Current mood:

contemplative

Agnosticism Aint Just For Deities Anymore
I came up with a list of things which we can never prove nor disprove.



We will never know if God exists.    Can't prove or disprove that one.

We will never know if souls exist.   Still, I think I made a strong argument against souls by asking "Can a soul get drunk?"

We will never know our futures with absolute certainty.   Even if the future is pre-determined, it remains completely unpredictable when you consider Chaos Theory and the butterfly effect.

We will never know some properties of the Universe.  If some physicists are right, it is impossible to create a theory of everything, a theory which explains all physical phenomena.

We will never know if we have free will or live in a completely deterministic universe.    Here is a paraphrase of what a friend of mine once said:

    * You can choose to believe you have free will.
    * You can choose to believe you don't have free will.
    * Either way, it is your choice.

We will never know the answers to some mathematical questions.  Some mathematical statements can never be proven true or false, so math will always remain incomplete or inconsistent.

We will never know if we are immortal.  You won't know as long as you live, and then once you die, you don't know anything.  Or maybe you do have a soul which survives death, but you won't know if that soul is immortal.

We will never know the emotions, intentions, or thoughts of anybody except ourselves.   We can guess at these from external behaviors, but never truly know what others experience.


ETA:
We will never know if numbers exist as abstract, necessarily existing objects, independent of the human mind. Or if they exist only in our minds.

You can never know if you are the only person, and the rest of in existence is just part of your imagination.  Maybe I live in a solipsitic reality where my brain sits in a vat and gets fed signals to make me think I have body.  Who knows?  Certainly not me.

We will never know the past with absolute certitude since too much evidence has been destroyed.



Each item on this list seems different from others.  One is about mere subjective experiences - and hence only knowable by one person.  Some are about pure logic and mathematics and hence we can know with objective certitude that some statements are forever unknowable.  Some are about physics and the nature of the universe.  And some are utterly within the realm of metaphysics.  Yet each seems unknowable.