Let's define "faith"

[rich1540]

For me, faith is trust, nothing more. For me, hope is the wish that a loved one finds peace and joy through Jesus Christ. To me, to ascribe hope to oneself seems to contradict the message.

 

[KnowtheSilence]

Let's define "faith"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



The Greek word commonly translated as faith is "pistis" which literally means forensic proof. While it can be read as this in some parts of Acts faith is usually used in the sense of loyalty and trust.



As opposed to loyalty and trust? No. Hope is defined as faith in things unseen.



No. Because while hope is faith in things unseen, most Christians believe that there is also significant historical evidence for the resurrection. (please note I did not say proof)

and loyalty

Christianity is a big tent so you may get some different answers but for me ; yes that is what I am saying.

Trust in a philosophical system that denies what seems so obvious.

Not precisely the same thing but closely related.
Again you will probably get some different answers.


You're Welcome
God Bless
Jax_________________

So, faith is trust and loyalty.
Where your religious beliefs are concerned, which came first, belief or faith?

I also don't have trust in philosophical systems that I think deny the obvious. I think naturalism is pretty obvious. I think that the existence of God is not obvious.

 

[stevevw]

Hebrews 11 tells us about faith. It goes into all the great people of the bible and how faith made them great. They achieved great things by believing what God said was true and then trusting Him with their lives. They based their decisions on that faith and they took actions for themselves and for others based on that faith. At times they were putting themselves in danger and even in what seemed like impossible situations that were against all the odds. But they still trusted God and He came through in the end. The bible tells us that faith is the key to our relationship with God and being saved.

But its not some blind dumb thing that some make out it is. Like we are believing blindly without any evidence and conviction. The bible says that faith is the confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. So its a confidence and assurance. That comes from God and it is a conviction we have in our hearts that will cause us to make those same decisions that the great men of the bible made in our lives. That conviction can be a strong as if God was standing right in front of us. Its not an imaginary things like non believers want to make out. Because they will base everything on what they see they will not understand this. But it is real and is the only way we can be saved and know God.

Hebrews 11
11 Faith means being sure of the things we hope for and knowing that something is real even if we do not see it. 2 Faith is the reason we remember great people who lived in the past.
3 It is by faith we understand that the whole world was made by God’s command so what we see was made by something that cannot be seen.

Hebrews 11 then goes into all the examples of the great men who had faith.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+11&version=NCV

 

[True Scotsman]

Faith in the context of religion is not simply belief without evidence, it is a declaration of war on reality itself. The God belief contradicts everything we know about reality. It is a rejection of the four axioms of philosophy. It is an abrogation of every principle which knowledge rests on and is therefore irrational.

Faith in the context of religion is not synonymous with "hope" or "trust" but with "wish". It is an attempt to escape from the absolutism of reality.

Robert

 

[Chany]

The God belief contradicts everything we know about reality. It is a rejection of the four axioms of philosophy. It is an abrogation of every principle which knowledge rests on and is therefore irrational.

Please define "The God belief". In my experience, opinions and beliefs on God are incredibly varied, especially when we start to get to particulars.

Please list the four axioms of philosophy.

What are the principles on which knowledge rests? What is knowledge? I am unaware of a universal consensus on epistemology.

 

[Gottservant]

Faith, is. (selah)

 

[jax5434]

Um, no actually. "Not believing in God" is not a positive affirmation. Not believing means exactly the same thing as lacking belief. It would be very different to say "X does not exist."

That exactly what I said

atheist began to redefine what atheism meant in the middle of the last century because they realized that that they could not shoulder the burden of proof for the positive affirmation "God does not exist" So they redefined it to mean a "lack of belief in a God". Thinking then that they would no longer have a claim they couldn't defend.

That would be different and would turn the burden of proof.

Again thats what I said. "Thinking then that they would no longer have a claim they couldn't defend."

What doesn't turn the burden of proof is one's rejection of another person's bald assertion. Nice try, though.

I did not make a bald assertion. A bald assertion would be one with no supporting premises. My premise is this: If you say "I lack belief in God because...." then you have to shoulder the burden of proof for those reasons.
If you say "I have no reason for my lack of belief in God....." Then your position is an emotional, not an intellectual. one.

