Jeremy,
Because if we accept your reasoning, it means there are no facts because nothing can be known to be a fact without omniscience.
It means no such thing. You’ve gone nuclear here: “OK, something logically impossible may not be a fact, but then again all facts rest on premises so any claim of fact is equivalent to any other”.
It fails because, well, do I really need to explain why?
All facts are at some level probabilistic – the Sun being 93m miles from the earth is a fact because we have instruments that tell us that but for all I know I’m a piece of junk computer code or brain in a vat and everything “I” think is real isn’t real at all, or maybe there's a global conspiracy among telescope makers to produce incorrect readings. Nonetheless, as this is the world I appear to occupy and have to navigate, we treat such findings as
functionally certain facts, verifiable as they are in various practical ways.
Then though we have claims of fact that are
unverifiable and sometimes logically impossible too: there’s a teapot orbiting the sun just beyond the range of our instruments to detect it; there is no verifiable evidence for gods (or for leprechauns) etc. You can call these statements claims or assertions or opinions, but you cannot call them facts because they fail the basic requirements of statements that are facts – logical coherence and investigability.
You know this already though - calling anything at all a fact because no statements of fact can ultimately be known to be certain would be chaotic: the fact of taking the stairs being equivalent to the fact of stepping out of the window and floating to the ground would collapse immediately you tried it.
LR’s statement is considered a fact because there is no verifiable evidence of God.
Considered by whom, and how do you know it to be a fact rather than an opinion that there’s no verifiable evidence for god?
I suppose there is an outside chance that somebody will find the said evidence but do you honestly think that is likely? I don’t. If you want to be really anal, I guess you could say she should have prefixed the statement with “it’s almost certain that”. If you are going to insist on that, then I’m going to hold you to it for every statement you make about the real World. You won’t even be able to say it is round without qualifying it.
Doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s likely either (and I’m leaving aside for now the problems with relating evidence conceptually to a claim of the supernatural), but that’s not the point. Terms used for workaday, colloquial purposes are often used imprecisely (or plain wrongly), but in a conversation about epistemological accuracy you cannot just claim something to be a fact (or “FACT” as Floo put it) when
necessarily it cannot be a fact for the reasons I’ve just explained.
