Just curious, what is your warrant for claiming that we know this? It is obviously a belief; and given certain presuppositions, it is justified; but what makes you so confident that it is true? — aletheist

That's a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge. You could ask the same question about anything we say we know. The answer, of course, is already contained in your question - the warrant is in the justification.

But who takes vitalism seriously anyway? — SophistiCat

The BBC article takes it seriously enough to mention it. If it wasn't taken seriously, why would it?

[Scientists] aren't really producing life from scratch - there's rather too much hype about their results, impressive as they are. I suppose if someone did pull off such a feat - actually assembling a living organism from non-living components, as opposed to modifying and reassembling parts of living organisms - that would be a convincing argument against vitalism. — SophistiCat

Do you think if they did it, that they would then qualify as deities? (Because I'm sure that is at least part of their motivation. Someone asked Venter if he was "playing God", and he said "not playing" - according to @Arkady, who mentioned it.)

Life, as we would define it, didn't begin in this part of this galaxy until:

a) enough supernovae had produced enough of the heavier elements all the way up to gold and uranium — Bitter Crank

Many of the familiar elements of which organisms are constituted (excepting hydrogen, which was present in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, along with much more limited amounts of other trace elements such as helium and lithium IIRC) are formed by nuclear fusion in the cores of stars (the all-important carbon atom, for instance, is produced by jamming together 3 helium nuclei in the "triple alpha" process). Only the heaviest atoms (which include, as you note, gold) are produced in supernovae.

I think it's interesting that the 'origin of life' is the one type of event for which the favoured scientific explanation is that it was a chance occurence. In all other matters, one expects a scientific hypothesis to provide a cause, or a reason, for what it seeks to explain. But not here. — Wayfarer

The fact that something occurred by "chance" doesn't entail that it lacked a cause or explanation: it may simply mean that there was no intentional plan or design underlying its occurrence. A fellow can have a "chance" meeting with the cute girl in his office at the coffee machine (in that the encounter was unplanned by either of them), or he may have memorized her schedule of comings and goings and made sure that he was at the coffee machine at the just the moment he knew she'd be there, so he could "just happen" to bump into her, in which case the encounter was not due to chance.

In any event (as I've pointed out at least once), chance is most definitely admitted into science. It is in fact the default assumption (the "null hypothesis") when a putative connection between two or more variables is examined.

Why do you think Venter's work is relevant to the OOL research? — SophistiCat

Isn't Venter involved in "minimal genome"-type research (i.e. investigating what is the minimum number of genes an organism requires in order to sustain and propagate itself)? That line of research would seem to be at least tangentially relevant to OOL.

Many of the familiar elements of which organisms are constituted (excepting hydrogen, which was present in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, along with much more limited amounts of other trace elements such as helium and lithium IIRC) are formed by nuclear fusion in the cores of stars (the all-important carbon atom, for instance, is produced by jamming together 3 helium nuclei in the "triple alpha" process). Only the heaviest atoms (which include, as you note, gold) are produced in supernovae. — Arkady

Thanks for providing this correction -- it has been squirreled away for future reference.

The answer, of course, is already contained in your question - the warrant is in the justification. — SophistiCat

The justification warrants the belief, but not (by itself) the claim to knowledge.

The justification warrants the belief, but not (by itself) the claim to knowledge. — aletheist

Oh but it does. What else could possibly warrant a claim of knowledge? (Other than the kind of knowledge that doesn't fit the JTB mold anyway, such as knowledge how.)

Isn't Venter involved in "minimal genome"-type research (i.e. investigating what is the minimum number of genes an organism requires in order to sustain and propagate itself)? That line of research would seem to be at least tangentially relevant to OOL. — Arkady

Yes, this sounds like it could be relevant, but I confess I know very little about their research.

What these observations do, is undermine the notion that 'life arose by chance'. There is an element of chance, but chance is only meaningful when there are various possibilities, and for there to be domain of possibility, something has to exist already. — Wayfarer

The pervasiveness of causality undermines "chance" in the universe. When we say "life arose by chance" we don't mean to say that things could have been different, we mean it was un-directed by some kind of intelligence. In the same way that the formation of a storm is determined by the laws of physics, hypothetically abiogenesis can also occur as an emergent phenomenon from basic laws. "The chance of life forming" then becomes a forecast about how frequently life tends to emerge in a given system, not a statement about the kind of "chance" that would conflict with causation.