But we're digressing...

As I pointed out to Ana several Posts ago.

What is faith? We need specifics.

Faith = loyalty and trust. I really don't know how I can be any more specific.

Is it a reliable epistemology to discern fact from fiction?

Faith is not an epistemology. Faith is an attitude of "loalty and trust" in someone or something. The epistemology of faith would be theology. For the Christian Faith it would be Christian Theology.

God Bless
Jax

 

[jax5434]

@knowthesilence

So, faith is trust and loyalty.

Yes

Where your religious beliefs are concerned, which came first, belief or faith?

1.There is really no distinction between religious and non-religious faith in terms of definition. Faith is Faith no matter where it's placed.
2. I would say that belief always precedes faith. How could someone place their loyalty and trust into anything they did not believe?

I also don't have trust in philosophical systems that I think deny the obvious.

Good for you. What do you think about Atheism?

I think naturalism is pretty obvious.

Actually if naturalism is true you don't really think at all. Your "thoughts' are nothing more than the random firing of neurons which may have no correspondence to reality.

I think that the existence of God is not obvious

Well, that would be the root of our disagreement wouldn't it.?

God Bless
Jax
__________________

 

[True Scotsman]

Please define "The God belief". In my experience, opinions and beliefs on God are incredibly varied, especially when we start to get to particulars.

Please list the four axioms of philosophy.

What are the principles on which knowledge rests? What is knowledge? I am unaware of a universal consensus on epistemology.

While there are many variations they all share some essential characteristics which are contradictory to the facts of reality. They all involve a conscious being with the ability to create, maintain and alter reality by an act of conscious will. I don't think this should be a controversial statement on a Christian forum.

The four axioms of philosophy:

Existence
Consciousness
Identity
The primacy of existence

The above principles are the ones that all knowledge rests on. They are implicit in any knowledge claim, even claims that contradict them. They are axiomatic in nature.

Knowledge is the facts of reality or statements that correspond to the facts of reality.

Yes there are many different views on epistemology, but these primaries are implicit in all of them including the ones that reject them such as the epistemology of Christianity. In fact any philosophy which rejects them, such as Christianity, commits the fallacy of the stolen concept and is wrong.

Robert

 

[Tree of Life]

Faith in the context of religion is not simply belief without evidence, it is a declaration of war on reality itself. The God belief contradicts everything we know about reality.

In what way does belief in God contradict reality?

It is a rejection of the four axioms of philosophy.

What are the four axioms of philosophy, who identified them, and why should I care about them?

 

[Chany]

First, your notion is wrong. For example, some believe might believe God is beholden to the the laws of logic; God cannot transcend the law of identity, etc. The only type of logical consistency problems on the analytical level I've encountered (with any consistency, that is) is with orthodox Christian conception of God (Trinity, divinity of Christ, etc.).

Okay, so how does the notion of "God" break any of the four axioms? God exists and is something. The whole "creation ex nihilo" might be a problem, but not if you make God pantheistic, have God coexist with some sort of matter, have God on a plain of existence unfathomable to humans, etc., or if you reject ex nihilio creation.

Consciousness exists. God, as a conscious agent, would always exist. God, at the beginning point, would count as existing, being aware of his own existence and subsequent internal conditions of his mind.

Identity holds. If I need to argue why it does for God, then nothing I say will ever change that.

Primacy of Existence. I don't really get the point of this. At all. When Rand talks about this, she treats existence in a weird way; that is, she treats consciousness as a thing that does not exist.

Alright, so your epistemology is the correspondence theory. Okay. So, please tell me the truth value of the following statement:

This statement is false.

Does the factual claim of the above statement correspond with reality?

It's sounds like you've accepted Ayn Rand's Objectivisism and treated it as the whole of philosophy. Every time I google for these axioms, it always ties back into a site either on Objectivism. There's nothing wrong with trying to support her outlook. You can say the other views are wrong. But you can't claim them as philosophy and say that any philosophical positions. Furthermore, it's not really the axioms themselves most people have a problem with, it's the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical conclusions Rand tries to argue for based of upon them.

