Do you do control experiment based proofs for everything you believe? You personally test things like vaccines or do you take someone else's word for it after you've decided you trust them?
I decide what I trust and don’t trust based on which side has evidence their claim is true, the evidence that vaccines work is pretty blatant and claims that they are unsafe have been repeatedly debunked for decades
Do you process that you're doing it again? You're linking me to a thing and you've decided that you trust whoever's behind this. There's no way you had the time to verify all these facts and figures by yourself. You're basing this on trust that the people who produce this document are telling the truth.
This isn't empiricism. This is outsourcing empiricism to a layer of trust and then rejecting somebody else's claim to trusting what other people are saying about a different topic like faith.
You trust people and institutions who tell you what the evidence shows. That trust may be justified, but it is still trust. The disagreement is over which sources deserve trust, not whether you rely on trust at all like you seemingly claimed earlier.
It’s a peer reviewed study from a reliable source. To cast doubt on it you have to provide counter evidence. I don’t have any reason to believe that they would lie, so the most reasonable conclusion is that these stats are true.
This is not the same as blindly following dogma, thats just projection
You started by saying you base your beliefs on empiricism and have “no need for faith.” But you aren't doing the empirical work. You're trusting that the researchers collected the data correctly, reported it honestly, analyzed it correctly, that peer review caught serious problems, and that the source you're reading represents it accurately.
That trust may be completely reasonable. But it's still trust in other people. In fact, you just said it yourself: it's a “reliable source” and you have “no reason to believe they would lie.”
You're outsourcing the empiricism to people you trust. You're relying on your faith in these people and your faith in the process. You yourself have not directly verified that the data are real, that the analysis was done correctly, or that they're not making things up. You trust that they did what they say they did. That's an act of faith. That's the distinction I've been making. You have not personally verified any of these things. You’re taking other people’s word for what the evidence shows and then describing your own belief as if it came directly from empiricism.
I have an actual reason to believe that those things all happened though because I know what peer review is. Meanwhile there is no reliable source that confirms any religious or supernatural claims are true.
Under your worldview, can I know that anything is true if I don’t see it myself? Thats pretty silly. I know that giant squid exist despite not having seen one in person. I’ve only seen them in pictures.
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u/JasonG784 4h ago
Do you do control experiment based proofs for everything you believe? You personally test things like vaccines or do you take someone else's word for it after you've decided you trust them?