It's the equivalent of saying that a 6 sided dice has a 1/6 chance of rolling a 6, which is true; although in any given dice roll the laws of physics still determine the necessary result.

Using the anthropic principle to reason that there is a fix as it relates to actual abiogenesis in our actual universe suffers from the problem of insufficient data. All we know about actual abiogenesis right now is basically that it might have happened once before, but we don't know the shape of the dice that describe it's frequency, or how many sides there are on that dice, (or how many of those sides would actually result in life). We can imply that there is a dice (abiogenesis occured), but as our only data point point this can tell us absolutely nothing about the statistical likelihood of abiogenesis actually occurring in our universe (as a trend, not a causality breaking phenomenon). If you run a survey that gets only one respondent, then the resulting statistical conclusions would be maximally weak. Until we observe abiogenesis happening, or not happening, elsewhere we will have no hard observational data to qualify it's statistical likelihood. Even if we scoured the entire universe and found that abiogenesis only happened a single time (making us maximally lucky, and the anthropic principle maximally persuasive) if we understand the causal mechanisms which caused life to emerge then why should we be surprised that in an unfathomably massive universe, very very unlikely events occur; actually inferring a fix is still unjustified.

If we speak of a variance of possible universes (each with different pre-determined causal outcomes, some with life, and some without), we're still utterly lacking sufficient observational data to confirm it because we get no data from other universes. And even if we did prove that it's true we're living in the luckiest of universes, this could either be because we are in fact lucky, or some intelligent entity rigged our universe to be an interesting one

The anthropic principle is broadly an appeal to existence itself. It presumes that non-existence (and non-life) is more likely than existence (and life), and broadly calls shenanigans on the universe itself simply because it exists and we within it. The scientific knowledge upon which arguments using the anthropic principle are based are definitely very important and interesting, such as the (attempt to) forecast of how frequently abiogenesis will occur in a given system, but it does not justify or strengthen the leap from "abiogenesis occured" to "the universe was rigged for abiogenesis". An easy way to logically show this is to simply challenge the likelihood of some intelligent designer or manipulator as a complete unknown, possibly with the same degree of unlikelihood as finding one's self within the luckiest universe in the first place. "The fixer" is very clearly just an arbitrary substitution for luck.

It's the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. In order to dismantle the plethora of scientific observations, theories, and experimental confirmation which describes seemingly uncanny things like spatial expansion, time dilation, and the big bang, we would need to somehow come in with something that has more predictive power and explains more things and in more simple terms, to such a degree that it can overturn what is basically the whole of science and physics.

We know the big bang happened (but we don't know exactly what it was) using the same logic that a detective who finds a murderer knows that they are the murderer. It's always possible that evidence was fabricated or misinterpreted - we can never know for certain - but in science and in life what's practical is to talk about degrees of reasonability. Science accepts the rapid expansion model because it's evidence is highly reasonable.

What else could possibly warrant a claim of knowledge? — SophistiCat

How do we distinguish justified belief from genuine knowledge? For example, I do not see how anyone can possibly know that the universe is 13.75 billion years old. After all, that age estimate has varied over time, and probably varies somewhat even among scientists today.

It's the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. — VagabondSpectre

But each of us has certain presuppositions that dictate what we count as evidence and how we evaluate it, and different people can have different presuppositions, such that what is reasonable to some is not to others. I see it as an important role of philosophy to expose those presuppositions so that we are not adopting them uncritically. What are you assuming when you claim to know that the Big Bang happened, which another individual could reasonably dispute?

The fact that something occurred by "chance" doesn't entail that it lacked a cause or explanation: it may simply mean that there was no intentional plan or design underlying its occurrence — Arkady

That's precisely what it means in this context. The scientific analysis of the origin of the Universe was consciously differentiated from religious cosmology, especially after the Enlightenment. Within that context, 'chance' assumes an existential dimension, as exemplified in a great deal of 20th century literature and philosophy (Free Man's Worship, Chance and Necessity, and many others.) The idea that life is a fluke is one of the motifs of 20th century thinking; a lot of people regard it as a fact known to science. And that underwrites a lot of modern existentialist philosophy (if it can be described as philosophy.)