 

[True Scotsman]

First, your notion is wrong. For example, some believe might believe God is beholden to the the laws of logic; God cannot transcend the law of identity, etc. The only type of logical consistency problems on the analytical level I've encountered (with any consistency, that is) is with orthodox Christian conception of God (Trinity, divinity of Christ, etc.).

Okay, so how does the notion of "God" break any of the four axioms? God exists and is something. The whole "creation ex nihilo" might be a problem, but not if you make God pantheistic, have God coexist with some sort of matter, have God on a plain of existence unfathomable to humans, etc., or if you reject ex nihilio creation.

Consciousness exists. God, as a conscious agent, would always exist. God, at the beginning point, would count as existing, being aware of his own existence and subsequent internal conditions of his mind.

Identity holds. If I need to argue why it does for God, then nothing I say will ever change that.

Primacy of Existence. I don't really get the point of this. At all. When Rand talks about this, she treats existence in a weird way; that is, she treats consciousness as a thing that does not exist.

Alright, so your epistemology is the correspondence theory. Okay. So, please tell me the truth value of the following statement:

This statement is false.

Does the factual claim of the above statement correspond with reality?

It's sounds like you've accepted Ayn Rand's Objectivisism and treated it as the whole of philosophy. Every time I google for these axioms, it always ties back into a site either on Objectivism. There's nothing wrong with trying to support her outlook. You can say the other views are wrong. But you can't claim them as philosophy and say that any philosophical positions. Furthermore, it's not really the axioms themselves most people have a problem with, it's the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical conclusions Rand tries to argue for based of upon them.

Chany,

I have a lot to say in response to your post. I think there are some misconceptions about Objectivism that I need to correct and I would like to answer your questions in detail. Rather than write a huge wall of text I'd like to respond in parts and the first thing I'll do is validate and explain the 4 axioms at the base of Objectivism. This will not take up much text because they are easily understood being so fundamental and being axioms. I have to go finish cooking dinner and then I'll start with the first axiom, existence, validating and explaining the concept as Objectivism informs it. I'll also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these principles are axiomatic and that they must be accepted and used even to object to them. I can do this very briefly and then the rest of my answers will be much more understandable.

Robert

 

[True Scotsman]

In what way does belief in God contradict reality?



What are the four axioms of philosophy, who identified them, and why should I care about them?

Hello Tree of Life,

Chany has raised many of the same questions so I'll answer you at the same time as I do hers. I have to finish dinner and then I'll be glad to answer all of your questions briefly. If you would like me to expand on anything I will.

To answer your last question, you should care about axioms because they are true and have profound implications for literally all knowledge and because you implicitly affirm them each and every time you make a knowledge claim. In the case of the claim of the existence of God you then contradict those same principles with the content of the claim resulting in a stolen concept fallacy.

Robert

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Atheists get criticized for taking the word "faith" to mean something along the lines of "belief without sufficient evidence," even though sometimes that's pretty much what we're given to work with when someone tries to describe their faith to us. But I want to give people a fair shake, so I'd like to hear what Christians and other religious people typically mean when they use the word.

Anticipating some areas where I see this heading, here are some follow-up questions for various definitions that might be given:

Faith = "hope"
But do you base any knowledge claims on faith(hope)? When you say something like "I have faith that Jesus resurrected," are you really just saying "I have hope that Jesus resurrected"?

Faith = "trust"
So, if someone says something like "I don't have enough faith to be an atheists" or "atheists have more faith than me," are they really saying "I don't have enough trust to be an atheist"? Trust in what?

Hebrews 11:1
Faith is "the substance of things hoped for" and "the evidence of things unseen." Can you unpack this for me at all? Is this at all different from saying "faith = hope"?

Thanks in advance to all who participate.

Faith, according to the entire New Testament, is an active, positive 'response' to God, through Christ and His Church. We can quote single verses, but the Word of God isn't a single verse, and neither is a description of faith denoted by only a single verse of Scripture.

 

[stevevw]

It is interesting that some say belief in God defies reality. From what I understand that is what is exactly happening in quantum physics. So if scientists are looking into a world where reality first comes into existence and seeing that what forms our reality isn't what we see around us. Its a completely different set of physics. For example particles can pop in and out of existence, two particles can respond instantaneously to each other as though they are connected even if they are trillions of miles apart on opposite sides on the universe.

