So faith then. Not actually "truth".
I will reiterate, ultimately any position you take requires faith. As you said nothing can be 100% proven, so any position you take requires you to trust or have confidence in your position. However some positions correspond to reality more than others.
Belief in the absence of actual fact based on testimony.
That is not correct. There are many facts that we know about the Christian faith, facts that are historically verifiable.
Again in your original quotation, I was referring to Biblical truth. So through proper hermeneutics, you can come to factual conclusions of what the Bible and the biblical authors meant. Just as if you wrote a letter and your authorial intent was to tell people “you shouldn’t eat poison”. It would be true if someone said “he meant that you shouldn’t eat poison”. Just like it would be un true if someone said “he meant you should eat poison”. So to with the Bible, it is a Biblical truth if it corresponds to the authors intent, and it is not a biblical truth if it doesn’t correspond to the authors intent. This was the entire context of the last 4 or 5 pages before you launched into this line of conversation
So too you can have historical truth. That was something else I was drawing out in my previous arguments, specifically how it pertained to church history and historical theology. If someone makes a statement about history that can be shown not to have happened, then it is false. Just as if someone can make a stat about history that can be shown to have happened, then it is true. There were many people making verifiably false claims about history. I was pointing them to the facts of history.
Neither of these are points are solely belief. Additionally you reference testimony. Let’s talk about Jesus for example. It is true that Jesus was written about more than almost anyone from antiquity. It is true that only maybe Roman emperors were written about more. It is a historical truth that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilot (even skeptic Bart Ehrman agrees about this and everything else I write) It is true that Jesus’ followers believed they saw him alive after he was crucified. It is true that they believed this enough that they were willing to be martyred for their belief. Now yes it does take faith to believe all those truth claims means Jesus actually rose from the dead, but the correspondence of these truths (or internal consistency) seems to favor that he did. In fact most scholars who don’t think Jesus rose from the dead do so based on their unwillingness to accept miracles.
With that there is reasonableness that can assigned to beliefs. If I believe that the world is resting on the back of a turtle as the Hindus do, that is unreasonable. It is unreasonable because there is no verifiable truths that the belief rests on. If I say I believe Jesus rose from the dead, that is reasonable because of all the historically verifiable truths that belief is based on.
So you're not actually looking for a metric for truth. Because one exists already.
You are right, I am not looking for a metric for truth, nor did I ask anyone to try and give me one. When I said “ this shows that we need to have a metric for understanding truth other than someone's sole interpretation” I was not soliciting ideas for this metric, rather I was showing that one was needed and I gave that needed metric immediately after. I already have a metric and have spent much of my adult life pondering epistemology.
