One of my little etymological bagatelles is that in many languages the word which is translated "Truth" has a sense involving loyalty (as in "troth")
I know the argument from etymology is not dispositive in any way. But isn't it fascinating and beguiling that there is this volitional, or even existential, connotation hovering around that thing that philosophers seek to know?
In my little kiddie religion classes (like smart fifth or sixth graders, say) I used to distinguish between boring truths, which are "knowable", like, oh, F=MA, and really important truths like, "My parents love me (or not)," about which we seem only to be able to have hunches and hopes and sometimes doubts.
And this is one of the frustrating aspects to the not even worthy to be called "debates" we have here. For example, take the debate about when the "catholic Church was started." If you already think the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon, you will see the great crisis of suddenly becoming legal and even established as a fundamental breach in the continuity of the Church, so that "Real" Christianity has to so to speak, submerge for a millennium or so. On the other hand if you believe that the Catholic Church is that body in which the fullness of the esse of Church subsists, then you will see all that stuff as a crisis which set the Church back on its heels, but which it survived and which led to conditions in which it might be said to have prospered.
The data do not admit of being viewed dispassionately, and most of us tussling over them are not inclined to view them dispassionately. So when the feathers and fur settle to earth, what we mostly have as the skeleton of an "Is NOT"/"Is TOO" conversation with a few interesting new facts (maybe) added to the mix.
So you heard Mort the Wart, huh? What a guy! He gave an almost annual lecture at my college where it was traditional to play a prank on him.
Believe in what? It is a circular argument, like “proof texting”. It is similar to fides quereas intellectum. Faith in what?
It seems to me that today the concept of “church” is an anachronism. The debate cannot be resolved because the accretions to the concept by all churches are now more important than the original idea.
I was just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to hear Dr. Adler and even though the lecture lasted more than an hour and I'm sure if I had time to spend I could call to remembrance some of the main lecture. The only thing that fixed my attention was the fact that a seemingly committed agnostic had been persuaded by reason that there was a God beyond a reasonable doubt. The caveat in his later book that I did not pick up in the question and answer period was that although one could be persuaded by the evidence of this God's noncommunicable attributes, omi- this and that, one could not know His ethical attributes, love, mercy, grace etc. by reason or logic. That he said was by revelation.
ena