real electron and you invent a blustery excuse instead of saying Sorry, I was wrong. I now understand electrons exist in reality.
That's not a picture of an electron. Even the article itself says that it's not a picture of an electron. It says: "What you’re looking at is the first direct observation of an
atom’s electron orbital —
an atom's actual wave function!"
What we have here is deep seated
confirmation bias. You see a picture of something that might (or might not) be a confirmation of what you believe, and so you insist that it
proves you right. It proves nothing. You should seriously read polymath's recent post on the problem of induction and the need for falsification. He's wrong -- but he's light-years ahead of you!
An electron is not a tiny ball bearing, it's a negative fermion with 1/2 spin, and presents with both wave-like and particle-like properties. You can see it in the image as the outer ring of dots.
Speculation.
