Absence of Evidence (The limitations of science)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 20:18 (6112 days ago) @ dhw

dhw writes: First of all, I'm not convinced (or don't know for certain!) that 0.5 = we don't know for certain. Most contributors, including yourself, seem to agree that in the context of theism versus atheism, we are not dealing with knowledge but with belief, and that "knowledge" is impossible. - I have a problem here with this distinction between knowledge and belief. As a rationalist I am committed to the principle that one's belief should be proportional to the evidence. One doesn't believe something just because one fancies it. That's wish-fulfilment. - 0 and 1 represent the absolute extremes of knowledge, certainly false and certainly true. Such absolute knowledge is really impossible, though belief that "1+1 = 2" comes as close to being certain as we can get. - 0.5 represents a situation where the evidence for and against a proposition is equal. It is just as likely to be true as to be false. This is an unusual situation of perfect balance. - The more usual situation is that we have good evidence, 90% or 99% or 99.9% (sorry to confuse the issue by changing from fractions to percentages), and can assess our degree of belief or knowledge appropriately. - If we are just confining our agnosticism to the concept of a life-creating being we need to examine what we know (with sufficient certainty) about life and about creative beings. We can say a good deal about the nature of life in terms of the elements and structures of which it is composed (DNA, cells etc). All we can say about creative beings is by analogy with human creators. We create gods in our own image (to invert the biblical saying). Human watchmakers have eyes and dextrous fingers and delicate tools, but who has seen the supposed creator's fingers or tools in action? - However I don't really want to go over that ground again. What I'm arguing about here is the nature of knowledge and belief and agnosticism in general terms.