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On 14-7-2009 7:07, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> On 12-7-2009 8:04, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>> andrel wrote:
>>>> I think the difference is significant. "I don't know" implies that
>>>> you can still look for an answer, whereas "I can't know" means that
>>>> the search ended. The former means that you are open to suggestions
>>>> from others who claim that they know more, whereas the latter is a
>>>> sound basis to build your own ethics.
>>>> I don't like the "I don't care".
>>>
>>> On the contrary, how is "I can't know" a grounds to build anything?
>>
>> Easy. If you are convinced that you can not know if God exists or not
>> (which is what agnosticism is about, all your other examples are
>> irrelevant here), it means that you have to build an ethics that will
>> work in both cases. You can not assume there is someone else that
>> knows better (a god or her representative on earth), nor can you be
>> certain that you won't be judged after death on what you did in your
>> entire life. That means that you have to think about what you are
>> doing and you will have to make the right choice everytime by
>> yourself. With 'right' defined by a much broader spectrum of ethics
>> than that of a single religion. E.g. simply defining another group as
>> non-human won't work. (i.e. if your current social environment allows
>> you to recognize this as an item, but that is a whole different
>> discussion.)
>>
>> Believe me, simply being one in a crowd of atheists or believers is
>> much more simple. (BTW I am not an agnostic, in case you are wondering).
>
> Uh.. But, in that case, you are not basing it on the "unknowability",
> your doing it the same way that you would if no one had ever presented
> the idea that one existed in the first place. You might as well claim
> that you are, "building your system of ethics on a lack of being able to
> know if there is a tea pot in orbit." Its a meaningless statement. Well,
> unless you where describing it to someone that insists that all of
> creation is defined by how many invisible tea pots are orbiting life
> bearing planets, but, then its only meaningful in context of
> "attempting" to explain it to the person making that assertion, which is
> basically the same thing as saying, it is meaningless. lol
I think you missed the point completely. Or perhaps it is something that
you have to understand before you can understand it. i.e. the
philosophical equivalent of the mathematical 'trivial'.
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