this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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Is it presumptuous and arrogant to say that there are no unicorns, sasquatches, or dragons?
God and the afterlife are what is known as unfalsifiable hypotheses. They are simply asserted with no supporting evidence, and most people thinking critically would not insist that we respect the possibility of every single assertion a person can make without evidence.
Yes. Universe is pretty damn big and I ain’t seen all of it.
I think what he means is that while yeah, you can have a deep conversation about like epistemology and use dragons as an example of something we can't truly know because the universe is vast, it's also really pretty normal to say "fantasy creatures, like dragons, unicorns, sasquatch"... and it's not presumptuous at all.
Like you know the difference between a dog and Bluey, but you might start to say "okay Bluey could be a real dog, we don't really know" if there were a lot of people around you who adamantly insisted Bluey was real, to the point where they'd very earnestly kill and die for Bluey. But even when you're saying "for all we know Bluey could be a real, upright, blue, Australian canine child, walking around Perth right now", you still kinda know the difference between a dog and Bluey. This subject broadly is also sort of a major trigger point for Reddit style atheists
yeah no kidding, I feel like I'm relapsing. Years ago I had a looong conversation with a friend who had a philosophy background and insisted that "atheist" meant "someone who knows that no god exists" I kept being like "no it just means I don't believe cause I'm not convinced they do!" & brought up leprechauns in a fashion similar to that earlier in the thread.
would finding a space alien that resembled a sasquatch mean that sasquatch the cryptid exists? the answer is no, right? sasquatch lives in the woods of North America, so the vastness of the universe has no bearing on the matter. I guess I see them as different categories, but you're treating them as the same.