You just seem to be going through what I said paragraph by paragraph and creating a set of disjoint arguments that don’t really link up. I’m not going to go point by point; because chances are you’ll do the same thing again; creating 100 irrelevant sub arguments of sub arguments just drives a conversation off the rails.
Perhaps you should focus on the big picture argument; and actually present something comprehensive. We’re grown ups and can scroll up to see what we said.
To start with, I am absolutely an empiricist because it’s the only valid answer to this question, as I have and will show; despite the objections - ironically, you are an empiricist too.
You’re citing a particular form of experience as a way of gaining knowledge at the same time as trashing other types of experience as a way of gaining knowledge. That’s incoherent.
In reality, you’re just arbitrarily asserting, without justification, that a particular type of experience is somehow special, and reveals truth without explaining how or why. Also incoherent.
Your real objection is not whether observation of reality is required for knowledge; but that’s yours should be accepted as valid.
I find this fairly typical - it is not enough for many theists to simply have faith and believe; they also have to pretend that their belief is knowledge: religion doesn’t know anything, it’s just very good at loudly pretending that it does.
I’m going to explain my assumptions. You seem to be accusing me of making a bunch of then - without saying what they are or exactly why they’re inconsistent.
Assumption 1: We all appear to be collectively experiencing some form of shared reality.
Assumption 2: logic is a valid way to interpret this shared reality, and our experiences.
This makes no claims about what reality is; how accurate our experiences are, or claims that our reasoning is always valid.
But without these two assumptions; it’s not possible to have any discussion on truth: because without 1 truth can’t exist, and without 2, logical debate is meaningless.
If you reject them, then I will accept your concession, as you’re agreeing your position is inherently irrational.
From there, we have to define what we mean by truth. I defined it as that which is concordant with reality - the state of how reality is. While you vehemently objected to that definition - twice - but declined to actually come up with your own; which is no basis for rational discussion.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you’ve misunderstood again - reality as it is, is not reality as we observe it.
You do seem get a bit weird by suggesting reality is subjective - which it isn’t. While I can never know what you think tasty wheat tastes like; we can have broad agreement on things we observe: trees exists, I have ten fingers, there is a day and night. That’s objective as these agreed facts are not dependent on feelings of opinions.
Perhaps you just have an odd definition of truth and reality - it’s hard to tell as you’re not saying what they are.
So given the two assumptions and definitions, the question becomes by what process can we make determinations about our shared reality - how do we determine what is true - knowledge.
The only way - almost by definition - is by observing, experiencing and reasoning about that reality.
How can you possibly make any determination about what is real, what reality is, or how it works - without the ability to tell whether the answer matches what is real, what reality is, or how it works?
I don’t know, you’re spending too much telling me you can to say.
That’s what knowledge is; in any functional sense that we use it in every day lives ; illustrated with the box examples: you can only know what is in the box if you can some make an observation that allows you to determine what is in the box.
Your reply utterly fails to understand this example:
You ask if the guess involved some reasoning based observation - is it knowledge. Well yes. Duh. You’ve made observations and used it to determine what’s in the box.
You ask what if the method of determining what is in the box is unreliable, is that knowledge? Well no; duh. If the fidelity, accuracy or reliability of your measurement is not sufficient to make an accurate determination - you can’t claim to know the answer.
Far from being any sort of rebuttal here; your “objection” really just expands upon the very point I’m making. In the same way you won’t offer a definition of truth, or reality; you also criticize empiricism, but fail to offer an alternative that you can show works.
How can you know what is in the box without making an empirical determination? Either to validate the boxes content, or to validate some methodology to determine the boxes content?
Let’s briefly expand on what I mean by knowledge, fidelity and reliability of the observation.
Knowledge is not binary true/false, it’s levels of confidence. Take “Do squirrels exist”
All observations are logically consistent with the statement that squirrels do exist in our shared reality: But as there are possible explantations that allow for squirrels not actually existing, that we cannot disprove, all assumption 2 allows us to do is to say one is far more likely than the other.
Conversely, if we have a grainy camera, or incomplete information, we may not have enough information to know to some reasonable degree, but we can offer better than a guess.
Someone could have doctored the image of the box; is it likely? Does someone have motive and means? In most cases you can reasonably say it’s unlikely. You can raise the confidence though, through additional observation (checking the camera, for example)
Perhaps part of your confusion is that you’re mixing up levels of confidence with a need for knowing something without doubt: alas this is not really possible ; there is always a possible alternative that cannot be disproven.
These issues dovetail nicely with fidelity and reliability. Take “Can I trust my eyes?”
Remember assumption 1: we live in a shared reality, and if we’re all consistently seeing the same thing, assumption 2 helps render it more likely that the observation is reliable than everyone imagining things.
Disagreements tell us we can’t always trust our eyes, movement, things leaping out at us, cataracts, hallucinations etc. Fidelity and Reliability is high but not perfect.
We can make rational conclusions about outlier observations, we can rule things out. We can perform vision tests, run comparisons, brain scans, etc - all to say we can use observation to justify the confidence in the fidelity of our observations.
That applies to religious experiences too : Are those experiences truth - representative of reality, or false? You can use observation to determine the fidelity of those experiences - to tell whether they show reality: Brain scans being able to discriminate a religious experience from imagination; and an established baseline of accuracy by taking the “knowledge” from these experiences and comparing it with reality outside what is to be expected if it were being faked.
If genuine religious experience always, say, unambiguously predicted otherwise exceptional events 5/10/15 years into the future - that would help render religious experience valid empirical evidence.
But the last 5000 years have an interesting tapestry of religion spectacularly failing to deliver anything. Whereas one only has to think about the knowledge needed for you and I to be able to communicate as we are to understand the unmitigated success of empiricism in delivering demonstrable knowledge.
Despite all the talk, all the hand waving, and vocal protestations - religious experience has not so much as carved an arrowhead. That, should be a much starker statement about whether your professed experience is a valid way of discerning reality - whether it is really knowledge - than a billion of my posts.
All this is, as it always is: just an attempt to try and manufacture knowledge from belief.
