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Normally, I'd assume that was an ironic witticism; here, I'm not so sure...
Yers... Presumably, he's absolutely correct because it's a truth, and it's a truth because God said it, and what God says is, by definition, truth.
That's exactly my point. A truth that is true by definition is tautologous, empty of meaning and value. In the case of the word of God, the absence of verification or validation, and the multiple competing claims for it, also make it arbitrary and uncertain.
That's a non-sequitur for a non-believer. To a non-believer, the importance of God to believers is to provide a sense of certainty.
Once could equally say that only the truly lost and adrift would cling to tautologous definitions for certainty.
I was referring to verifying some text as God's word; not verifying God's word itself, which is obviously unverifiable.
Analytic truths are verified by the context of their definition; synthetic truths are verifiable in their correspondence to the facts, to reality - in as much as reality itself is verifiable. As I said, the 'truth' you're talking about has quite different semantics; it looks like an analytic truth, but has no verifiable context, which is why anyone can claim anything to be the word of God, and every believer has their own version and God concept - which, interestingly, appear to be based their own concept of self (mainly women) or parents (mainly men) [see Concepts of God].
I'm more interested in the sort of truths that verifiably correspond to the facts, to reality.
I'm more interested in the sort of truths that verifiably correspond to the facts, to reality.
And 'pick up a god'? you make it sound like they hang out on street corners, soliciting punters...
So not only is it arbitrary truth by fiat, with no necessary correspondence to reality, but no-one knows what it means... I think you need a different word for it.
There are literally hundreds of doctrines out there. Did you choose yours carefully from the most popular five or six, or are you following whichever random one you grew up with?
I think I'm already taken - by the god of natural philosophy (or perhaps that should be the patron saint of natural philosophy, patron saints being the Catholic substitute for the minor gods of Roman polytheism). Doctrine - there's an objective external reality, that has some consistency in its behaviour, and can be tested (measured/observed). Be curious, question and doubt; there are no certainties.
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I know. I was making the point by strained analogy - a homage to Einstein when he explained relativity to aetherist physicists shortly after he published it. He told them (paraphrased), "There is no such thing as the aether as you know it, there is only spacetime; if you must have an aether, you can call spacetime the new aether, but it's not at all like the aether you're used to."
It depends what you use it for and how you use it, what kind of saturated oil you're comparing it with (and various other factors). The public want simple soundbites of information that are easy to digest, like their oils; the real world doesn't always work like that.
Proud? No; that's just how the world appears to be. Quantum mechanics is stochastic; you might as well ask if I am proud to have gravity.
No. Reality doesn't care whether you think it's a good thing or not, and the goal of science is knowledge and understanding - to explain the world we observe in terms of useful models. Certainty in science is expressed in degrees, or levels, of confidence that may get close to 100%, but never reach it (expressions of absolute certainty are generally either analytic, or shorthand for 'beyond reasonable doubt' or an uncertainty too small to consider). They are also expressed within specified contexts, bounds, or limits.
I don't see why you're disappointed; the world is the way it is, and that's what science tries to discover.
Facts are facts. They are only good or bad in relation to some context (and some moral or ethical judgement).
Unknown & uncertainty are just words; they're not facts until they refer to some particular real-world context; then they may be judged good or bad from some viewpoint. If you were hiding from a terrorist wanting to shoot you, would it be a not-good thing if your hiding place was unknown to him? If you were wrongly accused of murder would you consider it good that the eyewitnesses were honestly certain you did it (this has happened)? or would it be good if they were uncertain that it was you?
I was taught that it was the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil' (which might mean the tree of all knowledge, depending on your interpretation), though what it has to do with the moral value of certainty, I don't know. It seems to me that if we all knew what was GOOD, the world would be a better place. I suspect it's another homonym for which you have your own definition.
Exactly. The facts themselves are simply correspondences with reality, they have no moral or ethical dimension in and of themselves; but we can judge the facts according to our moral & ethical viewpoint in the relevant context.
Unfortunately, this is neither a logical nor a coherent statement.