Now some scientists when trying to explain what they are seeing in this quantum world are now coming up with theories which are out of this world. Some are talking about life beyond this world and that our consciousness is what is making reality. That it is the observer that is making our reality rather that our reality making what we see. At the very least some scientists are moving outside the way we measure things with our reality because there is not other way to explain it. Quantum physics isn't an imaginary thing. It is part of our existence and is the building blocks of everything we see around us including the empty black space we see in the universe.

So if a faith in God is a declaration against our reality so is the quantum world. Maybe the two are connected. If God really is the creator and brought something from nothing then maybe this is how He works with this quantum physics. Maybe we do have some indirect evidence of God in this quantum world. Even though it is such a tiny world that is invisible to us within our reality there is something still working. It has a force and it has an ability to affect our reality and absolutely everything is the universe. So maybe this is how God works when the bible says that God is everywhere and in all things.

John 1.3
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Colossians 1.17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Romans 1:19-20 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[a] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Atheists get criticized for taking the word "faith" to mean something along the lines of "belief without sufficient evidence," even though sometimes that's pretty much what we're given to work with when someone tries to describe their faith to us. But I want to give people a fair shake, so I'd like to hear what Christians and other religious people typically mean when they use the word.

Anticipating some areas where I see this heading, here are some follow-up questions for various definitions that might be given:

Faith = "hope"
But do you base any knowledge claims on faith(hope)? When you say something like "I have faith that Jesus resurrected," are you really just saying "I have hope that Jesus resurrected"?

Faith = "trust"
So, if someone says something like "I don't have enough faith to be an atheists" or "atheists have more faith than me," are they really saying "I don't have enough trust to be an atheist"? Trust in what?

Hebrews 11:1
Faith is "the substance of things hoped for" and "the evidence of things unseen." Can you unpack this for me at all? Is this at all different from saying "faith = hope"?

Thanks in advance to all who participate.

I, together with the whole Lutheran tradition, am a big proponent of the idea of faith as trust. But trust rarely means 'belief without sufficient evidence,' because assurance is not the opposite of trust. In other words, having complete and certain knowledge would not in any way mitigate my sense of trust.

Trust, rather, is a form of dependence upon promises. You may very well know with absolutely certainty that those promises will one day be fulfilled. But in the interim, trust still characterizes the relationship.

In classical Reformation parlance, "God justifies sinners by grace alone through faith alone." In other words, God has graciously offered promises of assurance which we then trust will ultimately be brought to fulfillment (either upon our death or upon Christ's return). That doesn't mean we can't seek out reasons for believing those promises (historical and philosophical inquiry into the truth of Christianity); it means that trust is the primary human response in the relationship between Christ and the believer. It is always a relational term.

Alas, Luther's nuanced development of the concept of 'faith' was turned into crass 'salvation by belief alone' by subsequent Protestantism, which in turn led to rampant anti-intellectualism. L'sigh.

 

[True Scotsman]

First, your notion is wrong. For example, some believe might believe God is beholden to the the laws of logic; God cannot transcend the law of identity, etc. The only type of logical consistency problems on the analytical level I've encountered (with any consistency, that is) is with orthodox Christian conception of God (Trinity, divinity of Christ, etc.).

Okay, so how does the notion of "God" break any of the four axioms? God exists and is something. The whole "creation ex nihilo" might be a problem, but not if you make God pantheistic, have God coexist with some sort of matter, have God on a plain of existence unfathomable to humans, etc., or if you reject ex nihilio creation.

Consciousness exists. God, as a conscious agent, would always exist. God, at the beginning point, would count as existing, being aware of his own existence and subsequent internal conditions of his mind.

Identity holds. If I need to argue why it does for God, then nothing I say will ever change that.

Primacy of Existence. I don't really get the point of this. At all. When Rand talks about this, she treats existence in a weird way; that is, she treats consciousness as a thing that does not exist.

Alright, so your epistemology is the correspondence theory. Okay. So, please tell me the truth value of the following statement:

This statement is false.

Does the factual claim of the above statement correspond with reality?

