You and Mattias have proposed that the question of truth cannot be answered.
I on the other hand submit that knowledge of truth (not just belief) is possible.
Let's take your statement, "To affirm that God exists or not is impossible, one cannot prove it..."
Is this a statement of what you know to be true or something that you just believe (your faith)? If it is knowledge then you should be able to communicate your thoughts and experience whereby that knowledge has been acquired.
No one is too interested in what someone simply believes but if they know something it is worth talking about. I know that God exists. I know more than that about God but let’s limit our discussion to this for now. Proving this statement is not difficult. Here I will present some thoughts that lead to this conclusion and you can tell me if you agree or if you think I have made a mistake.
First it is necessary to define what we mean by God. We are not talking here about the God of the Bible or the Koran or some other religious tradition although those traditions may not be opposed to the God that we are speaking of.
We live in a cosmos where much of what we observe follows the laws of physics(science). Now imagine that as you are drinking coffee one morning you look through the window and you see a leaf drop to the ground. If you are in a contemplative mood you might try to consider the string of events that led up to the particular event that you observed; the falling of a leaf. In this exercise of thought you attempt to trace back to the first thing that happened in the sequence of causes that led to the dropping of that leaf. The initial cause that started the sequence must be non-physical. For lack of a better word we will call that “God”. It(God) must be non-physical because if it was physical it would just be another physical cause as a result of previous physical causes.
In response, someone might propose that the sequence leading to the event that you observed is infinitely long (i.e. that there was no initial event); no event that is not simply the result of a prior infinite sequence of physical causes. This idea, however, is easily debunked. If there were an infinite number of prior physical causes in the sequence that led to what you observed, then you would still be waiting for that infinite sequence to arrive at the present event that you observe. It would not have happened yet. That is the nature of infinity.
This has proved that God, defined as the non-physical first-cause of the event that you observed, exists. It has not considered what God is like other than that he is not physical (we might use the word spiritual). If we are interested we will try to learn more but we will no longer question the existence of God.
If I may join in, you speak of God as the primordial origin, but it seems that He is still in time.
Let us go out of time. God is the necessary condition; He is that which conditions everything but has no condition itself. Only then is it easier to understand how nature and soul/consciousness are related. So, we are talking about a third element that conditions both; it is their source.
Consciousness is in the world, you are right, and we can look for physical causes of how it came to be, but there will always be an explanatory gap in relation to consciousness, to the qualities of consciousness. So, we have to understand there is also another truth: the world is in consciousness. Everything is in consciousness. This is where the opportunity to relate to Jesus opens up. We have to understand him in the context of the "symbolic" (Lacan), knowledge. Here spirituality acquires its "materiality", Lacan describes is it with the theory of the signifier. I would say that Mattias thinks in this context.
Isn't God something that acquires meaning in the context of knowledge and awareness? What can we know? What can we be absolutely sure of? What we cannot doubt, as Descartes would say.
In the study of consciousness, we collide with the necessary structure that makes consciousness itself possible (and with it everything that IS). Consciousness itself can ask what makes it possible, what is its condition. Where does consciousness stand in order to be able to think or be? This is why Lacan says that God is the unconscious. There is another place that speaks. There is a need for an inner split that makes us in the world but not part of the world. Don't you think the key question here is who am I? Do I really know myself? What am I (as Ramana Maharshi would ask)?
What if God is the answer to this question of existential uncertainty? God originally, I think in Sanskrit, means sacrificial smoke. So, it also refers to the sacrifice of illusions. Knowledge is within God, Spinoza would agree. We accept this (unconsciously) out of necessity, invoking the reality that He guarantees. He guarantees meaning. We have, on the one hand, states of ignorant consciousness and, on the other hand, an awakened consciousness - a God-consciousness that is aware of a certain necessary difference that is its source. God is important in this transition from ignorance to knowledge. He is a kind of reference point, an absolute ground, a ground of being.
But it is still not clear what its nature is. Mia, this is where your concern about the indeterminacy of the world comes in. Awareness of God is awareness of the inner split of the world, the necessary condition that makes the world finite but open to infinity. Awareness is always in relation to finitude/nothingness and infinity. In this sense there is no absolute place in the world, but there is a place of absolute division. The world is stateless, indeterminate... all that Mattias says.
Jesus affirms this difference, the God who is dying. We can say that he articulates the truth, we are talking about full speech (Lacan) and what Mattias associates with soul speech. Jesus is the subject of the new possibility, of impossible.
There may be many interpretations, but not all of them are good. Psychoanalysis and certain philosophies offer better concepts. But I am not here to lecture anyone; I am commenting to see if anyone will respond if they "vibrate" with what I am sharing. It is certainly possible to reflect without going into the specific philosophy of this or that author, but it is also possible to have a very fruitful dialogue with them.
Good reflection leads us to recognize the duties we have to the Universal. It is not just a question of wanting to help this or that person, the environment, etc. It is also about recognising that this is your/my duty.
