It seems that your position implies that there was *NO* reliable knowledge before the "scientific method" was developed (I think this is usually attributed to Roger Bacon in the 1200s). Do you agree with this?

rethink it. Bacon .. lol.
then check out some of the work in India 4000 years ago, or at least Ibn al Haytha but those are just a span.

It wouldn't matter as far as my query goes whether I thought the scientific method started yesterday at noon ...

the question was about other sources of reliable knowledge ( your claim).

You don't have to answer. If you can't describe any I'll understand.

But then this would imply that the only reliable knowledge was in India for 3200 years preceding Bacon (or 3000 years preceidng Al-Haytham). Is this an assertion you agree with?

There is something inherently reliable about the human experience. In fact, if the human experience is not generally reliable, then the scientific method is all for naught since the scientific method is a subset of human experiences. This is not to say that the human experience is infallible (as the scientific method is not infallible -- confounding and hidden variables do arise and can be difficult to determine), but if my brain isn't being fed generally reliable and useful information about the universe, then it would be hard to imagine how I've managed to get this far.

the question was about other sources of reliable knowledge ( your claim).

You don't have to answer. If you can't describe any I'll understand.

Ducking sudden movements and jumping to alert at loud noises aren't reliable ( your criteria).

If you want to pretend that the scientific method proceeds *WITHOUT* basic reliability within the human experience, you're welcome to your delusion.

When I sit down in my car, I reliably know it's there and that I'm not sitting on the floor of my garage. When I drive down the street, I reliably know I'm on a street and not driving on the sidewalk. When I get into an elevator, I reliably know it's there and that I'm not walking into an empty shaft.

Edit: When a scientist runs an experiment in a lab, he reliably knows that the measurements he's writing down from his machine are accurately reflecting the information that the machine is giving him.

Our experieces have inherent reliability, because if it didn't then we would not be able to accomplish anything.

I would have phrased it "... proceeds *IN SPITE OF* basic unreliability.."

You'd be a hoot to play the airplane game with, not only would you think you are 6 feet off the ground, but you'd insist you were right even though all the pranksters were telling you not. Have you never watched versions of candid camera, our sense input is easy to fool, in fact it evolved to be fooled both in direct perception and in automatic deductions from them.
edit: it evolved to give us a construction that is likely to be most useful most of the time. ( the railway tracks don't come together)

It's the innate unreliability of our experiences that drove the need for the scientific method which is meant to reduce the errors. If you think your experiences are as reliable... wow.

again, is that your answer to the other method(s) you had in mind that are as reliable as the scientific method. "as aarons experienced it"?

I cant imagine the percentage of of deists being more then 1-5% of the population at anytime in any given state. And thank their deistic God for that small number because i don't think we would even have the pretense of separation of church and state that we do without them. But if you want to say the laws that say you must acknowledge a God to be a full citizen were put into place by any other any other groups besides Christians, i would be more then happy to look at your evidence and through deists under the bus also. Not that an open and outspoken deist could get elected to an important office within the federal government anyway...

I fully acknowledge my views are unfair and discriminatory but look at it from my perspective. If atheist were the majority and there were laws prohibiting you from running for office in the US because you're a Christian. If you were asked to put your hand on a book that condemns you when you testify in a court you help pay for. If you were asked to acknowledge NO God when taking a pledge to your country. If you had a president who said Christians are not real citizens (with no protests or repercussions).
How would you feel. I mean seriously could any other group today have these things done to them besides atheist. Its clear to me im not a Real citizen of the country i was born into. When i am, ill think about changing my unfair views of not wanting Christians in power.

This is false. All that we need in order to accomplish something is to make basic predictions. Nothing "inherent" is needed.

I'm not saying that the mind cannot be tricked. But this is no different that experiments having confounding variables and that sort of thing.

If you want to negate your own experiences, that's fine. Feel free to ignore the next wall you see in front of you and keep right on walking.

If the basic human experience is not reliable, then any conclusions that are drawn that require the use of the basic human experience are equally unreliable.

Notice how you had to change the statement in order for you to dodge the fact that you're stuck.

If the brain is not being fed generally accurate information, then predictions based on that information are not reliable, and therefore the predictions are not reliable. Given that we make many generally reliable predictions, the information must have been reliable enough.

Don't misrepresent my position. I'm not saying that those laws are good, fair, or equitable. I would not object to having those laws repealed. I'm just pointing out that you're pointing your ire at Christians, and I'm not sure if that's historically justifiable.

I'm not an historian, but I generally do not believe the notion that basically everybody was a Christian in the US when the country was founded. If you have any links to reputable, reliable documents regarding this, I would be happy to read through it and reconsider my position.

Kind of a quibble but I think the laws he's referring to are in state constitutions and such, usually written in the nineteenth century south.

Don't know what your position is to misrepresent it, except you want to deflect blame away from Christians.

When Christians are and were the majority i dont know who else to blame but feel free to point me in another direction.

Never said everyone was a Christian, i said the vast majority were.

The funny thing is if any of the thing i mentioned were done to Christians there would be an armed revolt. I just dont want to vote for y'all or have you in power.

