Wyrdsmyth

To this, I can only raise an ironic eyebrow.

I think you are missing something fundamental. Sagan's statement here is not a claim, but more like an axiom. He is not making a claim about an existant. He is saying that we can't really include untestable claims about existants in our body of knowledge, although we can include them in our myths, anecdotes or inspirational stories. If there is no way to verify them or falsify them, then science must pass them by. They are scientifically worthless, worthless when it comes to scientific definitions of knowledge, but not necessarily worthless in the sense of being inspirational or valued by people.

Okay, this time you get more than an ironical eyebrow: I'm just curious -- is it more or less silly than the talking ass of the Book of Numbers?

You seem to deliberately be missing the point. Don't get bogged down in the details, or comparing the supernatural qualities of gods and dragons. That's not the point. The point is, for every question by the skeptic, the "believer" in the invisible, undetectable entity always has a glib answer for why the claim cannot be tested.

theophilus

That's an interesting concept. Assuming you are an atheist, with means you are a materrialist/naturalist, perhaps you can explain what sensory experience instructed you about "epistemic consequences."

theophilus

Don't make unsubstantiated generalizations.
I have never said they couldn't be tested. I have simply challenged atheists to explain how their admittedly limited testing mechanisms, limited to empirical inquiry, can test immaterial entities. I'd bemore than glad to have you respond.

BTW, is "Don't get bogged down in the details" a scientific axiom?

theophilus

lpetrich

There are some other well-known versions of Carl Sagan's garage-dragon conundrum:

Philip Gosse's Omphalos theory of created appearance. He believed that the Universe had been created with the appearance of being in existence much longer than the time it had actually existed in: the Biblical ~6000 years. This theory's name, the Greek word for "navel", was inspired by the conundrum of whether or not Adam and Eve had had navels, since neither of those two had been born in the usual way.

The "brain in a vat" puzzler. How can you be sure that you are nothing but a brain in a vat that is being fed inputs composed by some supercomputers?

The recent "Matrix" movies.

Clutch

Yet again: your library must contain some basic books in the philosophy of science. Why should it be so difficult to convince you to learn the first thing about it, before you embarrass yourself with such nonsense?

You are confusing (among other things) atheism, materialism, and sensory empiricism. Even some introductory readings on the web can clear this up, at the level of your confusions.
This is just a non-sequitur. Whatever you have in mind -- if anything -- by "epistemological assumptions", you seem just to be stringing words together about materialism.

Why the obfuscation? Apparently as an evasion.

theophilus earlier: But I pointed out that this is false -- indeed, that it's obviously false from the most cursory survey of the history of philosophy and science.

theophilus now:What remarkable revisionist history!

Please, learn at least the very basics about this stuff. It takes some work, but it's much more rewarding than your present course of obfuscation and revisionism.

CX

Minor niggle here, but being an atheist doesn't necessarily entail beign a materialist. A regular on my other forum is a Buddhist Monk. He is most definitely an atheist, but rejects materialism.

bd-from-kg

Clutch:

I was disappointed that you ignored completely my ingenious refutation of your “research programmes” argument, which took some time to come up with. But so be it; let’s move on.

Please. Eval is my idea; I get to define it. A disjunction won’t work because there are lots of cases where more than one principle applies. A conjunction will work if we preface each rule (if necessary) with a statement of the conditions under which it’s applicable.

Actually you don’t have to assume Eval is complete, or even that the guidelines are absolutely precise. All that has to be assumed is that Eval is complete and clear enough to allow for empirical evaluation of the guidelines that constitute Eval itself, if such a thing is possible in principle. (If it’s impossible in general to empirically evaluate such principles, it would be very strange if Sagan’s principle happened to be one of the “empirically evaluable” ones. And not very interesting, since I take it that your position is that guidelines for evaluating empirical claims are in general empirically evaluable.)

That doesn’t help. In order to determine empirically whether a principle (i.e., one of the guidelines in Eval) “works”, you’d need to have some facts about the “real world” to go on. But almost all such “facts” are themselves conclusions based on evidence. And to know whether they’re rationally justified conclusions you’d have to appeal to Eval.

Eventually you get back to your own actual sensory perceptions (which I’ll admit for now as facts that are not conclusions, and hence do not require appeal to Eval to justify accepting them as evidence). But your sensory perceptions do not include guidelines on when the evidence rationally justifies a conclusion. You have to have such guidelines from the very start before you can make any progress i.e., before you can know what to counts as “facts” besides your own sensory perceptions.

So without Eval you can’t even get any facts (beyond the pitifully inadequate pool of your own perceptions) to test the principle with. But let’s ignore this for now and suppose that you have somehow acquired a bunch of facts and want to test the principle. How do you know which of your facts (if any) are even relevant? How do you know which ones tend to confirm and which to disconfirm the principle? How do you know how much evidence is “enough” to justify the conclusion that it “works” ? Why, by appealing to Eval, of course! This is all transparently circular.

Nonsense. It’s as circular as anything can be.

Then how are you justifying it? And what are you doing?

That’s not even enough to show that the principle is consistent. (A principle may entail immediately that it’s valid, yet yield logically incompatible conclusions in other ways.) It certainly isn’t enough to show that it’s valid. For example, for many people the principle “Believe it if it appeals to you” is very appealing, and hence “validates” itself. That is, if we simply “hold it to its own standard” it passes with flying colors.

Now you’re not even making sense. “Science should work” is not a guideline for determining when a conclusion is justified by the evidence. It’s a value judgment. How would one go about determining whether a value judgment “works”? The question is meaningless.

I’m similarly unable to make sense of the remainder of your post, so I’ll refrain from further comment.

theophilus

You're equivocating. Budhists may be non-theistic, i.e., the do not believe in a personal deity, but they are supernaturalists and hence, not materialists.

If you harbor such qualifications, you need to clarify and explain.

Wyz_sub10

I think that is exactly what CX said to begin with - atheism does not imply materialism. I'm unsure of what distinction you are trying to make?