Do you think any claims are unjustified claims? Any ideas are bad ideas? [View All]

[Silent3]

If the scientific method is merely "one way" of knowing things, merely one epistemological approach no better than any other, what exactly are other valid epistemologies? Do they demonstrably "get somewhere", filter out the good from the bad, or do they simply provide an open door for justifying practically any claim as being off limits to validation or refutation?

One caveat: I'd like to set aside the "truth" of individuals subjective perceptions as a separate case. There's typically no practical or realistic application of the scientific method to claims like "Alice felt sad last Tuesday" or "Bob thought for a moment he smelled roses when he got out of his car this morning". No doubt many such claims often reflect factual circumstances even though on an individual case-by-case basis proving or disproving these claims would often be nearly impossible. Even when theoretically amenable to scientific verification, verification would seldom be worth the effort, since claims of these sorts are neither extraordinary nor likely to have broad ramifications. In day-to-day life we have to evaluate such claims on the basis of the fuzzy metrics like trustworthiness of individuals making these claims, the existence of possible motives for error or deception, the possible impact (or lack thereof) of acting on bad information, etc.

This is not to say that subjective experience is outside the reach scientific investigation, only that the accessible truths regarding subjective experiences are more often going to be statistical and aggregate in nature.

What about claims which are often cast as being personal and subjective, but clearly have broader implications far beyond any one individual? Can an epistemology which can be used to justify nearly any such claim be said to truly justify anything at all? Should claims which contain within themselves "escape clauses" excusing the difficulty or impossibility of proving the claim be taken seriously?

If a person making a claim says they don't care about proving anything to anyone, should that person's claims be taken seriously? Do their claims deserve respect, perhaps even a special category of respect, if you apply the labels "spirituality" or "religion" to their claims?

What brings these questions to mind for me is an argument in a recent thread where the idea of a "non material" God was trotted out. The non-materiality of God was offered not merely as an excuse to render the concept of God outside the reach of the scientific method, but as a reason to laugh and be amused that anyone could be so absurd as to not see how obvious, true, and reasonable this exemption was.

Even setting aside the logical difficulties of a non-material deity having any relevant impact on the material world, I don't see how you can build any kind of solid epistemology around such an idea. How you can claim solid reasoning under any such approach for the existence of God while also ruling out, say, invisible pink unicorns, and without the case for God simply being a case of special pleading?