Hi pronomono, I think one has to start from basics when ones foundation crumbles and the building on top shatters into dust. This being the case one has to decide what the foundation should be made of before the foundation can become better that the one that crumbled. When the foundation is completed and the structure starts to get built on top, such a building will by itself fit into any of the pre-provided labels and world view that are out there. These go by such terms as atheist or theist, Christian and so forth.
The foundation however is a different matter than the structure, as words like faith and other similar type labels are more appropriate to the foundation rather than the structure on top of the foundation. In many respects the foundation is far more important than the structure as buildings can always be modified where necessary but foundations cannot without the complete destruction of the building. When it comes to faith, I decided that there was a valid distinction between blind faith and faith. So to me evidence was an absolute prerequisite for faith to have any solidity. However faith is also a label which can be dropped in favour of the word evidence. To me they mean the same thing on a basic level. One thus has to decide what constitutes evidence.
There are many approaches to evidence in this world. Some limit what evidence is according to different things. Of course evidence in order to have any value must by necessity be limited, else all things can be evidence for anything, which is obviously of no value when it comes to the allusive truth about reality, if that is what we are after. Some approaches limit evidence to a materialistic paradigm and others include other things less corporeal. The details of these positions are worth looking at, so we can decide for ourselves which we think has more merit.
Philosophy is a good discipline in order to try and weigh such things in order to help us look as objectively as may be possible. One doesn’t have to study it in a university to make use of it and it is very valuable for evaluating systems of thought.
The most important point I would make is this, that what one ends up believing is often a function of what one thinks is important. For instance is one thinks that life the universe and everything has a deeper meaning than the normal everyday meanings we give it ourselves, we will probably build up a world view that reflects that. Of course if we don’t then we won’t and the resulting world view will reflect a different view. So what we believe already and today, deep inside and I mean really deeply, even after and beyond a catastrophic collapse of our mental model or belief system, will modify in time what we eventually replace that old mental model with. The problem here is that our most deeply held beliefs are not a function of evidence but of belief. This applies to atheists and as well as theist’s although many would dispute this as being the case. Don’t get me wrong, most belief can be modified and shaped by evidence, but not all of it, not the most basic ones to which all else revolves in how we relate to ourselves and reality.
I want you to decide for yourself but speaking for me I am a Christian in the sense of a follower of Jesus. You have the luxury of time to try to get the foundations in place, and also to discover what your inbuilt foundations already are in terms of who you are, that part is already there, but it takes time to combine these two types of foundation and then to build on it. I think someone said `to thine own self be true.`
Brian