In the same way that the formation of a storm is determined by the laws of physics, hypothetically abiogenesis can also occur as an emergent phenomenon from basic laws. — VagabondSpectre

Of course, the whole idea being that it's a natural occurence, to distinguish it from the idea of 'special creation'. But what the anthropic hypotheses are showing is that then you can simply shift the locus of the argument: why are there 'laws of nature' in the first place? And in what sense are they 'laws'?

Now those kinds of questions, I maintain, are not answerable by science. Science assumes that there are regularites which it describes as 'natural laws'; but as soon as it begins to speculate as to why those laws exist, it is no longer in the domain of science, as such, but is engaging (often unknowingly) in metaphysics. Science deals with very particular and specific principles, albeit sometimes covering a very wide range of phenomena; but those kinds of questions are beyond its scope, because they ultimately will include such questions as 'why does science exist', which is not itself a scientific question. ('Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds' ~ Richard Feynman.)

An example is the recent Universe from Nothing in which Lawrence Krauss attempts to show that physics demonstrates the fact of the title of the book. The problem, many critics noted, is that Krauss equivocates about the meaning of 'nothing' - is it literally no thing, no electromagnetic fields and forces, no quantum vacuum, no fields, no laws? Or is it only the apparent nothing of empty space, which science now tells us actually possesses immense energy (and there's a good scientific allegory for God, if ever there was one)?

The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story. 1 — David Albert

I think, ultimately, all such questions are undecidable, on the grounds given by Kant in his section on the 'antinomies of reason'. But I also think at the very least, the fine-tuning observations ought to give pause to the idea that seems so obvious in our day and age, that life arose by chance.

But each of us has certain presuppositions that dictate what we count as evidence and how we evaluate it, and different people can have different presuppositions, such that what is reasonable to some is not to others. I see it as an important role of philosophy to expose those presuppositions so that we are not adopting them uncritically. What are you assuming when you claim to know that the Big Bang happened, which another individual could reasonably dispute? — aletheist

Great post. That's how I see philosophy, too. It's abnormal discourse about the norms of normal discourse.

I think, ultimately, all such questions are undecidable, on the grounds given by Kant in his section on the 'antinomies of reason'. But I also think at the very least, the fine-tuning observations ought to give pause to the idea that seems so obvious in our day and age, that life arose by chance. — Wayfarer

Great quote from Albert. I do agree that certain questions are undecidable or even pseudo-questions. I think we can test such questions by considering what sort of answers we are really hoping for when we ask them. If A comes from B, then where does B come from? Either B is just there or it came from C, and so on.

If life comes from chance, I suppose that means its the result of probabilistic laws that are just there. The casino is just here, and it happened to generate creatures who could analyze the slots and call the casino a casino. On the other hand, let's say a human-like intelligence is somehow responsible. I stress "human like" because that's how we understand intelligence. Then this intelligence was just there and decided to create creatures who could (within the limits of their own intelligence) conceive of this intelligent creator. In a sense, we still have a machine in both cases that spits out the world as we know it, but one of the machines has a quasi-human face. So the universe does or does not give a damn (was or was not constructed with human needs in mind). If some thinkers adopt the first view, it may be to simplify their practical calculations or just to do away with the uncertainty.

If life comes from chance, I suppose that means its the result of probabilistic laws that are just there. The casino is just here, and it happened to generate creatures who could analyze the slots and call the casino a casino. — Ignignot

I think obviously we ought to avoid anthropomorphization, but consider this idea. What, according to neo-Darwinism, constitutes 'an intention', or 'a design'? If, as the proponents of neo-darwinism maintain, the human mind is the product of (output of, consequence of) an essentially fortuitious set of circumstances, the random shuffling of the deck - this is the gist of the Blind Watchmaker - then there is nothing like 'design' or 'intention' anywhere in the Universe - until a sufficiently-evolved intelligence comes along, as a consequence of that process. Then that intelligence is capable of acting intentionally, and designing things. But nowhere else is there really anything that can be thus described. So nautilus shells and flower stamens and buttefly wings may look like the product of design, but that is the one thing they definitely are not. They are, in the true sense, an accident of nature. But then, so too is a mind like ours, that can design, and form intentions. So what does that mean?

