Okay...let's see...where was I...

Frank Apisa wrote:

real life wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:

There is a mountain of stuff that cannot be known.

To state that something cannot be known would require Omniscience. Are you omniscient, Frank?

A question like this from someone like you...who pretends to know what the nature of REALITY is...to someone like me who acknowledges that he does not know nor can he make a meaningful guess from the evidence available.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You gotta be shytin' me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


There is a mountain of stuff that cannot be know.

No omniscience needed to make that statement.

Grow a brain...then come back. It will be more fun.

To state "I do not know" as in the first part of your post, is quite reasonable.

To assert "It cannot be known" , as in the second part, would require Omniscience and is self contradictory.

Get it?

I know you do. But it is difficult for you to see the Sacred Cow of the Agnostics fall so hard.

Without Unknowability as your defense, what are you left with?

I dunno.

It is possible to state that something is impossible to know.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem both clearly demonstrate that there are things that are simply un-knowable. This knowledge is quite concrete.

Thalion wrote:

It is possible to state that something is impossible to know.

Obviously it is possible to state such. Frank stated it. That much is plain.

However, stating it does not make it so.

The Sacred Cow of the Agnostics is their assertion of Unknowability.

To accurately assert that "such and such cannot be known" , (for example as in a statement such as "It is not possible to know if there is a God.") would require that the one stating it is omniscient.

i.e. he would have to have full knowledge of all that is known and full knowledge of all that is possible to know if he were to accurately assert the absence and the impossibility, in anything that exists or can exist, of the possibility of knowing the thing.

The Agnostic's position of Unknowability is therefore contradictory. First , because the one stating the position does not have the condition (Omniscience ) required to accurately maintain it; and second -- if he was Omniscient then obviously he would not have to be agnostic ( a- "not" gnosis - " to know" ) about anything.

The Agnostic vainly asserts "I don't know, but I know it can't be known. " We will accept the first part, i.e. that he does not know, and leave it at that.

Neologist says If God exists, His existence should be obvious and explainable even to the most unsophisticated. (Compare Matthew 11:25) When we overintellectualize, we risk overlooking.


Is Neologist offering this as proof of his non-existence? I would accept that, more or less.

The cheeseparing nature of the above argument is somewhat beside the point. Agnostics can moderate what they say to: 'In the light of my (meagre) knowledge, this is unknowable, I and many others cannot see a way in which it can be known.' They tend to say that it is unknowable but the provisos are there, surely. They don't preclude a state in which it could be known. That's the essence of agnosticism, IMHO (proviso well in place).

Mankind will never truly be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Frank: Did one of your posts get deleted? I could have sworn there was another one. I wish the moderators would let us know that they're doing these things so I don't think I'm insane later.

Regarding "knowability", I was simply saying that the argument that saying that something is impossible to know reflects its own impossibility on itself making the statement impossible does not make sense. I believe that everything is knowable. This might sound like it contradicted my post that referred to Heisenberg and Godel, but as long as you were treating reality in a Newtonian fashion (things are corporeally real or corporeally unreal -- consciousness plays no role), those two theorems dispute your argument. Any intellectual has to realize that both modern philosophy and modern physics have refuted this Newtonian notion of the world. Hegel does a good job of refuting Skepticism in his Introduction to the Phenomenology. The meaning of Heisenberg's and Godel's theorems change slightly in a more modern interpretation (Heisenberg - it is not that we don't know the position or velocity, they simply do not exist -- this is in fact the correct interpretation of the theory). So my point (getting there) is that God is knowable, but many common conceptions of God based in a pre-modern framework result in fallacies such as the one I mentioned. The entire omniscience "problem" concerning God is such an example, a rather absurd topic that I debated at length about a year ago before I realized this...Spell check used for clarity; but still unclear.

Can we logically say that anything CANNOT be known? Or does one have to be a god...as Life suggests, to assert such a thing?

My response is….of course we can logically say that certain things "cannot" be known.

I gave an example of one.

If there is nothing to REALITY but what we see and experience here (no god...no spiritual world...no anything besides what is perceived)...we can never KNOW that to be the case.