It's sounds like you've accepted Ayn Rand's Objectivisism and treated it as the whole of philosophy. Every time I google for these axioms, it always ties back into a site either on Objectivism. There's nothing wrong with trying to support her outlook. You can say the other views are wrong. But you can't claim them as philosophy and say that any philosophical positions. Furthermore, it's not really the axioms themselves most people have a problem with, it's the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical conclusions Rand tries to argue for based of upon them.

OK lets look at the axioms. We have to begin where all knowledge begins, with reality because knowledge is knowledge of reality.

The first thing to say about it, before we can say anything else, is that it exists. Existence exists. It's real. Existence is a one word concept that subsumes everything that exists. It is the broadest possible concept, implicit in all others. because it is the most fundamental concept, it can't be defined by reference to any antecedent concepts as there are no concepts antecedent to it. It is conceptually irreducible. It can only be defined ostensively, by pointing to it. It is perceptually self evident. The validation of the concept "existence" is the simplest of all methods, sense perception. being implicit in all forms of "proof" it is outside the realm of proof. The concept of "proof" rests on it and presupposes it.

In the act of grasping that existence exists we discover the second axiomatic concept, consciousness. Consciousness is consciousness of something as opposed to nothing. Consciousness is consciousness of an object. Consciousness is the faculty that perceives that which exists. Furthermore consciousness presupposes existence. If nothing exists there can be no consciousness. A consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. Before a consciousness could know it was conscious it would have to be conscious of something other than itself. Consciousness is not an entity, it is an attribute of entities, specifically biological organisms. Consciousness too is perceptually self evident. It is directly observable through introspection.

These are the The first two axioms. Something exists and we know it. Both are implicit in all knowledge and in any action you take, even the act of disagreeing with them. They are implied in all philosophy including philosophies that reject them. Objectivism simply states what is implicit in other philosophies explicitly.

Both of these concepts are undeniably true. Any denial of their validity is doomed to fail because it presupposes that someone exists to disagree and there is a consciousness which disagrees.

That's the first two. I'll go on in the next post to inform and validate the other two, tie them together and tie them into the question of the definition of faith and why faith in gods is irrational.

 

[Archaeopteryx]

It is interesting that some say belief in God defies reality. From what I understand that is what is exactly happening in quantum physics. So if scientists are looking into a world where reality first comes into existence and seeing that what forms our reality isn't what we see around us. Its a completely different set of physics. For example particles can pop in and out of existence, two particles can respond instantaneously to each other as though they are connected even if they are trillions of miles apart on opposite sides on the universe.

Now some scientists when trying to explain what they are seeing in this quantum world are now coming up with theories which are out of this world. Some are talking about life beyond this world and that our consciousness is what is making reality. That it is the observer that is making our reality rather that our reality making what we see. At the very least some scientists are moving outside the way we measure things with our reality because there is not other way to explain it. Quantum physics isn't an imaginary thing. It is part of our existence and is the building blocks of everything we see around us including the empty black space we see in the universe.

So if a faith in God is a declaration against our reality so is the quantum world. Maybe the two are connected. If God really is the creator and brought something from nothing then maybe this is how He works with this quantum physics. Maybe we do have some indirect evidence of God in this quantum world. Even though it is such a tiny world that is invisible to us within our reality there is something still working. It has a force and it has an ability to affect our reality and absolutely everything is the universe. So maybe this is how God works when the bible says that God is everywhere and in all things.

John 1.3
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Colossians 1.17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Hebrews 11:3
By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Romans 1:19-20 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[a] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

This seems like a very tenuous connection to make. There's a lot of weird stuff happening on the quantum scale, stuff that we don't fully understand. Invoking God as an explanation does nothing to improve our understanding at all.

 

[stevevw]

This seems like a very tenuous connection to make. There's a lot of weird stuff happening on the quantum scale, stuff that we don't fully understand. Invoking God as an explanation does nothing to improve our understanding at all.

This is what you said before when I gave this explanation. As you said a God of the Gaps. I am not saying scientists or anyone should stop investigating things. I am saying that what they are seeing is something different that is making some come up with unusual hypothesis and theories. So why isn't it fair to consider that it maybe God as one of the hypothesis. I am not the first to put forward that what we are seeing can be lined up with what the bible says about God. But of course just like multi universes and holograms theories it can never really be confirmed because they are all in another realm beyond ours.

