For many Christians, faith is a word used to describe a particular class of evidence, namely evidence sent (as it were) by God to a person. The person believes x, y, z for a good reason - they have evidence (of that particular class of evidence) which supports the belief. They believe God exists, for example, because God has made himself evident by means of this class of evidence.
That the empircist decries such a faith position is to be expected. His philosophy demands he do so. That doesn't diminish the fact that religious belief can be a reasonable thing. It is reasonable to belief what you have evidence for - afterall.
This line of reasoning is flawed because it applies equally well to the mentally disturbed.
The sort of revelation iano is referring to is subjective - it is evidence solely for the person who experiences it, and cannot be intependantly confirmed by an additional observer. There is no objective difference, for example, between a person claiming he has heard the voice of God and a person claiming he has heard the voice of Thor os even his imaginary friend. The person very well may be hearing voices, or could simply be convincing themselves that they are being communicated with when no such communication is happening; in either case, an independant 3rd party would be unable to hear teh voices or experience the communication.
In the case of the person who claims to actually hear voices, we typically label them as "schitzophrenic" and treat them as such.
This is the difference that iano fails to take into account. Yes, the person who has faith may have good reason for their beliefs
for themselves, but their reasoning is compeltely invalid for anyone else. If iano, for instance, were to claim that his life has been guided by God, I am reasonably certain that a simple examination of the major events of his life would reveal personal motivation, influences from other human beings, and a major confirmation bias on iano's part where
any result is confirmed to be the work of God's guidance. Iano may believe that his life has been guided by the divine, but an outside observer would find the idea preposterous.
In my own personal experience, when I was a Christian I "felt" the presence of God as a genuine sensation, an emotional confirmation that God loved me and was watching me. When I spoke to God, I really felt that he was right there with me, listening to every word. I considered these things to be a "good reason" to believe in God at the time, much like iano. But such "evidence" is purely subjective and cannot be conveyed to anyone else except as an individual's say-so.
Worse, it's fundamentally no different from a person experiencing hallucinations. In exactly the same way, the "evidence" cannot be conveyed to anyone else except as hearsay. In exactly the same way, the "evidence" is solely the experience of the individual.
The experiences of an individual, no matter how "real" for them, cannot be interpreted as objective evidence. When we ask for evidence in support of the existence of a deity, we are not asking for personal testimony - I can find "personal testimony" that supports any religion on Earth, as well as a variety of space aliens, conspiracy theories, and simple delusions from the mentally disturbed.
The problem for the faithful is that
all of the "evidence" in support of the divine is subjective. You cannot see, hear, taste, smell or touch God. You can find no divine fingerprint, no holy signature, no
objective sign that any supreme deity exists whatsoever. God doesn't show up in the sky saying "Hi, here I am." Even the claims of the Bible, the
only reason beyond tradition for the existence of Christianity, have either a startling lack of evidence in many cases, or as with some are directly contradicted by
real objective evidence.
Until theists can produce extraordinary,
objective evidence to match the extraordinary claim that God is real, there is no reason to beleive that he is.
So no, iano, it is not always reasonable to "belief" what you have evidence for, if that evidence is wholly
subjective and cannot be independantly verified. In fact, I would very strongly argue that believing in things that
cannot be independantly verified is the very definition of
delusion.
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