In alt.religion.christian lsenders@hotmail.com wrote:

Descartes would disagree.

Additionally, I think that you conflate reality with knowlege. I said
that reality = facts. I said nothing about one's knowlege of facts.

Again, you conflate knowledge with facts. Facts exist indipendently of
knowledge, and can exist whether known or unkown. Accordingly, unknown
facts can never be assumptions. For example, the temperature on a
yet-to-be-discovered planet is a fact, despite our having no knowledge of
it, and this fact, this "what is" is in no way an assumption.

You may prove something has been

Here you use your conflation of facts and knowledge to posit that the
perceptions of men are the truth. But the truth exists indipendently of
knowledge. For example, one may prove that the sun has been shining
"since the beginning of man's record". This has nothing to do with any
sociological average. Indeed, if no men had ever seen the sun, the fact of
the matter would be that the sun has been shining since (and before) such
time.

There are NO absolutes unless you

I can't evaluate what you are saying unless I know what you mean by
"absolute". I notice that you capitalize the word in one place and not in
the other.

Not only that, but taking your statement at face value, please tell me the
implications of there being no absolutes. Are you saying that there is
always a tiny sliver of doubt in all statements of fact? Is that
important?

And before you do your normal acrobatics of jumping to

Can you inexhaustiely know a truth absent an "Absolute" who reveals it?
For example, do you know that you exist, absent Absolute revelation? Is
the mind of man capable of accurate perception of fact, absent revelation
by a third party?

Again, this

With that, I agree. Reason is irreleant to faith. For example, we use
reason to demonstrate that there was never a world-wide flood. And yet,
despite this reasoned conlusion, one may have faith that the events
recounted in the Bible are facts.

One can rationalize the two, the manifest conclusions formed by
examination of the world around us, and the statements found in the bible,
in any number of ways. For example, some folks deny the validity of the
conclusions we reach by using our senses and then empoying reason. They
take the same sensory input, and employ unreasonable methods to demnstrate
its concurance with statements in the bible. Hence those who use
the fossil record to "prove" the existence of a wold-wide flood, despite
there being good reasons to reject their methodology.

I don't know what you are saying. How are you using the word mediate?

But with regard to the first clause, faith may either be reasonable or
uneasonable. One may have faith that there was once a world-wide flood,
but such faith is not reasonable, because no process of reasoning can lead
to such a conclusion absent a premise based upon faith. One may have faith
that rocks can float in mid-air, but such faith is unreasonable. One may
have faith that the bus will show up eventually, late as usual, because of
repeated experiences, and such faith would be reasonable.