> Thanks for taking the time to reply and speaking civilly! I've really come to enjoy discussions on Hacker News more than anywhere else.

:-)

>> I am speaking of observation, not revelation.
>
> Me too. There were lot of observations about people and events in first-century Palestine that were then recorded and preserved over time.

Sure, and based on that evidence I agree with you that there were humans living in first-century Palestine, for example.

> I was just in a meeting today. Let's say I write a blog post about it and that post is read 2000 years later. While it can't be the sole basis for answering the question of whether or not that meeting happened, I think it should be given a lot of respect and precedence when considering the question.

Well, that very much depends.

If the claim simply was that there was some meeting today in some company and that your were in it, and whether I believe it or not was essentially inconsequential, sure, might well have happened, that doesn't contradict anything I know about this world, there are meetings in companies all the time, and I assume that will still be a well-established fact 2000 years from now.

Now, if you asked me to bet my house on the truth of the claim that that meeting actually happened? No way I'd do that just based on a simple blog posting, even today, blog postings are just way too easy to fake.

Or if you claimed that in that meeting someone demonstrated that energy conservation doesn't hold, or that the speed of light can be exceeded, or that you resurrected a dead human ... no, your blog post wouldn't count for much as far as those claims are concerned, if anything at all, we have pretty solid evidence that energy is conserved, that the speed of light cannot be exceeded, and that rotting human bodies cannot be resurrected, at least with current medical technology. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> But don't discount revelation outright! If I want someone to understand me better, I'd rather tell them myself rather than having them resort to observations and experiments, and I'd probably give them more information in an hour of talking than they ever could figure out on their own.

But first of all, listening to someone speak is perfectly fine observation, there is nothing supernatural about humans producing sound waves in patterns of some spoken language and other humans detecting/observing those sound waves, and secondly, if you said to me "I know everything", the observation I make is that you said "I know everything", not that you actually know everything, those two are two very distinct claims that would require very different evidence. Also, usually, if you talk to someone, you usually aren't limited to just listening and watching, you can even do interactive experiments, such as ask a question and then observe the reaction of the other person. That's how you usually figure out other people.

All of that demonstrably can provide reliable knowledge about the world. In contrast to the "having an experience", personal/internal type of revelation, which has an abysmal track record. Note though that I don't "discount [it] outright"--if you claim that that can provide reliable knowledge about the world, sure, possibly, but don't expect me to believe that until you have demonstrated it. I don't hold much hope for it though, given how contradictory claims are that people have made, supposedly based on such revelations, both versus one another and when compared to other (demonstrably reliable) methods of observation.

> If you can explain it completely, it's not faith. So that makes sense.

There is no such thing as "explain it completely". There is "you can explain it", aka "you know it", and there is "you can't explain it", aka "you don't know it". But there is no such thing as "completeness" in explanations. In a sense, there is no such thing as an explanation. There are models of reality, which colloquially are called explanations, but they are nothing more than descriptions of regularities that have been observed, and in every(!) model there are details of which we don't know whether more details couldn't possibly be found out at a later time. Why do we have day and night? Because the earth is spinning! Why is the earth spinning? Because it got angular momentum from the accretion disc around the sun that it formed in, and angular momentum is conserved! Why is angular momentum conserved? ... ad infinitum, or rather, until you get to the point where we don't know (yet), which is the point where the responsible thing to say is "I don't know", not "<whatever>, because I have faith", because only "I don't know" logically leads to you possibly finding out, if you pretend you know even though you don't, chances are, you won't.

> The concept of a triune God is one that kinda ends up this way. I can pontificate all I want about how I'm a father, a son, and a brother all while being a single entity, but at the end of the day it's like explaining depth to Flatlanders - it's tough to truly understand something that doesn't exist on your level. So, what goes beyond my comprehension requires faith.

No, what goes beyond your comprehension, you don't comprehend, and chances are it's bullshit. If you can't comprehend something, you can't determine whether it's true, so, while it's quite possible that it is in fact true, it's just as possible that it's false, and without you being able to determine which of the two is the case by means of comprehension, just believing something "on faith" becomes a random game of chance, on some things you will be right, on others you will be wrong.

Humanity has heaps of experience with this method of obtaining supposed knowledge, by the way. People over time have believed all kinds of crazy shit "on faith"--that is to say: Stuff that we meanwhile have a working understanding of, much of which turned out to be wildly different from what people had sincerely held beliefs about "on faith". Luckily, some people avoided believing this supposed knowledge, so we now know, to pick a random example, about bacteria. People were perfectly convinced that demons were real, and they even developed "demon therapy" ... but as you might know, exorcism didn't quite do the trick, antibiotics did.

> Can it be used as a cop-out or an intellectually lazy answer? Sure! The Bible even suggests that faith is hard - a man once said to Jesus "I believe; help my unbelief!" But that doesn't mean it's not a valid state of mind.

No, that doesn't mean it's not a valid state of mind. But it also doesn't mean that it _is_ a valid state of mind. If you claim that it's a method to obtain reliable knowledge about the world, it's up to you to provide the evidence, it's not up to me to disprove any random evidence-free claim you make.

> I like the chair metaphor for this sort of talk. Sitting in a chair requires a measure of faith that it'll hold my weight. If I'm sitting in the chair, the question is already answered so no more faith is required (unless I wanted to question the idea that the chair would continue to hold my weight!).

None of this requires any faith, if you want to figure out whether a chair will hold your weight, you(!) use evidence. Does it look like chairs that you have experience holding your weight (it's the same model you have at home, maybe)? Does it look like chairs that you have experience not holding your weight (those rusty legs full of holes look just like that laundry rack of yours that fell apart yesterday, say)? Have you seen someone else sit on it? Does it stand in some context where there is an increased chance that it won't hold you (a room in your company where meetings are being held all the time vs. a long-forgotten corner in the attic)? All of those checks and many more are how you(!) decide whether you will sit down on a chair or not, or whether you maybe carefully test whether it will hold you before you sit down. You don't just sit down on any chair in the faith that it will hold you, and there very much are circumstances where you will refrain from sitting down based on the evidence you observe and your experience from previous observations as to what attributes tend to indicate a reliable chair and which indicate an unreliable chair. And still, you could be wrong, in which case you'll figure it out by trying to sit down, not by postulating some truth "on faith".

> If I couldn't sit in the chair because it's behind a glass wall in a museum, then I can choose to believe it will/won't hold me or I can choose to not make a decision because, who cares? And for a chair that's okay, because it's not being prescriptive or dealing with anything existential.

You can't choose belief. Belief is about whether you are convinced of the truth of some claim. Either you are convinced, or you are not. You cannot decide what you are convinced of. If you could decide your beliefs, you could decide, for example, to be convinced that jumping from a tall building is not dangerous. Once you believed that, you would jump out of the window of a skyscraper without any hesitation, just like you don't hesitate when stepping out of the door at ground level because you believe that to not be dangerous. Could you do that?

I for one would probably withhold belief. Just as above, if it looks reasonably solid (aka reasonably similar to chairs that I have experience holding my weight and reasonably dissimilar from chairs I have experience not holding my weight), I might tend to believe it. But if you asked me to bet my house on it, I probably would refuse.

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