reason vs faith vs reality

[genkaus]

I am actually perceiving a distinction between the abstraction "reality" and the term "real" which corresponds to that which exists or is factual.

And what distinction are you perceiving and how?

I am proposing that however you express it, we cannot get outside of our own minds our own subjective experience. No matter how hard we try to be objective, we are witnessing, observing, evaluating, analyzing, everything outside and inside of ourselves through the lens of our personal subjective self.

We cannot actually live in some objective "reality" that exists outside of our minds. I see Reality as the abstraction that our mind creates out of all the raw materials of the existent universe mixed and colored by our own psychological, emotional, mental frames of reference. Everyone experiences the external world and their own internal worlds in unique ways. There can be some congruence between our own individual lived experience and that of others. But there is no actual 100% correspondence. Can't be. We all just come close to one another in our experiences and also simultaneously far distant from one another.

Wrong once again. And this is a good example of how not knowing the actual meaning of words not only leads to miscommunication, but also to bad philosophy.

Here is the progression of your thought process:

We are experiencing the external world through our subjective self.
Therefore, all our experiences are subjective.

We call the object of our experience 'Reality'.
Therefore, effectively, everyone in living in a subjective reality.

We all accept that no one subjective experience is more valid or true than another [insert 'beauty is in the eye of beholder' example here].
Therefore, no one person's 'reality' is more valid or true.

The problem here is that you are using the word 'subjective' incorrectly. And that results in this chain reaction culminating in bad conclusions. Here in the pertinent definition to be considered:

Subjective - existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.
Objective - being the object of perception or thought; belonging to the object of thought rather than to the thinking subject.

With regards to any experience of the external world, you are the subject of experience, i.e. one doing the experiencing and the world is the object of experience, i.e. the thing being experienced. If the nature of your experience can be completely determined by the object then your experience is objective - even if it is done by your subjective self. And is the nature of experience is completely determined by your subjective self, then it is subjective. As a matter of course, an experience would have both objective and subjective aspects and it would be a big mistake to conflate the two and regard the experience as wholly subjective or objective. For example, when I perceive an apple and my experience tells me that it is red, round, juicy and sweet, then that is an objective experience. That is being determined by the nature of apple itself and not colored by any of my psychological or emotional frames of reference. That experience depends on the object (the apple) and not the subject (me). On the other hand, the part of my experience that tells me that it is beautiful and delicious is subjective. That is the result of my emotional and psychological frame of reference and therefore is determined by the subject (me) and not the object (the apple). And that is why it would be a grievous error to regard the experience as subjective or objective because it has elements of both.

Now, given that we can identify and therefore disregard the subjective aspects of the experience, the rest of the experience becomes wholly objective. And where the objective aspects of my experience are concerned, there can, should and must be 100% congruence and correspondence with another individual's experience. That's because we do, in fact, live in an objective reality - the reality that determines all the objective aspects of all our experiences - and that reality is the same for all of us. Any in-congruence here is explained by error in perception or by regarding subjective aspects as objective. Which is why the objective experiences containing minimal errors and minimal subjectivity are, in fact, more valid and true than others.

My primary point is that Atheists and theists are each using different data sets and applying different mental tools and as such the conclusions cannot be mapped cleanly or even messily onto each other. The questions asked by one cannot be answered by the other.

Atheists, using the selected dataset of information, knowledge and empirical analysis of the material universe which is being passed down and continually developed and advanced through the scientific endeavor, using the mental tools of reason, logic, and skepticism have constructed a reality which does not include God with all the accompanying issues with which religion has saddled that idea of God. The data set, methods, mental tools, and conclusions hold together perfectly and create a reality that is satisfying and cohesive. It frames the experiences of life in a reliable and sustainable framework. The idea of God not only does not fit the dataset but cannot be even theorized based on the methods and mental tools.

Christians (and yes mostly Christians who have made faith a -if not the- key component of their religious beliefs) using the selected dataset of information, knowledge, and yes empirical analysis of a cosmos comprised of both material and spiritual dimensions which is being passed down and continually developed and advanced through well established religious methods, using mental tools of analytic reasoning, logic, and faith have constructed a reality which begins and ends with God and the spiritual dimension of life.

Your point fails because there is, ultimately, only one dataset to be perceived and analyzed. You may go about analyzing one subset, but the results of your analysis must be compatible with analysis of any other subset. If they are in contradiction, some mistake has been made somewhere. For example, in science, if the explanation of the physical nature of an object contradicts its chemical nature, then either one or both may be wrong or there is some data being left out of consideration.

Your first mistake in this argument is the assumption that there is, in fact, a spiritual dimension to be analyzed. If there was such a dimension, then it would be within the selected dataset of theists and atheists alike. Your assumption that atheists discard the spiritual dimension of reality in order to create a cohesive and satisfying model is not only wrong, it is insulting. We discard it because we haven't found any subset of reality that pertains to a spiritual dimension. Any datasets pertaining to it we've been provided so far have been subjective in nature.

Your second mistake is thinking that just because you put "analytic reasoning, logic and faith" in the same phrase regarding mental tools, it somehow makes them equally valid. It doesn't. What we have found is that when we use logic and analytic reasoning to analyze the dataset called reality, the resulting model represents reality most accurately. And when we build a model of reality using faith, the resulting model is unreliable, varying and most often wrong.

So, in conclusion, there is only one dataset to be analyzed. You may analyze that dataset (reality) using different tools (reason or faith) and end up with wildly different conclusions (models of reality/paradigms/worldviews etc.). That these conclusions cannot be mapped onto one another does not mean both are equally valid because one of them can be mapped better to the actual reality, while the other can't. And that, right there, tells us which is the better tool for the job.

Faith is not the counterpart to reason in the equations of reality construction, it is the counterpoint to skepticism. In other words the key difference which cannot ever be resolved is that not only are the selected datasets of information being used radically different but the actual mental tools are mutually exclusive.

Faith is a counterpoint to reason (not a counterpart - which would suggest an alternate but equally valid tool). The dataset being analyzed is the same - even if the tools are mutually exclusive. And the key difference can be resolved by establishing which tool gives more accurate results.