Sure, but what is your justification for defining knowledge that way?
No, we have faith in our epistemology. You cannot empirically prove that there is nothing outside the four dimensions of spacetime, what we call ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’.
I’m not convinced I need to justify a definition? We use definitions for the purpose of communication, first of all.
But I do have reasons for defining knowledge the way I do. My primary one is that I think, in normal every day speech, when we say we know something we usually mean we have good reasons for believing it(that it is not just a guess, or a hunch, or mere speculation). So when I define knowledge to require evidence-based justification, I am trying to give the colloquial usage of the word the justification I think it requires.
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I don’t see how.
You cannot empirically prove that there is nothing outside the four dimensions of spacetime, what we call ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’.
I agree. I also don’t claim that there is nothing outside of spacetime. I don’t claim there is something, or that there isn’t. If you ask me what I think there’s outside spacetime I will simply answer “I don’t know”. If you then tell me you think God sits around out there, I’m going to ask how you know that. And if all you can tell me is you get a warm feeling inside when you sing, or that it says so in some book your parents read to you when you were young, I’m not going to agree that you know it.
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That last sure looks like an attempt at deprecation. Let me refresh your memory by reiterating the Rich Stearns account as to how God is active in his people’s lives. It is just one among innumerable scores (I have scores of my own) in the lives of Christians over the centuries.
But you’re doing more than simply saying that “knowledge requires evidence” or “knowledge requires good reasons.” Rather, you’re saying saying that “knowledge requires empirical evidence.” What is your justification for that?
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If intuition, or pure reason without empirical evidence, or guesses, or dreams, or blind faith in scriptural authorities, could reliably be shown to produce true or useful answers in the same way empirical evidence does, then I’d be fine saying that those also produce knowledge.
But they don’t reliably produce that. They’re terrible at it. Which is why they’re worth next to nothing in court, and in science, and you wouldn’t accept them as justification for any claim other than the religion you happen to already believe.
How would you test whether water divination works? Or homeopathic treatments? You wouldn’t test it with your intuition, or a purely abstract deductive/inductive argument, and you wouldn’t test it by just accepting the testimony of someone who just claims it works. You’d test it empirically. You find out if it works by actually using it in the real world. Not in dreams, not by guessing, not by hunches, or abstract arguments. These “alternative ways of knowing” that were listed above aren’t that, because they don’t work. If they worked we’d use them in science too, it would be stupid not to. But they don’t.
If the word knowledge is to carry any weight, then it can’t (shouldn’t) be based on things that consistently fail to give good results.
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Just because something is evidence, does not mean it is strong evidence. It can be flimsy evidence, or even misleading evidence. This characterization can include testimony, personal experience, intuition, or aggregate opinion.
It is also possible it is not evidence at all. It is completely without merit, and can be utterly dismissed. I’m merely making the point that evidence does not have to be fully persuasive to be evidence. The question of what is evidence is not fully equivalent to how do we know truth, or is that a pedantic distinction without a difference?
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Rich Stearns’ tenure as CEO of World Vision is continuing to give good results. And God’s providence as evidenced in George Müller’s life, too, gave good results for orphans (also a primary focus of World Vision, btw).
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But how do you know that science gives “good results”? How do you know that science is a reliable way of knowing?
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By comparing it’s performance to the “other ways of knowing”. They do much worse. Usually they do no better than random guessing. If you want to know what’s on the other side of the card, flip it over and look.
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You missed my point: God’s providence gives good results.
I think you’ve lost track of what we were discussing here, which was epistemology and how we gain knowledge. Not whether you can find examples of religious people helping others.
You’ve lost track of, or rather, never understood, that God’s providence is real and that testimony to it is a valid way of knowing.
Believers of every contradictory world religion will give examples of how they give religious interpretations to both negative and positive events in their lives. That’s not evidence those religions are true or that God/space-aliens/The Force exists. You can find some great significance in everything if you’re motivated enough to do so. I remember I used to do this myself when I was religious. I’d some times take something as mundane as a sudden gust of wind to be God speaking to me. Which is of course ridiculous, the wind blows regardless. Eventually I realized I was just making ad-hoc rationalizations about real-world events that I actually had no good reason to think God was behind. I just interpreted it that way.
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Is that the way you read the Rich Stearns account? A series of multiple separate improbable events that collectively infuse obvious meaning? You can excuse yourself by dismissing them as ad-hoc and join the ranks of denialists, but I find that disingenuous.
That doesn’t answer the question. When you compare, and science says A and some other method says B, how do you know science is right?
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I believe I have answered this already. Since I define knowledge as that which has good empirical justification, then if that other method B doesn’t have good empirical justification, I’m putting my money on science.
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Any series of multiple events is improbable. And that whole thing reads rather fatuous to be quite honest. Like a crappy novelist wrote it. I got Chick-tract feelings from reading that. Reading it was like talking to a phone salesman or advertiser. Someone wants my money.
You can excuse yourself by dismissing them as ad-hoc and join the ranks of denialists, but I find that disingenuous.
I don’t believe I need to excuse anything. It is all ad-hoc rationalization. It’s a textbook example. The events happened, and then people interpreted them to have meaning, and I am not persuaded by being called either a denialist or disengenuous.
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You would be badly mistaken.