god created the universe and let it evolve without any furth

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Yes, because I accidentally made a spelling error, that means the point made is less valid.

Whatever, my cause seems too hopeless..

What is your cause?

We also have to assess probabilities in respect of knowledge. A trivial example: I see some dog s**t in front of my house. What is more likely? That the cause is my neighbour's dog or aliens of the 11th dimension place this s**t via an unknown process directly in front of my door? Set the case I can not prove both, I still would assume with a extreme high probability that the cause of the s**t is the dog of my neighbour or any other dog.

No observation we made do point at all to any super-natural cause, even not those for we do not have a good theory currently, but all observation fit very well into a materialistic-rationalist model of the world. Given this fact, we must conclude, that this materialistic-rationalist model of the world is so likely true that we can speak of a very high degree of certainty, almost indistinguishable from absolute certainty.

everyone lies to themselves. Though it is subtle and underlying with "justification". I could convince myself that I am better than people, or more logical, or not smart enough, or not pretty enough, or that what I believe is fact or what other people believe is "excrement", or that I can eat what I want and I will exercise the next day, or it is ok what he does because he loves me. When it comes down to it, I am just convincing myself of things that are not necessarily true so that I will feel better about what I believe or what I want.

In the end the one person that everyone feels they believe and trust is themselves. And in the end that is one of the least trustworthy individuals you will ever met.

you know how to lie to yourself, you just don't want to admit that you do it.

well, the example you gave was rather trivial, but also somewhat accurate. I want people to stop dealing in certainties and to deal in probabilities. My only reservation is that science and math are merely man-made ways to describe the world around us. It is limited by our knowledge (which is limited by no one knows what). Humans are fallible and the things we create are also fallible. One would have to understand that a scientific or mathematical endeavor by a worm or a single cell organism (assuming for a moment that they could do such a thing) would look drastically different then a scientific or mathematical endeavor by a human. Primarily because of perception and limitations.

There is no way to know exactly how correct our materialistic-rational model of the world is because there is no way to quantify what reality actually is compared to how we see reality. And that is because there is no way to truly understand the limitations of human perception and comprehension.

It would be almost like trying to look outside through a door peephole. There is what you can see and what you can observe, and by all accounts you have no way of knowing if how you define what the "outdoors" looks like is what it actually looks like (outside of the limitations to your perception). What I am saying is don't presume to know that there isn't a huge whole entire world beyond what you can observe because you can't see beyond the peephole opening. You can say "I feel with such and such amount of probability that the world actually is the way we can observe it" but for all you know the world is nothing more that a hallucination or a VR simulation (with atoms instead of binary) and the dog crap in front of your door was placed there through a process you don't understand by 11th dimensional aliens who designed dogs that crap into the simulation. We put crapping animals into our video games. If there was a measure of consciousness placed into one of our video games (such as SimLife) then perhaps those consciousnesses would wonder if the existence was made up of all that the could see or if there was something outside of their existence designing crapping animals.

Shiggily, I agree with everything you just said. It seems that we think alike.

many people think that they think like me when my viewpoints align with theirs. But inevitably I will switch sides because I like to pick apart views to see what is all there and to assimilate them into my own worldview. Eventually your views won't align with mine and your concept that we think alike and that you agree with me will change.

Is this not your actual opinion, what you just stated? I'd be interested in knowing what you really think.

my opinion is fluid. It changes. I do not adhere to specific ideals, instead I combine ideals, and I keep my mind open to the constant possibility that I am wrong... or that all of humanity is wrong. What I argue and what I talk about do not always line up with my personal views because I don't necessarily want to argue that I am right. I want to argue an idea to see what parts of the idea stand up to logic. What I stated is currently my opinion. But that might change.

I do agree that we have (must have) limits of our knowledge and we must be aware about this limits. Our models of the world are modelled by two forces: Our pre-perceptions of the world and our observation of the world. Even this observations are modelled by the way we measure and observe.

At least we can say that our model of the world is so consistent and predicts reality and future events in a way that it seems to be quite close to what Kant called "das Ding ansicht" (the thing on itself).

I do not have any difficulties with realizing the weaknesses of our model of the world. I do have a problem with filling up the gaps of our model with mere speculation, under which label such speculation may appears (religion, new age, esoteric. etc.) - or even worst: Replacing our scientific model totally.

modernists

I agree. But that I find we attempt to gloss over the gaps by overlooking the concept of limitations (like covering a wall filled with holes by putting up a bunch of pictures). I wouldn't want a god of the gaps anymore then I would want crappy science of the gaps. Like a shoddy spackle job. We are so afraid of admitting weaknesses that we are changing our educational curriculum to state that if the results of an experiment disagree with popular scientific belief that the experiment or the results are wrong. Because all great scientific discoveries agreed with popular scientific belief ( ). We are destroying science to avoid admitting where the holes are. Embrace the holes. Know what you do know and what you don't know and what you will never know and then you can search for the truth instead of hanging pictures

?

You can never know what you will never know.

And you will never know what it is not possible for you to know.

So it's always a good idea to try to find out.