Dioptre, let me first just say that I greatly appreciate your willingness to put together a careful, thoughtful, and polite argument. It’s one I disagree with totally, not surprisingly, but I can certainly say that the board would be a better place if everyone was as mannerly as you.
So with that said, on to the debunking.
You say, “Faith can be contrasted with the scientific method”. I’d certainly agree with that. You say that the “The scientific method as a way of knowing about things has itself been empirically confirmed as effective”. Well, I’d agree that it’s been confirmed as effective as a way of knowing about scientific topics. And what is a scientific topic? I’d be happy to define it by the same words you used in that paragraph. Science is about “the behavior of the physical world”. So, in other words, if I want to know how hydrochloric acid reacts with sodium hydroxide, or where the continent of South America was fifty million years ago, or whether atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing the planet to overheat, I use the scientific method. (Or, more likely, consult someone else who uses the scientific method.)
But there are plentiful topics that are not scientific topics. If I want to know whether my girlfriend loves me, or how my neighbors are doing, or whether my co-workers are trustworthy, or how the American people will react in a given situation, I do not use the scientific method, nor consult someone else who does. For those topics, I have to engage the higher faculties of the human mind. If I want to know how someone feels, it’s not sufficient to merely ask them. It’s not sufficient to ask them multiple times and make sure the results are replicable. It would not be sufficient (even if it were possible) to have an expert write a peer-reviewed journal article on the topic. Things that occur at the human mental level, which is higher than the physical level, cannot be determined by processes designed for the physical level. Consider the things that truly matter in life: love, beauty, friendship, peace, agreement, satisfaction, self-actualization, charity, determination, and so forth. All of these things are invisible. I can experience my own version of those things directly, but I’ll never have direct experience of anybody’s else version of those things. All I can get is indirect evidence that other people may be experience those things. But to interpret that indirect evidence, I need to give up any use of “objective”, “scientific”, “replicable” techniques. Instead, I must acknowledge the uniqueness of each individual. Identical words or actions from two individuals may mean two completely different things. Only someone who knows an individual truly and deeply can hope to correctly interpret their words and actions to achieve a good understanding of what happens in their mind.
So in response to you saying “The scientific method as a way of knowing about things has itself been empirically confirmed as effective”, I say that it’s been empirically confirmed about empirical things, but not about all things. Science has produced excellent understanding of physics, geology, biology, and so forth. But when people have tried to nail down the human mind with scientific precision, they’ve produced a carnival of errors: phrenology, craniology, Freudianism, collective unconscious, social Darwinism, behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, and the list goes on. For the higher topics, we need higher methods than the scientific method.
It is, of course, readily evident that there is a possibility of error when we apply the higher methods to the higher topics. I can never be absolutely certain how my girlfriend actually feels about me; she may be dissembling. I can never truly know what’s going on in my neighbor’s mind; they may be putting on a facade. But even so, I am a person and I must interact with people, so I must be willing to tackle questions involving the higher levels of human existence despite the possibility of error. As Saint Thomas Aquinas famously said, “the most slender knowledge of the higher things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge of the lower things”. So if I arbitrarily limited myself to studying only things where knowledge was certain, I’d lose out on all the most important knowledge in human life.
So then I must be willing to accept some things as true even in the absence of certainty. In other words, I must have faith in some things. I can’t go around living without it entirely. If I’m constantly suspicious of my girlfriend because I can’t be certain of her interior life, then soon I won’t have a girlfriend. If I refuse to engage with friends and relatives just because I can’t be certain of them, then that will increase the distance between me and them.
So now on to the question of why I have faith in Jesus Christ. You say “almost the entire portion of revealed knowledge which has been subject to observation and measurement has been shown to be incorrect”. Mostly true. (Although I could show you some interesting, measurable facts that religious people did know long before science found them out.) But regarding things that aren’t subject to observation and measurement, faith in Jesus Christ has been established as a very reliable method of knowing. We only need consider the teachings of Christ in the Gospels.
Jesus said that we should love our enemies. At the time, people generally believed that hatred, violence, and blood feuds were the right way to deal with enemies. Jesus said that women should be treated as moral and mental equals to men. At the time, people generally believed that women were inferior to men. Jesus said that children should be treated respectfully and lovingly. At the time, children were viewed as property and often subject to violence. Jesus said that people should knock down barriers between cities, tribes, and nations. Jesus said that the poor should be given good standing, while the rich were the cause of the world’s problems. Jesus said that sinners should be forgiven. Jesus said the sick and injured should not be cast aside, but instead should be loved, treated with dignity, and cured. And Jesus said a great deal more, almost all of it contradicting what was generally believed at the time, yet which is now widely accepted by the people at large, including both secular and followers of many religions.
So, you might ask: ‘Jesus said some good things but why believe he was God?’ Well the first answer I can give is that I like having consistent beliefs, so when Jesus said that the was God and that he planned to rise from the dead, I believe it because I find it easier to believe all of what he said then to believe that he had extraordinary wisdom most of the time but a few brain farts that caused him to spout nonsense part of the time. But more to the point in this thread, I have faith in Jesus because I have found that faith is a successful method of knowing. That was the point that Paul was trying to make in the Epistle to the Hebrews with his long litany of people who “lived by faith” during Israel’s history. Yet, an equally modern version of the argument could be made with modern people. Look at Desmond Tutu, at Martin Luther King, at Mother Teresa, at Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at John Wesley, at George Fox. They all lived by faith too, and they created massive, positive changes in the world, which nearly everyone of any religious viewpoint now agrees that those changes were a good thing. So then, I conclude that living by faith is a quite reliable method of living.