This is where faith comes in. We can have indirect evidence but we will never get any direct evidence. So scientists can put forward many ideas about what they see and fit some of that indirect evidence to it just like you are saying I am doing with God. But when we consider some of the bigger questions we have to deal with like something from nothing I believe God is the best Hypothesis to put forward. He fits many of the things we see be it indirectly as much as any hypothesis put forward at the moment. So why not.

 

[True Scotsman]

First, your notion is wrong. For example, some believe might believe God is beholden to the the laws of logic; God cannot transcend the law of identity, etc. The only type of logical consistency problems on the analytical level I've encountered (with any consistency, that is) is with orthodox Christian conception of God (Trinity, divinity of Christ, etc.).

Okay, so how does the notion of "God" break any of the four axioms? God exists and is something. The whole "creation ex nihilo" might be a problem, but not if you make God pantheistic, have God coexist with some sort of matter, have God on a plain of existence unfathomable to humans, etc., or if you reject ex nihilio creation.

Consciousness exists. God, as a conscious agent, would always exist. God, at the beginning point, would count as existing, being aware of his own existence and subsequent internal conditions of his mind.

Identity holds. If I need to argue why it does for God, then nothing I say will ever change that.

Primacy of Existence. I don't really get the point of this. At all. When Rand talks about this, she treats existence in a weird way; that is, she treats consciousness as a thing that does not exist.

Alright, so your epistemology is the correspondence theory. Okay. So, please tell me the truth value of the following statement:

This statement is false.

Does the factual claim of the above statement correspond with reality?

It's sounds like you've accepted Ayn Rand's Objectivisism and treated it as the whole of philosophy. Every time I google for these axioms, it always ties back into a site either on Objectivism. There's nothing wrong with trying to support her outlook. You can say the other views are wrong. But you can't claim them as philosophy and say that any philosophical positions. Furthermore, it's not really the axioms themselves most people have a problem with, it's the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical conclusions Rand tries to argue for based of upon them.

The axioms part 2

I covered the first two axioms of philosophy and now I'll deal with the final two, Identity and the primacy of existence.

To exist is to be something. To be something is to possess a specific set of attributes or a nature or an identity. This is also a perceptually self evident fact. As Aristotle put it: A is A. A thing is what it is and only what it is. It can not be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. Existence and identity are one and the same. To exist is to possess identity and to posses identity is to exist. This is undeniably true. Whatever it is that you are considering, whether it is an entity an attribute or an action it is that thing and only that thing.

These three axioms imply a fourth which is the primacy of existence. This principle has to to do with the necessary relationship between a consciousness (the subject) and the things which it perceives (objects). This relationship is both perceptually self evident and contextually fixed. There are two fundamental possibilities for the orientation of this relationship. One is the objective orientation. This is the one represented by the primacy of existence. This principle states that the subject of consciousness conforms to the objects of consciousness. Things are what they are independent of any consciousness. A is A no matter what anyone wishes. The identity of things obtains independent of anyone's wishes, likes, dislikes, preferences or hopes. Wishing won't make it so. The corollary of this principle in epistemology is the fact that to gain knowledge of reality one must look outward at reality. This is the orientation held by Objectivism.

The antithesis of this principle is the primacy of consciousness. This principle states that things are not what they are independent of conscious activity. Things obtain their identity and are dependent on a consciousness. The objects of consciousness conform to the subject of consciousness. A is not A. A is whatever a consciousness desires it to be. Wishing makes it so. This is the subjective orientation or the subject/ object relationship. This is the principle affirmed by the God belief.

The four axioms are facts of reality, directly observable and validated by perception. They are logical corollaries and to deny one is to deny all. Clearly the God claim contradicts them affirming as it does The primacy of consciousness orientation of the subject/ object relationship. To believe in God is to contradict the essential facts of reality and therefore is irrational.

To equate faith in the context of religion with simple belief or trust or hope represents a false equivocation or package deal. It ignores the difference between an objective belief versus a subjective one.