Intellectual Honesty?

cvanwey said:

Thank you for the kind words.

However, I do not value faith as an asset. From my estimation, faith is pretending to know the unknown, belief in place of evidence, and can be used for anything and any reason. A Muslim can endow faith every bit as much as a Christian, Jew, or other, and feel equally as valid within their 'feelings.'

I've seem many use faith, when they read verses in the Bible, which do not appear to align with known reality. And then choose to instill faith (instead) of the presented evidence, which appears to fly in the face of the Biblical claim. In such a case, to use faith, may actually be demonstrating intellectual dishonesty.

I'm not saying you do this, but this is what I see time and time again...

Peace

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Sure. I can agree with a lot of that, particularly within the frame which your OP gives for all of this. However, the problem here is that epistemologically speaking, it's really difficult for any of us to finalize and absolutize any of our perceptions about the world and assume we "see it all as it really is in its fullness." And this goes for whether we are of a religious bent or of a more skeptical, non-religious bent. None of us can typically fully justify all of our perceptions about the world; in fact, I'd be tempted to say that no one person really has a completely worked out epistemological framework by which every aspect of reality he or she perceives can be demonstrated. Or that even if demonstrable to another, that it makes all that much difference. This isn't to say that we can't find some agreement in our conceptions of reality, however. It's just that we're all going to have a difficult time trying to ground and justify our perceptions and claims.

Anyway, rather than saying that the presence of 'faith' also expresses the presence of intellectual dishonesty, I'd say that depending upon the actual cognitive structure and experiences any one Christian has had, the rest of us might evaluate that one person's faith as being intellectually dishonest. But this wouldn't thereby define or reveal to us the nature of faith itself. No, our understanding of the essence of faith would have to come by another route of hermeneutical deliberation, as a part of other philosophical and theological considerations.