Originally Posted by
Heartless Angel
See, now that's an interesting post, filled with relevant philosophical ideas, and is something actually worth debating. Had you led with that instead of carpet bombing threads with bible verses, you would have been received a lot better.
I'm a rationalist, myself. Empiricism is in a way, self-defeating, as it requires reason which can not be experienced to establish the connection between experience and knowledge. If knowledge can come only from experience, it can't be known that knowledge can only come from experience, and if it can't be known that knowledge comes only from experience, it fails to explain where knowledge comes from. rationalism has a similar flaw, in that logic can not prove that the rules of logic determine truth, but this requires one fewer assumption than empiricism to reach the same dead end, and as such, empiricism is a needless complexity that doesn't strengthen the system.
Problem: By your own statements, a worldview is necessary. By your own statements, it is impossible for you to know what the world looks like without your glasses. You only have an understanding of how the world looks through whatever combinations of eye-wear you've tried on, and as such, you can't make any meaningful claim about how the world looks to the rest of us without your glasses the way you just did.
For people whose basic worldview already contains their final conclusions? No, there is no debating such people. The vast majority of us however, aren't wearing those particular pairs of prescription lenses. I don't believe I've ever met anyone who considers evolution to be a part of their basic worldview. I've known a fair few empiricists, for whom evolution just happens to be something that can bee seen through that particular pair of glasses, but none for whom evolution is itself a pair of glasses. Religious people, on the other hand, almost exclusively view the world through a fundamental bias which contains that final conclusion, because there aren't really any other worldviews that easily allow one to adopt it.
Here's where epistemology gets fun. How do you know that the truth can't be contradictory? It certainly seems like it shouldn't be, but that's just how we interpret it. The same goes for allowing you to establish a coherent system of knowledge. It would certainly be nice if that were the case, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. It may be necessary for an answer to be useful, but that doesn't mean it's necessary for an answer to be true.
But there's the crux of the problem. We can't know unless we presume we know. If we have to presume to know, it just means we don't actually know. You can't build a real house on an imaginary foundation. The only structure that can be stand on an imaginary foundation is an imaginary one.
It's not possible to presume the rules of logic, credibility of sensory data, or reliability of memory without a presumption of god? Sorry, but that's a very unsatisfying conclusion, and clearly an incorrect one. A presumption, by definition is made without rational justification, and as such there is no need to accept anything at all in order to make them. Your worldview faces exactly the same errors as any other; it just required additional complexity to reach the same logical dead end of circular reasoning. And thus, like empiricism, it's just an additional assumption that fails to strengthen the system, and is therefore unnecessary.