Atheism, links and thinks

Orphan here.
Spandrell here.

As a philosopher...the most interesting discussions are the ones that move backwards rather than forwards.  Ask a question "How do people know they are in love?"...and a "good" philosophy discussion will end up asking "what is love?",  "What constitutes knowledge?"

The Aretae contention is that the backwards root of ALL (truth) questions is epistemological...and the mother of all questions is: "How do I choose what to believe?"

The Aretae answer to the question is also rather simple:  Empiricism:  Observe, and induct.

The stardard philosophical barrier to the Empiricist approach is the superb David Hume....who demonstrated conclusively that one cannot arrive at induction by way of deduction.

And the Aretae answer is that Hume has it backwards.  One must arrive at deduction by way of induction, not the other way around.

In simple terms, you get the primal feedback loop:

Observe the world...
Use various methods to make guesses (about the future)
Observe the success rate of various methods under various circumstances
Take information about the methods success & failure rate to choose the best methods, and refine them,
repeat.

The core (rule zero) Aretae claim:
 
NOTHING predicts well in any complex system.
Science predicts some stuff about the world moderately well in a statistical fashion.
Complex deductions, applied to normal language, predicts ALMOST nothing.

Therefore, the Platonic/Aristotelian/Thomistic METHOD itself has sufficiently low epistemic justification that we should dispense with it altogether.