reason vs faith vs reality

[max-greece]

The strange thing is that there are believers in all variants of religion that will claim their belief to be rational and empirically verifiable - with countless others to back up their opinion.

I would argue that this necessitates accepting that rational and empirically verifiable does indeed vary from one individual to another. William Craig Lane is a good example of someone who believes all the above about his own arguments.

Yes. And that is because they are selecting a different data set to verify and a different set of well-established mental, conceptual, and physical tools to analyze and verify the observations, theories and conclusions.

i'm not talking about the average Christian here - or any Christian as they have not developed this type of deliberate, disciplined level of experimentation and verification by a multiplicity of persons following the precise procedures to reach the results.

The data set examined and observed, the tools used to observe, manipulate, test, analyze and confirm and the theories proposed and studies are not the material world with which the sciences engage so effectively and coherently. But the process is the same and the conclusions have been over time consistently reached.

I would argue that they start with the conclusion first and then work backwards. In most religions that means they start with God or Gods and go from there. If you question the God premise the whole things falls apart.

The unique thing about science is that it starts with a hypothesis and then uses experimentation or further research to either confirm the hypothesis or reject it and then move on to the next one.

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And that judgement is made by....?

By anyone who understands what the terms "coherent, cogent, meaningful, rational and empirically verifiable" mean. It could be that person himself, as long as he is judging honestly.

You know that this could go on and on forever. I will, however, stop here.