Recently I was thinking about certainty and faith. Those of you who know me know that I believe they are incompatible — or perhaps “orthogonal” would be a better word. Faith can only exist in the realm of uncertainty — so also with doubt.
Someone said, “So-and-so has extreme faith but in the wrong thing.” I said, “No, that person does NOT have faith. That person goes by feelings, and you cannot deny feelings.”
What I meant by this is that if you have a feeling, there is no denying it. It is a reality. It is a certainty. And so people who make their feelings the arbiter of truth are not expressing faith. They are seeking certainty and are finding it in the state of their own feelings.
This explains a lot of Christians who talk about “heart knowledge” versus “head knowledge.” It is not always clear what a particular train of thought implies, but it is always clear what you are feeling.
Unfortunately feelings are not “public.” Only you can feel your feelings — even a very empathetic person cannot always get your feelings right.
The value of reason and logic is to make your thoughts public so that others can follow them. Logic also requires work and training. People who are not used to thinking will not do it well. And so the results often seem unsatisfactory. Language allows communicating feelings but it is not always a precise tool.
But it gets better with practice. The point is it puts you in the game. You interact with the thoughts — and feelings — of others and are able to get a picture of reality from more viewpoints. Almost every viewpoint has some value — as long as it is not simply an attempt to deceive.
This also explains the “special snowflake” phenomenon — the idea that I have a right not to be “triggered.” Since my feelings are facts (subjective facts, but facts nevertheless), they represent reality. If you trigger me (producing bad feelings) you must be a bad person and are clearly wrong in what you say.
But that is incoherent. Others have feelings as well, and they may be just as triggered by what you say as you are by what they say. How can your subjective reality be preferred to theirs? Only a shared reality, mediated by language and logic, can give any hope for a true meeting of minds. By making your own subjectivity the basis for your view of reality, you cut yourself off from the benefit of seeing things from other points of view.