Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Does our faith have a verifiable foundation?

For us, being physically restricted in a spatiotemporal world, nothing is verifiable in the strictest sense. For instance, if we say only human beings worship God(s), the statement is unverifiable because we cannot say we will never discover the otherwise in the future. Instead, things in this world can only be disambiguated within our epistemological regime.

This is what we call objectivity, which itself is built up on unverifiable ground. Therefore, there is no absolute objectivity. Objectivity is relative. We as Christians may employ this logic to defend us against modernist's attack on our faith. However, it seems that such apologetic claim is at the same time self-defeating because it implies the foundation of faith is either unverifiable.

From my point of view, it is true that we can never verify our faith or the foundation of our faith. It is not only because the foundation of faith is unverifiable, but also faith is something outside the epistemological regime. The only thing that we can do is to verify the coherence between faith and personal spiritual experience which we are certain of. Hebrew 11:1 says, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." The dialogue between faith and experience is a dialogue between objectivity and subjectivity; between the future and the immediate presence of the kingdom of God. As mentioned by Wright: it is natural to say "I believe it's raining" when indoors with the curtains shut, but it would be odd to say it standing on a hillside in a downpour,* as it is what we are certain of.

* Reference:

The Meaning of Jesus - Two Vision, by Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright - Part I, Chapter 2, p.25

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