Yeah, except for Maryland, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

And Massachusetts law excludes all non Christians.
It really isn't just about the laws because those are unenforced and would be declared unconstitutional if challenged. Its about all the little things that add up to being a 2nd class citizen in my own country.

Your claim is - basic human experience reaches as reliable conclusions as those derived by the scientific method, better actually because the scientific method adds another layer of error sources to the mix? Why don't we scrap it and use "aarons perceptions" to increase mankinds knowledge and not risk larger errors?

I can't be stuck, all I'm doing is asking a question about YOUR claim. Since that was my third attempt to get an answer it's a wonder I didn't try a different language never mind try another phase to shoot against the stone wall.

I enjoy when people run themselves in circles while I sit in one place and watch. They try hard to distort and misrepresent positions so that they can feel smart (or something like that). It really just shows how poor your reasoning is. Welcome to the TomCowley Club.

Let's start with post #200:

My response:

You:

Me:

You:

You've changed the question. I thought the question was about reliable sources of knowledge (my claim). Now you're asking for "methods" and "as reliable as."

And now this also from you:

I have no idea what thread you're reading. If you can quote me where I've made that claim, then maybe we can have a continuing conversation.

I think you have this backwards. It's the starting point. "God did it." "Alright, then how did he do it?" "Good question, let's find out." And that's where the investigation begins.

Nowadays it's "God did it." "HA! What god?" Then the entire investigative inquiry goes off on a tangent.

Or you could skip the "God did it" part and shoot straight into asking, "how?"

Your statement ( which I quoted in my original question)

I've been trying to find a way to get you to state what other sources ( if any) you think are more reliable or just as reliable as the scientific method. So far, you've only pointed to our everday experiences and conclusions, the flaws in those are what led to the use of the scientific method. It's meant to thwart our slip into logical fallacies and use a 'testing' approach to discovery and resolution.

If you didn't have another method in mind when you wrote the original quote and were just ranting, np. It's no use twisting this to be about my questions, I could be a sloppy questioner puzzled by your statement.

The scientific materialists are not wrong if all you point to are methods that are less reliable than the scientific method, that would make scientific method the most reliable source of knowledge which seems contrary to your position. It would seem a strange criticism to make of a position if you agree with it.

for the future, it would help if when you make that statement you add-
"The source(s) of knowledge as reliable or more reliable than the scientific method are (.... ... ... ) ." it saves a lot of time.

If you can't think of any, I understand.

Even the very existence of the brain is a conclusion derived from that information (and a conclusion dependent on its reliability).

But this is trivially false anyhow. The information only needs to be consistent, it does not need to be reliably true. The brain in a vat scenario is an example in which the information received by the brain is wholly inaccurate yet also consistent enough to support reliable predictions.

To use an easy example, if I'm playing a video game, I can predict that my character will die if he walks onto the lava. This prediction is reliable, but it hardly implies that the character is "real," that the lava is "real," or that the spatial relations represented by the game are "real."

Why? That's not the claim I've been making. If you suffer from problems with reading comprehension, that's not something I can fix.

I disagree with your assessment of the scientific method. The scientific method was not designed in any way to "thwart" ourselves. It was chosen as a way of looking at a particular subset of our experiences with higher precision.

Again, see the part above about reading comprehension. The original statement:

Notice that there is no comparative statement contained here. That you keep inserting it is something that is beyond my ability to understand.

But your position also implies that the entirety of the scientific method falls into the same "trivially false" category, which is a completely different conversation (one that's also unresolvable).

thanks. So you agree with the statement?

sorry, I read the "only" as implying that when compared to other methods it stood apart) If you weren't comparing it to others and just stating it as a fact that's good enough for me. Didn't mean to be so clumsy in my questions, I just couldn't think of any and I thought it implied you knew of one ( or more ).

Yes, if an atheist was appointed that had written a book about how the current shortcomings of String Theory are strong enough evidence for him to declare that search for a universally unifying theory is fruitless I would definitely have similar concerns.

Except that you're just changing the intention of the phrase "God did it" to suit your purpose. In your example it is obvious that "God did it" is not a problem, but after a few years of fruitless investigation if the investigator says "well however he did it is beyond human comprehension" we have hit the same brick wall that furyshade was talking about. He clearly meant "God did it" as an aswer to "how?" rather than as a precursor. And it's not as if there is no precedent for this, it was a problem for medicine during the black plague, it was a problem for geology before Lyell, it was a problem for biology before Darwin, and even Newton ended up doing it eventually.

This is often true in arguments between lay people, but not really in the scientific community. It's more like "God did it." "We can't prove or disprove that via any experimental result or observation, so let's just treat it as functionally irrelevant and

I haven't seen this posted ITT yet; Sam Harris has chimed-in on Collins' NIH nomination in this NYT op-ed:

Science is in the Details

I agree with Harris.

I give 50-100 years and you guys over the ocean will come out of the stoneage and realize that the strongly religious should preferably be kept away from positions of power at all costs, and the ones who can't leave their religious views at home should be disbarred from any kind of administrative duties.

I mean, we have a few of them here in politics, but having them as fringe groups is a nice reminder why they are only fringe groups.