I feel compelled to come here again and clarify the matter, the key point in what I am saying that nobody so far have understood on this forum on the various threads I participated in and followed and that I wish to share with all those who were kind enough to try to help me. I think this is important and I really would appreciate people's insights about it.
No matter what you think it is and claim it is and how you perceive it, faith is an epistemology.
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy focusing on how one comes to knowledge, which processes of knowing can be relied upon to lead one to truth, and what knowledge is.
A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth. For example : « I have faith that Jesus will heal my sickness because it says so in Luke » is a knowledge claim. When I say « I have faith that Jesus was resurrected », it is obviously not a trust claim, nor a hope claim. When I say that, I really mean it, I do not imply that I merely hope Jesus will heal my sickness or that He was resurrected. I am saying I know it to be true. Faith is an epistemology. It is a process of knowing.
But by definition, knowledge is a justified true belief.
That means that to know something, that belief in something needs not only to be true ( the belief must lawfully correspond to reality), it most importantly needs to be justified ( one needs something to warrant that belief).
Faith is used for justification, it replaces, suplants even, the need for evidence in justification. Faith is a process we christians use to come to knowledge about the inevident, it is the something that warrants our belief. Most people seem to agree that faith is a conviction attained and maintained unrelated to evidence and reason. « Evidence takes you only so far, faith takes you the rest of the way » is something I hear often. Faith is the word we invoke when there is not enough evidence as justification to warrant a belief in a proposition, but when we decide to believe anyway and need to justify ourselves. All the other definitions of faith I have encountered so far, including Hebrew 11:1, are just another way to say this or were word play, equivocation.
The problem is that faith-based conclusions about the inevident are inherently suspect because faith produces arbitrary conclusions that cannot be considered knowledge under the standard definition. Most believers and theologians obfuscate the fact that faith is a suspect epistemology by claiming that the Holy spirit fills them, and that it establishes beyong doubt the truth or the falsity of a claim, bypassing the need for evidence. So instead of accepting that faith is an epistemology, it appears that the perception believed to be the Holy Spirit becomes the epistemological bedrock, with knowldege claims emerging from this foundation. We justify faith-based and by association scripture-based knowledge not with evidence but with the Holy Spirit. It unfortunately follows that we can not use faith to justify our belief in the Holy Spirit itself without going circular. The holy Spirit needs to be independently justified from our faith or from the bible to be a valid justification for both.
I am trying to find one shred of justification in the universe that the Holy Spirit is not a figment of our imagination, that it has objectivity. I am forced by honnesty and integrity to test the validity of the holy spirit as the objective foundation of our faith and of our knowledge of anything inevident, as the bedrock of everything christianity stands for. Nobody here or in theology books I have read have so far provided anything to show that the holy spirit is a reliable objective guide to truth or that its effects are in any way different from the various subjective cognitive bias that affects all humans, you, me, and even the people who wrote the bible.
The best and most common anybody has done is to tuck its tail into its mouth cleanly to make a perfect loop, by saying the holy spirit influence itself is a garantee that the holy spirit influence is objective. This is nonsense. Completely circular, untestable, unverifiable, unfalsifiable nonsense that can be used to justify belief in absolutely anything. It also works for fairies, Allah and astrology. If this is the best christianity has to offer in terms of justification, I feel compelled to look elsewhere where subjectivity, circularity and confirmation bias are not elevated to the rank of virtues, and where Truth and objectivity actually matters.
This is the root of my crisis of faith. I have come to distrust subjectivity and to trust objectivity. I feel it is entirely justified and it contradicts my faith because faith is based on subjectivity. If you think you have understood something I haven't, please share it with me. Anybody who feels a bible quote would help has not understood a word I said and should refrain from posting to avoid the embarrassment of showing it. The best you can do is to give me a valid justification for the belief in the Holy Spirit. If nobody does, I'll take it no such justification is available and I'll act accordingly.
I will not defend or explain this further, this is not a thread where I want to impose my opinion, just an anouncement of what my recent inquiries have led me to conclude. You can respond and discuss if you do it with respect and understanding but I do not want to get involved anymore with certain elements on this forum who think put-downs and aggressivity are the best way to discuss such matters with people riddled with doubts. I'll ignore all irrelevant confrontational comments based on distorted reinterpretation of my post. I do not wish to get into a debate or a fight over this, this is hard enough to process as it is. I'll gladly check comments, webpage, video and book references you feel are relevant to the subject and could help me along my path of inquiry.