Whereas (for example) Hegel had an idea of mind as 'geist' (which can be translated as 'spirit'), there's nothing like that in the neo-darwinian toolkit. The article linked above from the BBC goes to the trouble of spelling that out, and avoiding anything like that is major factor in neo-darwinian thinking. So the inescapable implication is always that mind is a product of mindlessness. That, I think, lies behind a lot of the angst of existential literature in the 20th C - the sense of 'thrown-ness', having been born out of chaos in a meaningless universe, and now being able to contemplate that. ('What am I doing here?!?) It seems the implication of the 'life as chance' attitude.

So the inescapable implication is always that mind is a product of mindlessness. That, I think, lies behind a lot of the angst of existential literature in the 20th C - the sense of 'thrown-ness', having been born out of chaos in a meaningless universe, and now being able to contemplate that. It seems the implication of the 'life as chance' attitude. — Wayfarer

Yes, this is the heart of the matter. But consider this scenario. Somehow it is establish (and everyone agrees) that there is indeed an intelligent creator. But it is also established that this creator is just watching and refuses to interfere. The angst would have a different flavor, I guess, but a God who does not help or harm us (who has no buttons for us to push with prayer and sacrifice) is not emotionally relevant. True, theology would become highest science again, since we'd need to understand the mind of God to make sense of his creation. But would we really evade thrown-ness here? The existence of this God would still have a sort of brute facticity. While we might explain the creation in terms of God's personality, we've only shifted brute facticity to this God's personality. And it seems to me that we could only understand such a personality in terms of our own, by analogy. I think we can't help but anthropomorphize, though of course we are wise to guard against doing it unconsciously.

...each of us has certain presuppositions that dictate what we count as evidence and how we evaluate it, and different people can have different presuppositions, such that what is reasonable to some is not to others. I see it as an important role of philosophy to expose those presuppositions so that we are not adopting them uncritically. — aletheist

The scientific method rejects the presupposition of truth. What counts as truth in science is generally an explanatory model with predictive power and confirmed through experimentation. When a scientific theory has been established, the predictive power that it offers remains consistent regardless of whether or not individuals happen to find them reasonable; that's what makes them scientifically reasonable (reliability).

I do not see how anyone can possibly know that the universe is 13.75 billion years old.... — aletheist

One way we can tell is by measuring the continual expansion/separation between observable bodies of matter, and by charting their positions, speeds and distances we can predict how long it took for them all to arrive at where they are from the central point of expansion.

Another way we can try to tell the age of the universe is by figuring out the age of the oldest observable stars and star clusters. We can find no star clusters older than about 13 billion years, which is evidence supporting the 13.75 number we get from measuring the observable expansion.

What are you assuming when you claim to know that the Big Bang happened, which another individual could reasonably dispute? — aletheist

"Reasonably dispute"? Basically nothing. They could start by hacking away at the foundations of science. Questioning the pervasiveness of causation is one avenue, just not a reasonable one.

They could question the particulars of astrophysics and astronomical science and the reliability of observations and measurements that we make, but because the evidence is so overwhelming it's not foreseeable that such an objection could be made with a reasonable degree of strength.

At this point, "dispute" becomes "denial"...

I don't have much regard for 'hypothetical gods', they are too near the playthings of an idle imagination for my liking.

What I'm talking about is nearer to what Horkheimer says in The Eclipse of Reason. It is the sense of there not being any reason for life to exist, that life is a fluke and reason itself is an 'evolved adaption' - like, we can reason because of Darwinism, it 'helps us to survive'. It reduces reason to a peacock's tail.

Regarding Big Bang cosmology - it is interesting that in some traditional cosmologies, the Universe is depicted as having been born from a 'cosmic egg'. Actually the 'bindu' which is the coloured dot between the eyebrows of the Hindu faithful, is said to represent that. So Le Maitre's 'primeval atom' is redolent with archetypical meanings.

