Here is Jimmy Stephens response to the same man from my previous post. Here are his thoughts:

Your questions seemed like contorted, flowery pseudo-intellectual word games crafted to trip up atheists.

And this preface isn’t flowery or lacking charity at all. :rolling_eyes:
My epistemological standard is correct because it works. . .
What sane and sober person thinks otherwise? What a useless standard.

Science and the scientific method is that standard.
Categorical error alert! By the very nature of the case, science does not answer or even ask the fundamental questions of epistemology. For example, “How do I know induction is a rational form of inference?”
My worldview is fluid and open to reassessment and revision. The standards I have are. . .under constant reassessment. . .
Is it open to being unfluid and unopen to reassessment? If so, then you’d have to be open to the idea you were never open in the first place, which is incoherent. If not, then you’d have to admit that some things aren’t open to reassessment, abandoning your worldview. Either way, your worldview is in trouble.
I do see a problem where the claim, “science/scientific method is the only reliable standard for knowledge” cannot be proven by science. Worse, this claim would engage in a fallacious circular reasoning (appealing to science to prove science). It’s the straw man that’s created to makes it look that way. Science is not a “claim”, it’s a system, a method. We don’t “prove science with science”. Rather we validate hypotheses (Predictions based on observation) as facts using the scientific method. And if a scientific outcome is wrong, guess which system you would employ to prove it is wrong and correct it? That would be science.
All this means is that the domain of science does not overlap with fundamental questions of epistemology. Your response, @ARIF 🌃, is essentially to say, “Instead of providing a cogent epistemological framework, let’s just ignore life’s most basic questions and be labrats.”
As Aron Ra puts it, “If you know it, you can show it.”
Yes, so perhaps you can show how unbelief is rational. We’ll come back to this quote.

The fact that you are reading this over the internet on a phone or computer is proof enough of its truthfulness.
This is patent question begging. That it is rational to believe we are reading things over internet, on the computer apart from believing Christian Theism is what needs to be shown. That the scientific enterprise is possible apart from Christian Theism is the very claim in question. So far it hasn’t been shown. Does it follow then that you don’t know that you can know anything without Christian Theism? If we’re following Aron Ra, looks like it.

Science, itself, demonstrates the truthfulness of this standard.
On your view, no reason has been given why science has resulted in operating computers, the internet, these conversations, or even your belief in your own epistemology as opposed to such things being the result of an erratic fairy goddess who waves her wand and spontaneously causes events. That science is even a rational enterprise needs to be shown in the first place, else – as you yourself implied – if it can’t be shown, it isn’t known.
To understand the Bible, even if we would grant that it is from god, you have to use your own mind and rational, just like any other human being, to understand it.
If you grant that the Bible is from God, then you’ve granted that God has designed the human mind to recognize the Bible on the occasion of hearing/reading it. If you grant that the Bible is from God, then you’ve granted that it is inspired, therefore capable of causing and justifying belief in and of itself.

Only if you beg the question and assume that the Bible is merely an ordinary book without any special properties granted by divine inspiration could you pose the limits of human reason as a problem for interpreting or discerning the religious accuracy of the Bible.
Empiricism has resulted.
Empiricism is incoherent. The problems with empiricism are so many that it would be difficult to write a book covering all of them, but the following two will suffice.

First, on empiricism, knowledge is contingent on the faculties and/or cognition of finite, fallible, and morally foul beings. However, if human faculties and cognitive capacities are finite, then we cannot exhaust all facts of the universe in one state of comprehension; we can only know parts, or as you put it, “approximations” of the universe. But if we can only know approximations, we could never be sure that there aren’t undiscoverable facts out there in the universe so radical that they disprove absolutely everything we call “knowledge.” Moreover, if human faculties and cognitive capacities are capable of (even prone to) error, then any claim we make to knowledge could be false, even this claim, ad infinitum. Moreover, if humans are not morally impeccable and we are capable of dishonest motivations, then we could never reliably distinguish what we call “knowledge” from self-deception, since it would be possible that the most basic concept of truth we have is just a deliberate act of deception on ourselves. In summary, empiricism is irreconcilable with the nature and experience of human beings. So much for that.
Secondly, on empiricism, it is impossible to arrive at universals and therefore impossible to arrive at knowledge. By universals, I mean general truths: things like classes (“humans,” “computers,” “knowledge”) or laws (of causality, of mathematics, of knowledge). Empiricism cannot provide us an encounter with universals because we only ever experience particulars; we experience the perception of a dog, not of dog-ness; we experience events in time, not causality itself. But without the classes and laws to which particulars belong, how could we ever identify them as particulars?
Basing beliefs off of actual observation and testing of reality has done more in four centuries in our search for knowing the true nature of reality than faith could in all its millennia.
Actually, the philosophy of science in the West has a robustly religious history. It starts with the Midievals, Christian (or at least Roman Catholic) philosophers, moves through the likes of Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Leibniz – all self-professed Christians, whose work functioned on the basis of a Christian view of the cosmos.

