Then you've come up with a novel idea of evidence that provides no way at all for you to discover whether you are in error or in truth. --aruanan
A.
It's called blind faith. I believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old. I believe that the KJV is inerrant. Both because of faith. I need no other basis.
From your FR page:
B. If I had to describe my outlook, it would be Objectivism tempered by Christianity. Reason is the highest absolute of the human existence, and reason equals the fear of God.
How do you reconcile the irrationality of A. with B. in which you claim that reason is the highest absolute of the human existence, unless you're engaging in the fallacy of equivocation between the two instances of the word "reason" in that sentence?
I suppose you could be trapped in the relatively modern use of the word "faith" to denote a condition that is the antithesis of reason, so that all things that apply to reason (such as deduction, proofs, evidence, consistency) by definition don't apply to faith and then, purely in an ad hoc manner, as an act of will rather than reason, declare all things having to do with God or religion, or more restrictively, all things having to do with Christianity, to be confined to the realm of faith (something like Sartre's authentication of self by an act of will, except in this case, it's an authentication of belief by act of will by removing the object of belief from anything open to inspection, evaluation, and reason).
If so, what are the criteria by which something can be removed to that category and made unassailable by reason and proof? What would someone say to induce you to include any particular thing in that category?
"A. The KJV is the inerrant word of God because B. _____"
Though it couldn't be that because that would be making a statement in which A depends on B and B is open to testing or verification and, apparently, testing and verification are anathema to blind faith. Is it just a latching onto something to believe
as true while actively denying any attempt for substantiation, the fear being that a desire for substantiation is a rejection of faith, faith being held as the belief of something for which there
can be no proof? This, however, is a purely arbitrary definition.
If, however, faith being held as the belief of something for which there
can be no proof, then does it matter whether what is in that category of "blind faith" has any necessary relationship to reality as open to experience, knowledge, and reason? Is it only necessary that there exist such a category, regardless of whatever happens to be its object, so that literally
anything could be its object so long as "blind faith" was being exercised? If one believed that Mickey Mouse died to save his soul and was truly resistant to any attempt to dissuade him from that, would his resistance and his clinging to that image be a sufficient faith whereby he could be saved? Or would you say there wasn't sufficient warrant to believe that Mickey died for anyone's soul, much less existed, whereas Jesus did and that's what makes blind faith in Jesus efficacious? But then you'd be basing the efficacy of faith on the truth or falsehood of a proposition about something that actually existed, in which case it isn't blind.
As Paul said, “If only for this life we have hope in the Messiah, we are to be pitied more than all men." He said the efficacy of our faith depended not on the faith but on its object: a Messiah who had truly risen from the dead. He said that if Jesus had truly not been raised from the dead, then our faith is futile and we're still in our sins. So, to Paul at least, the objective reality of the Messiah's resurrection is what makes the difference between an efficacious faith and a useless faith. It's not only important
that you believe, but
what you believe in. And choosing what you believe in needs to be something more than a blind leap of faith.
God has not required this.
Note what Elijah said, "If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." He gave them a choice, but it was based on a proposition that only one of these was actually God. He didn't say, "I believe that Yahweh is God in blind faith and you should too." He said, "Hey, let's have a contest. The priests of Baal and I will both build altars, stack them with wood, and we'll get a couple of bulls and I'll let them choose which bull they want to use. Then we'll cut up the bulls and arrange the sacrifice and each of us will call for our god to light the sacrifice and then we'll see who's really God." They agreed to it and got everything prepared. Elijah even let them go first. By noon nothing had happened except that Elijah started to taunt them. "Hey, where's Baal? Maybe he's taking a dump. Maybe he's off on a journey and can't hear you." So they yelled louder and cut themselves and continued until the time neared for the evening sacrifice.
Elijah rebuilt the Jewish altar that had been torn down. He dug a trench around it. He arranged his cut up bull on it and then had folks dump four barrels of water on it. And then had them do this two more times until the trench was filled with water. Then he stepped up and said something that didn't depend on anyone's blind faith:
“LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
And the fire fell and burned up the sacrifice
and the wood
and the stones
and the dirt
and the water in the trench.
And then the people threw themselves down on the ground and yelled, "Yahweh truly is God. Yahweh truly is God."
Now the blind faith approach would say that we have to believe this simply because it's in the Bible. Another type of blind faith practitioner would say that it doesn't make any difference whether this was a factual account but that the important thing was that it stirs our faith in God. My own belief is that if it's in the Bible and didn't actually occur as something that we could conceivably take a trip in the wayback machine and make a video of it, then its value for purposes of faith or anything else is simply crap.