Besides, it is well-known that when Le Maitre proposed his hypothesis of the Big Bang, at first it was resisted by many scientists because it sounds too much like 'creation ex nihilo'. When the then-Pope heard about it, he thought it vindicated Catholic doctrine, and Le Maitre had to enlist the help of the Pope's science advisor to dissuade him from talking about it.

Yes, the theory of evolution does suggest that reason isn't pure. And yet have this impurity as a result of this same "impure" reason. It's plausible that reason is a evolved tool. But does this impurity really reduce its value? Is pure reason something like an impossible object of desire, like a perfect circle never to be found among actual circles?

But does this impurity really reduce its value? Is pure reason something like an impossible object of desire, like a perfect circle never to be found among actual circles? — Ignignot

Well, I think there's a pretty strong argument that the neo-darwinian account of intelligence, insofar as it is materialistic or naturalist, is self-defeating.

That is what underlies Plantinga's 'evolutionary argument against naturalism' which is a part of a family of arguments called 'the argument from reason'. It has been debated at great length and detail but it's really not that hard an argument to state in simple terms. I cribbed the following from a blog site:

C S Lewis illustrates the argument from reason through the two different senses of the word "because". In the first sense 'because' can be used to mean a cause and effect relationship ("Grandfather is ill today because he ate lobster yesterday"). In the second sense 'because' is used in a Ground and Consequent relation, for example, "Grandfather must be ill today because he hasn’t got up yet (and we know he is an invariably early riser when he is well").

The first sense indicates a causal relation, while the second is a logical relation between beliefs that involves an act of knowing or seeing or rational insight. The second is nearer to a deductive proposition.

Another example of the second sense of because is the mathematical reasoning if A=B and B=C then A=C.

Lewis then explains that every event in nature, including our very thoughts, must be of the first type if physicalism is true. If this is the case, then when we ask "Why do you think this?", the actual answer must always begin with a Cause-Effect style 'because' - i.e. we think so and so, because our neuronal patterns are configured thus.

As a result, all of the thoughts that go into answering the question lie in a causal relation to one another - including the final answer. But we know that 'to be caused' is not the same as 'to proved' - and so the physicalist, if he is consistent, must admit he has no way to know whether what he thinks is true. He has no way to bridge the gap between the two distinct senses of 'because'. This is why the materialist position is self-refuting.

Likewise, if reason is simply an evolved adaption, then why should we trust it? That is actually a constant implication of Dennett's reasoning - he says that what we see as 'reason' is really just an illusion in service of the genetic algorithm that neo-darwinism has revealed. But why are his arguments immune from that criticism, whilst every one else's are not? In other words, if Dennett is correct, he's just a kind of animal making a kind of noise - which is what he says language and reason really are.

In actual fact, as is well-known amongst those who follow this argument, the very same realisation was expressed by Charles Darwin in a letter to a friend, when he wrote that:

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Myself, I fully accept the known facts of evolution, but I believe that when h. sapiens reached the point of language and abstract thought, then they transcended their origins, and are no longer able to be understood in solely biological terms. We're still biological beings, but that is not all we are - so the attempt to describe or anticipate all our potentialities or capacities in purely biological terms, is reductionist. And that shows up in particular, in the 'argument from reason'.

Likewise, if reason is simply an evolved adaption, then why should we trust it? — Wayfarer

I don't think we have any choice. We employ reason to doubt the perfection of reason. Reason is who we are when we're not just meat. We're embodied language that weaves an origin story for itself, but we never seem to be done editing our stories and therefore our own identity, which is a sort of story.

But why are his arguments immune from that criticism, whilst every one else's are not? — Wayfarer

Of course they're not, but there is a sort of performative paradox there. If he said "here are some potentially useful strings of symbols and noises that you might like," the situation might be different. If one clings to the absolute in some form, it seems hard to incorporate an evolving mind. Or one can try to do without it, improvising without perfect narrative sewing everything together. (I think most of us have core beliefs that we cannot justify to the satisfaction of others. So folks just arrange themselves into subgroups with shared, unjustified core beliefs. Justification is a different issue, so I'll stop there.)

We're still biological beings, but that is not all were are - so the attempt to describe or anticipate all our potentialities or capacities in purely biological terms, is reductionist. — Wayfarer

I agree. There's a line between nature and history. The historical realm is one of language and intention.

