You seem to have missed my last reply. [Except where you have since edited.]
It has to do with trust and history, as already mentioned. If the source, over time, proves to be reliable, trust grows and can become implicit trust.
That’s true. Some sources have shown themselves to be reliable. Anything my wife tells me in earnest I know is something she believes to be true. I can be sure no deliberate deception will be involved. But she can be mistaken just as I can. All testimony is therefore never to be accepted as settled fact.
I don’t agree that that is the necessary conclusion. I can pretty much trust in the testimony of the effects of gravity as settled fact, for instance. 
Some good points here, Mitch. But I would say that religion also can – or cannot – be backed up “by written procedures anyone can follow…” The issue of “results” is, of course, what someone does or does not want…but that is another issue. There are, in fact, sources that corroborate much of the background described in the New/Old testaments – historically, geographically, that sort of thing. The second matter is the part of “what they want or believe,” but the first part – that is, the historical, geographical, archaeological part of things — does not always leave room for people’s wanting to change the meaning or the significance of the text itself…The stuff just “is what it is” …The second matter of “what they want or believe” is more subjective. And that is a whole different matter.
1 Like
And I reject your rejection. So there! It is testimony. You best look up the definition of testimony. No metaphors and no twisting involved.
Nothing wrong with reserving room for faith in matters which cannot be confirmed. But why think of it as settled fact? It is settled for you but in the name of appropriate humility, why not remain congnizant of your faith as such rather than filing it as settled fact?
Some testimony is to die for, literally, as Christians have proven over the millennia. Including during plagues and pandemics, and including this one. I read of an Italian priest who, early on, risked his life to be with and comfort the dying, dying and alone, in a hospital, He himself later died from COVID.
That doesn’t really answer my question. I didn’t question whether faith was warranted, only whether there was any good reason to classify that as objective (or settled) fact.
It has to do with history and trust, just like gravity, so yes.
What are you talking about? You can go out and test for gravity yourself.
God has proven himself worthy of trust as well, not that you can immediately test and trust him like gravity, but in the long haul.
You have to go out to test for gravity?!
The rest of that is important: “written procedures anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they want or believe.” Since that defines science, that would make it a scientific result. But generally the procedures pushed by religions do depend on what you want or believe. They require you to have faith or some internal unmeasurable quality for their procedures to work. Now unlike atheists such as Sagan I do not claim that such things are “veridically worthless.” Quite the contrary, I oppose their naturalism with a counter claim that it is demonstrable that people can know things even when there isn’t one shred of objective evidence to support it.
This balance between the two comes from being both a scientist AND a Christian (in that order). It requires people like me to understand the difference between the two types of truth claims. The methodology of science has BOTH an epistemological superiority of sorts AND some crucial limitations as well. It certainly means that religious claims should accept some corrections from science, but it certainly does not mean that religions have to limit their claims to those of science as the naturalists do – in expecting people to do as they do, it is the naturalists who are not being reasonable.
If you want to do it properly, yes. The Cavendish experiment comes to mind.
I still like that photo Dale but I don’t think you represent faith well when you misrepresent it as something else. I don’t see how it accomplishes anything of value. But I’ll leave it there.
Could you elaborate? I would like to know how I am misrepresenting it, if indeed I am.
It seems to me that faith is the means by which one holds truths which are beyond our power to verify in any simple, straightforward way. To call those facts not only distorts them but demeans them.
Maybe it is just a different way of thinking about it than you are used to. Testimony can certainly be true and factual without your having the ability to verify it firsthand! It has to do with trust, and we are each juries of one.
That is certainly your take, not mine! It is hard to demean truth.
1 Like
And some of that corroborating evidence can be found in the details of the Gospels. many of which have been seen to be based on firsthand knowledge of the region and the time that were lived in…so this is where testimony and these other pieces can be useful in ascertaining the general trustworthy of a document as well as of the account of an event…
1 Like