forum for week of 26 September: skepticism

I personally have to disagree with the statement that most people fold in the face of skepticism. Discuss religion with someone who is devoutly religious sometime and regardless of the fact that skepticism discounts most of the devout believer's arguments they will continue to hold fast or simply denounce you as a servant of Satan. If discussing the existence of God, for example, they will most often quote the Bible which is supposedly the word of God yet within the context of the discussion God's existence has yet to be determined and therefore it is unproven whether or not He has any word but in their belief their arguments are fully valid. Though we may not think of a belief in the existence of God as knowledge it is to the devout believer and so it is a valid example for out discussion. The believer knows God exists just as the conspiracy theorist knows 911 was an inside job. Try using philosophical skepticism on one of those guys.

What is knowledge? The question of this course. We claim that something is not knowledge unless we have evidence or better yet proof but the devout believer, whatever it is they believe, sees proof of his belief everywhere. On the other hand do I really care that 2 + 3 = 5? No. Is that knowledge to me? Not really. It is, rather, an assumed and commonly held fact. What makes it different than knowledge is I don't have to and have never really thought much about it and therefore have never really seen any evidence or proof for it. (I am sure I have I just never really noticed because it is, to me, an inconsequential piece of trivia.) So it is not really knowledge to me but just something I assume to be correct because it is what I am told and do not care about it enough to look into it for myself. This is a topic on which I would admit the skeptics point but it would not really be folding or relenting as I did not really have a starting position of my own anyway.

Whether or not I have five toes or four on my left foot of whether or not I have a physical body at all can be called into doubt when I become convinced that it is quite possible that everything I perceive is either created by my brain or exists in the form I perceive only as my mind's interpretations of a physical world which I could not otherwise comprehend. But what must force my mind to concede that it is possible that nothing I perceive is real? That I might really be sitting in a classroom in Romania at this moment listen to a lecture by some Adam Morton guy and not laying on my bed writing this before going to sleep? In short, why do people relent in the face of skepticism regarding their "knowledge" which is not self-centered (e.i.: scientific knowledge)? We once believed the earth was flat which proved to be wrong. We thought, some time before we were born, that the earth was the center of the universe but is it? Up until sometime in the 1800's people believed the earth could not be more than 6000 years old. Einstein used to have us all convinced that it was impossible to travel faster than a known finite speed defined as the speed of light but wait... . In truth we as humans are aware of the fallibility of so-called knowledge. It is "so-called" because unless we have personally found proof of the belief it is not our own knowledge just something we are taking on authority. In the shadow of the long history of disproven beliefs and theories we admit somewhere inside that everything we think we know may be false and only refuse to openly admit it when it comes to those things we believe about the world or the way it should be that make us happy with ourselves.

In short, people do not agree with skeptics unless the subject matter is something they don't really care about. You can easily convince me there is an animal called a snuffleupagus but you can never convince a Priest to doubt the existence of God no matter what argument you make or how you undermine his arguments. In fact, in his mind you haven't even undermined his arguments. A doubt in the someone's knowledge must be self-derived because to them they have already seen the proof and must see the counter proof in order to doubt.