(Y)

Good to see you back, too. X-)

Lewis then explains that every event in nature, including our very thoughts, must be of the first type if physicalism is true. If this is the case, then when we ask "Why do you think this?", the actual answer must always begin with a Cause-Effect style 'because' - i.e. we think so and so, because our neuronal patterns are configured thus — Ignignot

The trouble with this sort of account is it only accepts "cause and effect" style reasoning. Infinite of definition are misread as a function of prior states of forms (e.g. if A=B and B=C then A=C) rather than grasped of themselves. In this respect, it is reductionism, only repeated in logic, as if its truths were brought about ones before it.

Logic is not an "if, and then" form of reasoning. It is a being or living rather than a state brought about be what preceded it. Such truths have nothing to do with cause and effect. They are true irrespective of it. Physicalism or materialism, that it is to say, cause and effect being the only sort of event in nature, can't touch any logic truths-- to say "the world is only cause and effect" does not bring any logical truth into question or result in any contradiction.

Lewis is wrong (and using a reasoning similar to the reductive materialist) because he's already reduced logic to nature in the first instance. Instead of realising logic is true over and above (or perhaps without) nature (i.e. state of the world), he confuses himself be thinking it must be equivalent to nature, that logical meaning must somehow not be present if existing states are only a matter of cause and effect. He's failed to take into account there is always reasoning other than the world of cause and effect.

How do we distinguish justified belief from genuine knowledge? — aletheist

Well, how do we? If justification is insufficient to warrant the claim of knowledge, then what is? Super-duper justification?

The fact that something occurred by "chance" doesn't entail that it lacked a cause or explanation: it may simply mean that there was no intentional plan or design underlying its occurrence. — Arkady

That's precisely what it means in this context. — Wayfarer

I confess to some confusion on this point: you claimed that science rejects "chance" explanations in every domain except the origin of life. I pointed out that "chance" simply means "without intentional plan or design," and you agree to that definition.

But substituting our agreed-upon definition into your original statement means that you believe that science ordinarily rejects those explanations which don't involve intentional plan or design, which, of course, is glaringly false. So, our wires seem to have gotten crossed somewhere. Also, you have segued from talking about the origin of life to the origin of the universe, which are quite different phenomena, at least as far as science is concerned.

science assumes that there are regularites which it describes as 'natural laws'[...] — Wayfarer

This seems to me to be an observation as much as an assumption, wouldn't you say?

What you said was:

The fact that something occurred by "chance" doesn't entail that it lacked a cause or explanation: it may simply mean that there was no intentional plan or design underlying its occurrence — Arkady

I agreed with that, insofar as in the context of the question of the origin of life, the meaning of 'chance' is indeed distinguished from 'design or intention'. But then I said that this has existential consequences. What I mean is that, the assertion that the origin of life is 'chance as distinct from design' has philosophical or existential implications - namely, life being a 'fluke' or a 'cosmic lottery', or 'an accidental collocation of atoms', as Bertrand Russell said A Free Man's Worship. And that is a theme in a great deal of 20th century literature and philosophy.

This [ i.e. existence of natural laws] seems to me to be an observation as much as an assumption, wouldn't you say? — Arkady

Well, yes - but I was commenting on the idea that science might somehow explain natural laws. That is where I'm saying that science morphs into metaphysics (often amateur). Often, science seems to want to take credit for the order of the universe, like this is something that it is going to explain; but it doesn't explain it, so much as rely on it.

The origin of life and the origin of the Universe are indeed different subjects; but one of the implications of the 'fine-tuning' arguments is that the conditions which were to give rise to stars, matter and life seem to have been inherent in the Universe from the very beginning - so the attempt to locate a precise point where life began, in some sense points right back to the origin of the Universe itself.

We know the big bang happened (but we don't know exactly what it was)... — VagabondSpectre

This is a very meaningless statement. We know that an event X occurred, but we don't know what X was. Every time we attempt to describe X, we are probably wrong, so how can we even make the claim that X occurred? X has absolutely no meaning because we don't know what X is. It's like saying I know that there is something there, but I have absolutely no idea what it is. What's the point in even naming it X, if it could be absolutely anything? Why not call it what it is, the unknown, instead of creating the false impression that there is something known here?