Underlying Philosophy

As far as I can tell, there is no fundamental starting point for atheists - unless you want to say that being born is a fundamental starting point.

Nobody is claiming that science is the absolute authority in determining truth.

I expect that those who are platonist mathematicians might disagree with that.

I'm not sure, but that might apply to deism.

All you need is a persistent curiosity.

I'm not sure what you think that proves.The laws of logic are a human construct. Where's the problem?

I cannot tell what is newly added and what was there before. I think that refutes your claims about the reliability of memory (as in Message 360), since obviously my memory is not reliable enough to tell me what I read before your additions.In any case, your additions don't help. Logic is still a human construct.You seem to think that logic is some sort of miraculous magic that was handed down. It isn't. When we say that logic is a human construct, we are not saying that humans invented such a miraculous magic. Rather, we are saying that natural language is a human construct, and logic works because of the ways that people organize their natural language naming conventions and their describing conventions.Oh, and logic doesn't actually work all that well anyway. See for example, the Sorites paradoxes as described in Wikipedia or in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Logic works particularly well in mathematics, because mathematics uses its own specialized language that is structured so that logic will work reliably.

This is an excellent example of why people criticize religion. It provides easy answers (as in "God did it") that turn out to be of no practical use. It is well known that human memory is unreliable.
Reliability of self-report data.
Human Memory is Unreliable and so is Eyewitness Testimony.
New study shows false memories affect behavior.

We tend to organize the world into an hierarchical tree structure, and logic is the natural way of systematically searching or traversing a tree. That can only be applied to nature if we first apply the name "a" to something in nature. How we connect our symbols to reality is part of language. That's an example of what I mean by organizing into a hierarchical tree. It is a formal way of saying that "if I put 'q' on the 'p' branch of the tree, then if I go down the 'p' branch of the tree I should find 'q'.

Meaning is complex, and "self-aware" and "love" are particularly difficult examples. What people are expressing, when they use those terms, depends on contextual considerations. No easy definition is possible, as far as I can tell. I am not my brain. Yes, some people talk that way, though I think it a confusing way of talking. I'd be cautious about that "abstract entity" idea. Your soul is an abstract entity, but you are not. That does not seem to make a lot of sense.People at evcforum might reasonably see you as an abstract entity, because they only know of you from forum posts. People who know you as flesh and blood would not think of you as abstract. You control you.

Let us know when you begin I hope that you were not saying that the post to which I am replying did those things, for I failed to see them there. If you are able to show that there is some evidentiary basis for metaphysics, I will look forward to that exposition. What does "neutral" mean here? I don't have a theory of being. Yet I seem to be able to know things. So there must be something wrong with that claim. In my way of looking at things, objects and data are epistemic issues. As a mathematician, I am inclined to think of mathematics as a system of thought. And, indeed, mathematics does have a foundation. However, the foundations of mathematics are only a little over 100 years old, whereas mathematics itself is thousands of years old. So it seemed to manage without foundations, and was rather successful at that.Consider me skeptical of your claimed need for foundations. That's a strange request, given that neither philosophy nor theology can come up with a standard of truth.Science is not a truth seeking enterprise. It is a pragmatic enterprise. It does come up with its own standards of truth (measuring standards, for example), but this is mostly a matter of adopting the term "truth" as a name for its own standards. I don't assume that. As far as I can tell, the evidence is against it. The surface of the moon is very different from the surface of the earth. And it is probably a lot hotter in the sun than anywhere on earth. It seems to me that nature is lumpy, not uniform.

Thanks for that. I have never been able to see any point to ontology, except perhaps as a basis for ridiculous arguments for the existence of God. It's refreshing to see something other than the usual references to ontology.

It only assumes that the verb "to show" has to do with the use of our senses.

Dogs, cats and other creatures seem to be able to learn with first knowing anything. If "knowing something" means being able to express assertions in language, the dogs and cats can do quite well without ever knowing anything (in that linguistic sense). Their knowledge is in the form of abilities.By the time a child begins to acquire knowledge, he already has acquired a lot of abilities to deal with his world. Those abilities, rather than any metaphysical suppositions, are the starting point as he begins to acquire knowledge that can be expressed linguistically. The child implicitly knows how to use his senses, long before he knows how to express a statement such as "we have five senses." Again, the abilities are there, without metaphysical presumptions. I can't comment on the "neutral" part, because I have no idea what you mean by that.If you have ever tried to chase word definitions in a dictionary, you would have found that they don't really refer back at all. The dictionary definitions turn out to be circular. What they really depend on, is a reservoir of shared knowledge, a good part of which was acquired by a child before he had a language. In other words, there's a core of our knowledge that is in the form of abilities, rather than expressible as statements. And to the extent that we refer back, we end up referring back to those abilities.I'm in agreement with Dr Adequate. I don't see that we need any metaphysical knowledge, and I don't see that it is possible to have any metaphysical knowledge other than by making stuff up. Who would change it? And if somebody tried to change it, who would take him seriously? Because we find them very useful as they are. So why would we change something that we find very useful, unless we could change them to something even more useful? They are human inventions. I don't know. As a mathematician, I can't say that I have ever found a use for such a thing as 'the class of "twoness"'. I would be a bit concerned that reliance on such a class might lead to the Russell paradox. It's the same as with logic. There's no reason to change something useful, unless you can change it to something even more useful. If you look at the history of numbers, you will find that they have changed, and each time for the better. We went from natural numbers to fractions, to integers (negative and positive), to real numbers, to complex numbers. Perhaps we should toss in quaternions for good measure. And then there are the p-adic numbers, the modular numbers. If change is evidence of human invention, then there is a whole lot of such evidence.

There is no such thing as ultimate truth. If there is no such thing as ultimate truth, then nothing is being denied.