@Frank Apisa,
As much as I'd love the gay get-together about old times in Abuzz (no, not really), it is probably best if we indeed get back to topic.
The study of "how do you know what you know?" is known as methodology. You will find, however, that most libraries no longer have a methodology section. They consider it a waste of time, as do atheists, which is why atheists like to make blanket statements about what they "know" about reality.
They have also largely abandoned philosophy at least according to their own claim, as per Hawking's "philosophy is dead" statement. Which is rather funny, actually, since he immediately launches into philosophy (rather than science) to defend most of the ideas in his books about science.
But let's move back a paragraph to methodology. It has survived, mainly by being merged by religious people into the field of epistemology. Methodology is more about the approaches you use to get to your knowledge, while epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. Yet, because epistemology largely originates in religion, some like Hawking, have taken the stance of
ontological relativism, they idea that you can just be flaky and assert whatever the hell reality you want.
Consider this then:
1. I do NOT know for certain that I was born on July 20, 1982.
2. I do NOT know that my parents actually are my parents, or just adopted me.
(I do not know either of these things, because like most children, I did not witness my own birth, and I have childhood amnesia. Neither do you)
3. We actually do know two + two is four. We know this because of real world application. I gather two groups of two together, and I find I have four. But if we're either redefining the system as something other than the classically used base 10, or changing the definition of "four" then all bets are off.
4. You tell me that you know that you do not know whether or not there is a God. Which is fine, you are a flake, and I have proven that the first two statements you are wrongly certain about, and the third you are so willing to shift your original position that you mention bases other than the one that actually works. But if you are unsure whether or not you can believe in God, you certainly cannot make this statement for other people. After all, if you accept Hawking as anything other than a
crippled hack who made a bunch of half-baked theories, then we must accept ontological relativism. If so, then in my reality space aliens exist and in yours there might be flying monkeys, and all study of reality is basically worthless because Leadfoot's is different from mine and so is yours and Annointed's.
Ergo... either Hawking is wrong, there is one reality, and you haven't figured it out yet. Or both of us are equally right, and you can't impose your agnosticism on me. This is like Pascal's Wager. In either case, you kinda sorta lose.
