I'm against absolute assertions
I don’t find the concept of “100% certain” to be useful. I’m only concerned with what people believe, what people know, what people can know, and what people are justified in believing. Those are actually useful standards.
and we should be skeptical of our intuition but it is also okay to follow our intuition if it appears to derive from logical observations of reality.
Where I have difficulty is narrating that progression of observations which compile to form the gut instinct so as to convince others and form their own based on a body of experience.
I'm fine with intuitive deductions with some supporting empirical evidence.
I see nothing 'intuitive' about the assertions you made though. Perhaps you have anecdotes with little girls getting their cherries popped at ridiculously young ages but I don't.
Are you positing they are hypothetically disprovable via future gained capacity or that you can presently falsify them given our technological capability?
A lot of this also depends on which version of a deity one is talking about since there are multiple competing narratives and various flexibilities in interpreting writings about them.
There is nothing hypothetical about it.
It is safely within our capability to dismiss all described gods.
I don't dismiss the existence of leprechauns or unicorns with high or comfortable certainty at all.
You are silly.
There are three very simple reasons we can dismiss such claims:
- The criteria for claiming knowledge is not that high.
- Human beings know things.
- No claim is entitled to special treatment.
It really is that simple. The case for strong/gnostic atheism or hard dismissal of myths/cryptids relies on only those three things.
If I search a typical room and don’t find any cats, I know there are no cats in the room.
Am I absolutely, 100% metaphysically certain that there are no cats in the room? Who cares. I am entitled to say I know there are no cats in the room. Why? Because the criteria for claiming knowledge are not that high.
But what if someone says that there’s an invisible cat in the room? What if someone says there’s a cat in the room but some powerful alien modified my brain so it doesn’t see that cat? In order to know that there’s no cat in the room, I must also know that those two claims are false. Since I do know there’s no cat in the room, I do know those two claims are false.
If we were required to remain agnostic with respect to fantastic claims outside the ordinary bounds of cause and effect then we could never claim to know anything. Since we can claim to know lots of things, because the criteria for claiming knowledge is not that high, we must be able to claim such claims are known false.
And this is what you do with respect to every claim that isn’t about god. Say you claim you know you weren’t born yesterday. I hope you claim that, since you do in fact know that. You are thereby claiming you know it’s not the case that you were born yesterday but were kidnapped by powerful scientists who implanted fake memories in you and everyone else is playing along. But what evidence do you have to reject this claim? All you need — it’s fantastic and unsupported by any evidence.
So we can reject theistic claims as known false because they are not entitled to special treatment and we must (and do) reject similarly situated non-theistic claims.
All I recognize is that as our own detection capabilities increase, to escape detection/proof they would need to be progressively more evasive and stealthful.
Again, how silly.
The default position is that things outside of our understanding of cause and effect are impossible.
This is how you reason every day. For example, say I put a penny in my desk drawer and closed it. I am perfectly willing to assert that I “know there’s a penny in my desk drawer”.
Suppose someone says, “Well, how do you know that a ghost didn’t take the penny out of the drawer right after you closed it? You can’t know there’s a penny in the drawer.”
The answer is simple — the default position is that things outside our understanding of cause and effect are impossible, and cryptids are outside our understanding of cause and effect.
You might hear someone say, “You can’t rule out something just because you don’t know how it could happen.” But that’s obviously wrong. That’s precisely how you rule something out. If you couldn’t rule things out that way, you could never rule anything at all out and then you could never claim to know anything.
Suppose we’re trying to figure out if one particular person killed another. And say we discover that the accused was a hundred miles from the scene of the crime just seconds before the crime occurred. We would then rule that person out as the killer precisely because we don’t know of any way the crime could have been accomplished given those facts.
Every day you, correctly and necessarily, rule out thousands of things precisely because they are outside your understanding of cause and effect. People like you believe that holding a position of agnosticism across topics like these gives you a position of skepticism or intellectual honesty but its in fact the opposite - as I said its just silly.
There's a slight distinction between a man who never kills and a man who kills once per 10 years (all things considered the majority of the time he doesn't stand out) yet it's still a pretty big distinction.
An even bigger distinction is that's entirely irrelevant to the topic of a higher being existing. I get that you want to make a comparison, but it doesn't apply at all here.
And you should understand why.
The effort to rely on evidence instead of perception/memory still loops back into it though: you rely on perception to analyze evidence, and memory to recall what you perceived in the evidence.
The main difference is you process it multiply times (like rewatching the Rittenhouse videos) humbly realizing a first impression may not be as accurate as coalescing several impressions.
It doesn't matter. In a (competent) court of law those alone do not suffice. They are supported by other, varying amounts of evidence.
Yes, I'm aware that things like #metoo and other things subvert this. That is precisely why they are kangeroo courts and why 'innocent until proven guilty' is [should be] the default.
I also hate shit like 'predictable' tbh because people can predict accurately for the wrong reasons. Maybe 'patternable' or something?
Quibble however you like. You get the point, so whatever.
Yes, though we often see that in corrupt scientific practices too.
Doesn't matter. The flawed methodology always comes out in the end.
Sure, but it was more of a rhetorical one tbh
However being humbly aware of our limitations in conceiving advanced cognition (just as a dog could not conceive ours) we should not assume to know the merits of the patterns of thinkings of alien beings.
Doesn't mean one should make the leap of logic into assuming there are alien beings communicating to begin with.
Generally that's how it seems to go 99.8% of the time, agreed.
But recognizing that overwhelming pattern doesn't mean I should ignore exceptions to it.
There are no exceptions.
Or believe that such a pattern existing means there cannot be supernatural phenomena that others touch into that I do not understand.
Again, refer to my explanations about agnosticism above. There is no logical issue with being open to new evidence, but that doesn't mean one is justified in making claims they 'might' exist now.
