[ARCHIVED] - Evidence Vs Faith

[Edwardo Piet]

No I take this from your own words. You actually say you will not accept it until you believe it.

What do you mean by "accept" here? Do you mean I won't believe it until I believe it? Are you stating a vacuously obvious tautology?

I am saying I won't accept God without evidence. But this has got nothing to do with my question as to why you believe it's rational to believe in God without evidence. Why believe in anything without evidence? Whether evidence is possible or not.

You said that if I truly understood Christianity then I'd accept it, that's the point. I never said such a thing - you just asserted it, and I could assert the same thing to you, the other way around. I could say if you truly understood these matters then you'd disbelieve because there's no real reason to.

Good then let's move on.

Good. Lets.

To explain why my belief in God is rational despite falling outside of the realm of empirical proofs sorta takes me outside of my belief.

Well if your belief is unexplainable, how can you understand it - because how do you explain it, how do you justify it, to yourself?

To ask me to explain something my faith is not takes the question outside of my reasoned stance.

I'm asking you to explain why belief in your God is rational, why believing on faith, in your faith - is rational, and how it can be if there's no evidence. I'm not asking you to change the definitions, and if you need to change them in order to explain - then how are you justifying it to yourself if it's so completely unexplainable? If you can't explain it to anyone else, how do you truly understand it yourself? How do you justify it as a rational belief?

This question is your question to answer in regard to my belief. I can try to help you with it and I have many times.

And I appreciate your best efforts.

To me, as I've said, it is entirely illogical and a ridiculous premise on which to build anything. As a basis for atheism, as I've said, I find it clings to fanciful and marginal assumptions.

If it's a ridiculous premise to require a belief, whether it's this belief or any other, to be justified, to require an explanation, to require support - to have credence given to it: Evidence - then I don't understand how you're justifying that. How is this ridiculous considering this is the only way to rationally justify a belief by definition? That's what explanation is for, that's what justification is for, that's why beliefs need support, credence - and more specifically, that's exactly what evidence is for.

When we talk about evidence, we are talking purely the subject of scientific understanding. You have to hold that science describes everything in the universe, known and unknown. And we already know it doesn't describe everything in the known universe, so your base for discussion is completely unsound.

No I'm talking about anything that gives valid credence to a belief. If science was somehow proved to be wrong by some other form of evidence, if that happened - then evidence is evidence and it would still be valid. By whatever means, known or unknown, if a belief has valid credence for it, then that's evidence by definition.

By evidence I just mean credence to a belief, I mean valid support to it. And my question is how you can justify a belief without evidence, "on faith", if then by definition the belief has no valid support, so is unsupported, there's no valid reason to believe.

Evidence is the only valid reason to believe by definition, unless you're playing into some kind of Pascal's Wager and you think it's worthwhile somehow. By definition, evidence deals with the truth of the matter. It is what gives beliefs validity. And if you speak of proof, as you have done - then that's simply evidence at its strongest. So however you like to mean it, if you speak of proof it by definition is really strong evidence, and with evidence you can't have faith. So what's up there?

EvF