Coming along now and ignoring this rich religious history is like ignoring all the scientific history behind computers and just chalking it up to fairies. Just as their is scientific history to computers, so there is a religious history to science.
Your question is nonsensical.
No, you just don’t understand what metaphysics is, as you promptly demonstrate in the following paragraph. For example, physicalism is a metaphysical view, the variety, it seems, to which you adhere. Unfortunately, it isn’t a coherent one.
Reality is matter and motion, space and time, and thus a matter of physics. . .
If only this statement had meaning in light of the worldview it promulgates. If reality were merely spatiotemporal objects, properties, and relations, then the above sentence could only be interpreted in light of the laws and properties of a physical things. However, nothing about atoms, gravity, space-time, or anything else native to spatiotemporal categories informs us what you mean by claiming those categories exhaust all reality.

In order to interpret your claim, we would have to be privy to, among countless other things, universals and intentionality. Specifically, we’d have to know “matter” is; but if matter is the class of spatiotemporal things, then it isn’t a spatiotemporal, and therefore, not everything would be spatiotemporal. Or again, we’d have to know what intentional states (in your mind) correspond to these words in order to ascribe to them a set meaning (viz. claim), but we could never learn about this correspondence or your intentional states (of mind) at all by consideration of spatiotemporal laws and properties – spatiotemporality does not, by itself, offer any explanation or implication for the nature of mentality.
Tests and evidences, or screw your thoughts.
Where’s the test and evidence for this maxim?

Science is the most reliable path to truth that we have.
Where’s the test and evidence for this claim?
👍3
You also seem to be tremendously naive about the purpose or function of scientific methodology. Why believe that truth is the aim of science in the first place? Why believe that science offers a picture of reality at all?
Look up, in your spare time, scientific anti-realism.
Science is a system and a methodology by which reality is known and understood. Reason is a logical process of deduction and induction. Experience is having a practical contact with and/or observation of objects or events. None of these things have anything to do with the metaphysical. Reason is the process of forming thoughts and understanding. This is the result of electrochemical processes in the brain, which we can observe and study and are coming close to being able to decipher with accuracy.
You failed to relate any of your concepts to neuroscience in a reductive or emergentistic fashion. In other words, you keep invoking all these unphysical concepts like science, methodology, reality, understanding, reason, observation, facticity or factuality, practicality, contact, thoughts, etc. Your onus is to show how these things are merely physical, either because they reduce to physicality or because they emerge from physicality.
Good luck with that, by the way. Philosophers and scientists have been trying for millennia to no avail.
For example, you make the following claim: Experiences (and the memories of them) are stored as electrical impulses in the brain. We can observe those and are working on deciphering them as well.

No, we observe electrical impulses. We do not observe memories as if they were colored, physical phenomena located in the brain and measurable by a machine scan. It is your burden to show how memories are such phenomena. Good luck.
We do not “see” memories in the brain any more than we “see” colors or perceptions or feelings or the psyche in gray matter or its activities. We see activities in the brain in correlation with our experience of memories, colors, perceptions, feelings, and so forth. How do you intend to get beyond correlation to identification?
Or correlation to causation?
Philosophical Naturalism/strict materialism excludes even the possibility of anything beyond what we can perceive.
First of all, philosophical naturalism is a metaphysic. Look it up. Second of all, can you perceive philosophical naturalism?
Methodological Naturalism is aware that there is no METHOD that we know of to access and examine anything beyond our perception, even if we use tools to enhance this perception.
Perhaps that is your interpretation, but whatever the case, this characterization suffers two problems. If Christian Theism is true, then we have but to open up and read Scripture to access and examine things beyond our perception. In this way, you have begged the question. Then also, methodological naturalism is itself not perceptible, and so one wonders what method we are using to access, examine, and otherwise think about it at all?
So, there is the possibility that there is something “supernatural”, but if someone claims to KNOW about it, they would have to present the method of how they accessed this, attained this knowledge, and how we would be able to verify it.
What is your criterion for judging whether or not something is supernatural? If you don’t have one, how do you know that anything is non-supernatural?
I’m close to the end, but all of this thought, @ARIF 🌃, is just terribly confused and in some places, very silly. I’m bound to retrospectively agree with @Vincent the fake Greg Bahnsen: I’ll deal with some of the more interesting comments. I highly recommend sitting down and seriously reading a book of the Bible. Maybe you are familiar with the Christian Scriptures, maybe not, but as far as I can tell, you’re just parroting the pantsless-emperor philosophy of New Atheism.