by jgnat 38 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
BurnTheShips, you are weaseling out of reason. Do you realize you've replaced one declarative statement with another? Are you willing to go through this exercise with me?
Before we do, are you limiting yourself to empirical skepticism? I just re-read your first post and it seems that way.
Burn
I'm off to take care of some utilitarian things. Be back later.
Does it naturally follow then that all questioning is useless? No.
Of course not. I never said it does. But some questioning would seem to be useless as you yourself note. It occurs to me that the issue becomes: "What type of questioning is useful"? "What type of questioning is useless?"
What do you think?
Burn
Thank you for posting that link, Leolaia. This is where an analysis of burn the ship's declarations would have led us. Just because questioning all sometimes makes skepticism difficult to apply in daily life, does not make skepticism false.
That still leaves the issues in my last post above.
Burn
Burn the Ships, I don't know how far I can go with you on this concept, because we are not sticking to socratic reasoning. You haven't varied from your pattern of throwing out declarative sentences, without questioning yourself their own validity. I am asking you to think differently than you have in the past.
Are you up for it?
Sure I am up for it. But I do not understand what your objection is to the concept that skepticism, if the concept is carried to its logical conclusion, must ultimately be self denying. You may call it declarative, but it is self evident. Can we question the questioning? Can we be skeptical about skepticism?
Burn
For a skeptic, very little is self evident. All has to be tested. You have made an erroneous conclusion based on threadbare information. Your ship has holes in it, and it is taking on water.
I'll use an analogy to make my point. A man building his house takes extra effort to make sure his foundation is sure, since everything else builds from that. So he'll measure twice, he'll test it twenty ways times Sunday. A sure foundation is a pretty good indication the rest of the building will go well from there.
What if a man erects a foundation with little care? He saw other foundations just like it, and outwardly, his looks the same. He starts to build the rest of his house. He begins to see flaws and cracks, but assumes other causes. He attacks those other causes. He even goes so far as to complain to the local weatherman, since the weatherman's predicted storm destroyed an entire side of his argument. Even with oustanding effort, his house still refuses to stand. Why? The foundation wasn't sure.
The same is for a skeptic's reasoning. It is true that at some point one has to keep building, but for the skeptic, the foundation must be sure first.
