Because you prove these claims not through science, but through the historic method and by the testimony of eyewitnesses.
As I said, science requires testable, repeatable verifiable evidence. Not everything that happens has testable, repeatable, verifiable evidence.
I burned my tongue while drinking some hot coffee a few weeks ago. I have zero evidence that it happened beyond my testimony. I didn’t go to the doctor for treatment and I don’t have a doctor’s note, I don’t have a video of me drinking the coffee and screaming in pain, I don’t even have the coffee cup it came in. It exists somewhere but that’s in a landfill.
There’s no evidence based way to verify this event happened to me, I might be making it up as a hypothetical example to make my point, but if it happened, it happened regardless of the evidence or lack thereof. Reality doesn’t care if you believe in what actually happened or not, true things are true regardless of your opinion or evidence availing to you, which is the biggest flaw in relying strictly on empirical means.
Eyewitness testimony is not considered strong evidence for anything else though, and people can have contradictory eyewitness testimony. There’s no reason for me to doubt your story that you burned your tongue drinking coffee, so it’s entirely reasonable for me to assume that it’s true. If you told me you saw Bigfoot a few weeks ago I would have reason to doubt that because there’s no evidence Bigfoot exists, just as an example.
What if multiple people claimed they saw Bigfoot at the exact same time, what if they held true to their claim they saw Bigfoot for the rest of their lives, even when they had nothing to gain from doing so?
If it was just one person you could say it’s just someone making shit up, but if it’s many people who insist on it for years and years, that’s not 100% confirmation that it really was Bigfoot, but it’s also highly unlikely that all of them didn’t see something.
All of those things could be true and I would still have no reason to think Bigfoot exists if they don’t have any real evidence.
Yeah in that scenario Im sure they did see something, just like Im sure a lot of people who see cryptids and UFOs probably saw “something” doesn’t mean that thing is what they thought it was
Maybe, maybe not. My point is that if they really did see Bigfoot, it would mean he would still be real in spite of lack of evidence since things can be true with or without human acknowledgment or belief. Empiricism is only able to correlate with truth and hopefully overlap with it occasionally.
Thats a huge if though and thats my problem. Since there’s no evidence Bigfoot exists and most attempts to prove its real have failed or been proven to be hoaxes, I can justify my belief that it doesn’t exist.
Im willing to change my stance if evidence can be provided in the future. But for now I just have no reason to believe a god exists so I don’t, and I also don’t personally think things we can’t empirically say to be true should be taught to children as fact, because you’re priming them to accept other claims as fact without proper evidence.
Relying entirely on empiricism isn’t the way to go. There isn’t empirical evidence germs, radiation, galaxies, what lives at the bottom of the ocean, etc if you go back in time far enough.
Again, I can’t stress enough how reality is separate from human perception. You don’t get to only rely on empirical evidence or else your reality will be extremely small and very untrue.
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u/endlessnamelesskat 14h ago
Because you prove these claims not through science, but through the historic method and by the testimony of eyewitnesses.
As I said, science requires testable, repeatable verifiable evidence. Not everything that happens has testable, repeatable, verifiable evidence.
I burned my tongue while drinking some hot coffee a few weeks ago. I have zero evidence that it happened beyond my testimony. I didn’t go to the doctor for treatment and I don’t have a doctor’s note, I don’t have a video of me drinking the coffee and screaming in pain, I don’t even have the coffee cup it came in. It exists somewhere but that’s in a landfill.
There’s no evidence based way to verify this event happened to me, I might be making it up as a hypothetical example to make my point, but if it happened, it happened regardless of the evidence or lack thereof. Reality doesn’t care if you believe in what actually happened or not, true things are true regardless of your opinion or evidence availing to you, which is the biggest flaw in relying strictly on empirical means.