The religious perspective. Wanna have this discussion?

I understand.

 

To me, revelation and testimony are useless, because they cannot be verified. If some god were to give me a revelation, I would not expect anyone else to accept my claim of revelation, because they would be unable to verify my claim.

 

My point is; where does this divine authority come from? If it's from a book then you're not a skeptic. It can only come in contact directly with your mind untainted by the flaw of your perceptions. In other words, most Christians are not skeptic because they're no schizophrenic.

 

The real world can't be verified, it can only be falsified. Thus I reject the absolutism of deductive logic when it comes to the real world. 1+1=2 does not exist in the real world.

 

I would say that outside of mathematics, there are no absolute truths. However, the theory of evolution has stood the test of time, and has overwhelming evidence in its support, so I take it to be a fact.

 

Language is absolute and since math is a language, it is then absolute.

 

But your mind can deceive you.

 

Only if you doubt, this is Descartes 101.
You cannot be deceived if you do not doubt.

 

Do you subscribe to Descartes, like Christians subscribe to the Bible, lol?

 

No. Like I said before, I reject rationalism.

 

But this sounds like rationalism devoid of empiricism.

 

Huh?

 

How do you come to conclusions?

 

How do you do that?

 

My point is that various religious people see certain people or beings as divine authority for various reasons. You would have to go ask them what those reasons are. Again, religious skepticism is just as valid as any other kind of skepticism.

 

So you're saying the divine authority comes from other humans then?

Religious skepticism is just people playing their religion's set of rules, not by the set of rules that the universe works by such as gravity for example and by facts. It's like playing a game, you're going to play by the rules but those rules aren't the rules of the universe that scientists base their discoveries upon.

Sorry mcponipon but you're not going to gain any ground here, religion is a bad joke being played upon humanity by people who would control others for their own gain, and it always has been just that, a method for one to claim superiority over others via being a member of the clergy or by having read a "holy book".

It's not real. It's not real. It's not real.

 

Let me break this to you in simple language.

Believing alone isn't enough to be a rationalist and a skeptic at the same time. To be a rationalist, you must have a set of axioms. To be a skeptic, those axioms must survive skepticism. In order for these two to coexist, these axioms must be exclusively presence in your inner world (mind) and cannot be tainted by the flaws of the outer world (perceptions of reality).

If your axioms exist in the outer world ( a book, a person) then skepticism dictates that perception is unreliable and thus so are your book and the person you believe in.

 

But those axioms survive religious skepticism. They don't survive a scientific/empirical skepticism but neither does science survive religious skepticism.
All is contained within your inner world, though. All you know is your perception, your beliefs and what you rationalize. To the individual, there is no outer world.

 

Flaws in your perception is subjective. Anything in your perspective can be deemed flawed. And since you are espousing Descartes, then I'll use Locke: You were born as a blank slate. You don't have axioms that are exclusively present in your mind, meaning that has not been influenced by the outside world at all.

 

Person A claims to me that an object free to fall near the surface of the Earth (neglecting any non-conservative forces such as drag) will accelerate at about 9.8 meters per second squared. I can verify this is true by conducting experiments, which I even did in a physics lab as a student. This can be investigated by anyone.

Person B claims that some god exists. I can neither verify nor falsify this claim (or investigate it in any meaningful way), so I reject it.