Let’s boil this thing down to the essentials.
First—yes I depend on faith before reason in spiritual matters (and these two phenomena are distinct in a subjective sense; that is, as they are used within an academic context). But a priori reasoning is not the same as faith.
Now, back to our discussion. Standards of truth are used across the spectrum of academic disciplines. In science we use observation, measurement and repetition. In a courtroom we use evidence and rules. Knowledge theory uses particular rigorous standards of objectivity and logic. Historians have their version of assuring the validity of their own work. The common thread is woven from the concepts of objectivity, sense perception, accuracy and reliability. These are found in all standards of truth. Let’s call this set of standards T.
I have made an assertion to you. We’ll call the assertion p. The assertion is that particular events surrounding Jesus and his resurrection from death are accepted as true by mainstream scholars of history (and these scholars include a broad range, from believers to atheists), who use T to verify and validate their work.
You protest to me that p must false because it doesn’t meet your standards of verification, which we will call k. It is very clear that k is congruent with T above. Your protest is based on the fact that I have not presented clear evidence of k (or T) for p, all I’ve done is claim it exists.
The important thing here is that your protest is tantamount to admitting that if T for p is present, then you will accept p as true.
But there is another problem. It’s the same problem we see in courtrooms, where objective truth falls prey to the lawyer’s tongue. Lawyers are victims of their training, which teaches them that real truth doesn’t matter—what matters is whether you can manipulate language so that your language seems to represent truth. Appearance alone is sufficient, not the actual truth. And an attempt is made to justify this claim with the assumption that objective truth doesn’t exist. That’s right. Our old friend relativism. Relativism tells us that something can be true today but false tomorrow, depending on subjective volition.
As for our conversation, I’m convinced that when T validates p but p is contrary to your volition V, you will inject standards of relativism, which we will call R. But if I show you T for p, you throw R on top of T and claim T doesn’t exist.
So the difference between you and me is R. What you need to learn is that R doesn’t make things right—it makes them wrong. R brings chaos. It’s the worm in a once good apple. R is the nail that flattens your tire. The red light, the traffic jam, the lost wallet, the misplaced keys. The girlfriend who rejected you in high school, the jock who bullied you, the social group that ostracized you, the mother who gave you up for adoption. R is that impulse she doesn’t understand that drives Anita Dunne to follow Mao Tse Tung; the murderer of wisdom in the soul of Van Jones that shows him goodness when he looks evil in the face. It’s that which denies Obama and Hillary the same spirit of allegiance enjoyed between Palin and DeMint, instead making them mortal enemies. R is the leftist troll on an otherwise perfectly good conservative website. It’s a blanket of darkness covering the light—like a cloud of death. R is the initial cancer cell. R is the master of Charles Manson, Bill Ayers and Joseph Stalin. It whispers into the ear of the liberal telling him he’s tilling soil, when in truth he’s digging his own grave.
Relativism excludes the leftist, ultimately, from rational discourse. So let’s exclude relativism from our discourse.
The starting point now is that you agree if I show you that universal truth standards have been met, you will agree with me that my original assertion p is factual.
I disagree. Objective reasoning is a posteriori; subjective is a priori. The former is phenomenological, and the latter ontological. Thye are antonyms of eahc other, and cnanot be conflated.
Relativism excludes the leftist, ultimately, from rational discourse
Man, and all of the known world, operates on relativity. Your attempt to slip in absolutism (which is the opposite of relativism) as the acceptable criterion is unacceptable to me. And so is your attempt to silence anything you arbitrarily choose to label "leftist."
As for hsitoricity of the story of Jesus, outside of the text selected by the Church, which is a biased source, there is no objective, or direct historical evidence about Jesus; what is out there is scarce and unwittnessed, superficial mention of a couple of individuals, utilizing hearsay (i.e. not listing sources). The fact is, people have believed the Jesus story and the Resurrection not through personal witness but by word of mouth for the last 1900 years.
If a vast majority of historians—according to a very partial Evangelical professor in Lynchburg, Va—accept the historicity of Jesus and his resurrection, it is more likely because of the sheer weight (and sensitivity) of the Christian tradition in the western civilization than any standard, verifiable, historical evidence.
How many of these professors are of non-Christian background, such as Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.? I would like to see the arguments of that professor and how many independent sources corroborate his findings.