The Tasteless Man (experience, atheist, faith, God, science)

[YawgmothsAvatar]

Sorry to jump in the middle of this, but I saw this:

Well, the concept of God will end up being the inescapable conclusion. You say we can only know anything for sure up to 99 percent. I would say that any knowledge that is not 100 percent might as well be 0 percent.

and thought that I might actually explode if I failed to reply to it.

We cannot be one hundred percent sure of ANYTHING.

The reason for this is that inductive reasoning is flawed. Inductive reasoning is basically taking a specific example of something and applying it a more general category. The way you do this is observing it repeatedly. An example of inductive reasoning is this:

I hold a pencil out in the air and let go of it. It drops to the ground. I do this again. And again. I conclude that whenever I let go of a pencil, it will drop.

You are taking the specific incidence (You letting go of the pencil) and applying its results to a more general category (Whenever you let go of the pencil).

A proof (not in the evidence sense of the word—the logical sense of the word) might look like this:

Cause X (Letting go of the pencil) has been proven to produce effect Y (The pencil drops)
Uniformity of Nature states that causes in the past produce the same effects in the future

Therefore, if cause X occurs, effect Y will follow

Seems sound, right? Well, it isn't. Here is why:

Inductive reasoning relies on Uniformity of Nature. This, in a nutshell, is the assumption that if something happens enough in the past (The pencil drops when I let go of it), it will continue to do the same thing in the future. So, how do you prove Uniformity of Nature?

Cause Q (The gradual rotation of the Earth) has been proven to always produce effect A(The sun rises in the east) in the past
Cause Q has continued to produce effect A

Cause T (Mixing sodium and water) has been proven to always produce effect G (Burnt eyebrows)
Cause T has continued to produce effect G

[insert more examples here]

Therefore, whenever a cause is proven to produce an effect in the past, it will continue to produce that effect in the future

You guessed it--that is inductive reasoning. But inductive reasoning relies on the Uniformity of Nature, which relies on inductive reasoning. Thus, the very concept of inductive reasoning is circular logic.

This makes a hopeless problem—we use inductive reasoning for almost everything. If you let that logical fallacy not use inductive reasoning, you might stop assuming that the ground will support your weight, or that not jumping in front of moving trucks is a good way to stay alive. You couldn't trust any of your senses, because just because they were right before doesn't mean they will be right now.

The conclusion is that we simply cannot require a one hundred percent assurance to make a judgment.

Sorry to go off on such an off topic tangent. I just had to get that out of me.