Let me point out that psychoanalysis is not analysing other people, it is the facilitation of a particular environment where one is enabled to know something about oneself (the truth of one's own desire). The analyst would only block the possibility of continuing the analytical process by interpellating (as Freud did, and quickly ran into problems). Lacan therefore interpreted this classical task of the analyst's interpretation in a new way, in which it is now an interpretation in the sense of a play (as an actor interprets a certain text and the role he plays)... So the important thing is that we can change certain emphases in life, not that we come up with a "scientific explanation".
Psychoanalytic knowledge is therefore not so much a theory in this first sense, but a theory of truth, a theory of interpretation itself... it is concerned with formal processes, not so much with content. What the analyst does with himself is crucial. And it is a "science" of the singular rather than the general.
It is a matter of recognizing a Law that applies to me, to you, or to all people. There is something that transcends my particularity or your particularity. That we have a duty to the other, and through the other to the big Other, cannot be "scientifically" proved, ethics cannot be proved (empirically), but we can try to point to, to point to this necessity.
Here universality is not something given, easily determined, because we arrive at it through thinking. The universal is an empty set. It sounds abstract. But I believe you have felt at a certain moment that you have to do something. Mattias Desmet talks about the fact that he had to speak out about all that was happening...
That means he had to actualize his own potential, he had to become "the other"; he had to go beyond his own ego, his own particularity, his own excuses - we know what the consequences of that were in the time of the covid. Maybe he didn't even want to do that, but he felt something in himself that in a way made him have no choice.
That is the paradox of freedom. Man can only act freely when he follows the Law, which transcends the rules and all that is offered to us by the imaginaries of society, governments, parents, etc. There is, of course, a paradox - man is subject to a law which he voluntarily, freely imposes on himself.
It is true that we live in society, but at the same time we are in relation to something that transcends us and transcends society. You cannot do whatever you want... and legal laws are not the only prohibition. We feel the consequences if we are ignorant about it... Maybe you don't like the word duty, maybe you could talk about vocation, responsibility, a call to response.
There is a source on to which we depend. Apart from having duties to other people, you have a duty to the Universal, whether you realise it or not is irrelevant. We have a moral sense. We can recognise its necessity or pretend it is not there.
Universality is not a mere mental construction, but is inherent in the symbolic itself, because we are speaking beings and creatures of relationships. There is something that transcends both you and me.
Systems, relationships, etc. fall apart without law, that is what we are living today. Today we live in a world where the law has failed, instead there are rules everywhere, prohibitions etc. But it is not an external law, it is a law that we follow with our hearts. When the law is not written in the heart, as Jesus said, then it becomes a dead letter on paper, corrupted, read in a distorted way. Ethics will therefore always be important, not just for a certain period :D!
The point of the law is precisely that it gives you the freedom to
So I don't think it's just about warnings and consequences. There are simply limits...and beyond them there is evil. It doesn't just seem that way to me, but it's universally right in the sense that anyone thinking would come to the same conclusions.
"Kant showed that people who are not responsible, autonomous, and do not fulfill their duties are not free. Individual autonomy is only possible if it depends on the otherness of the ethical law itself. The otherness of the ethical law means that it cannot be written down in any form that tells us what to do to obey it: it is therefore not advice, not a formula, not an equation, not a statement, not a sentence. It has a universal form and no content.
What makes the individual autonomous and free, then, is the subjection to the otherness of an ethical law which cannot be written down in the form of a code, a rule, a formula or advice on how to behave. Man can be a subject, a subject of freedom. Kant puts it this way: freedom as a force animates man through the ethical law. It animates him by directing him towards the highest good.
Freedom is not conditioned by anything. It is something unconditional and unconditioned. It is the cause of something else, and has no cause of its own. It is an empty space, a pure differentiation in the mind. That is why we can speak of openness, of opening. Without it there would be no opening and the world would be closed. With freedom, a new series of events, a new chain, a new sequence, as Badiou would say, begins again and again.
Freedom has precisely the status of the other, which thought cannot encapsulate and describe directly, because it cannot become the object of description. Man as subject is constituted as free precisely in relation to this other, to freedom itself, that is to say. The free man acts as something unconditioned, as something that is not caught up in any known chain of events, causes and effects. It is the very beginning of something completely new. We say that his action in the social field is contingent.
Man freely chooses to be free, even though he should necessarily choose only freedom. He can only choose causality. In retrospect, he understands the emergence of his own independent subjectivity. Kant speaks of the power of choice. Man chooses himself as the addressee of the ethical law. He imposes the law on himself and becomes the author of a new causal chain. He does this out of respect for the law, not out of respect for his neighbours or any authority.
For the world is indeterminate and does not exist as a coherent whole. It operates according to necessary laws, but to all the necessities we must add freedom, which Kant calls the uncaused cause. It can manifest itself in the world, but only under a certain condition.
It manifests itself or is realised through an ethical law, a universal principle or maxim. Freedom thus motivates the individual to submit to the law and to act ethically. Man therefore submits to freedom and wishes to submit to the ethical law, even though he does not necessarily know what he is doing in doing so. It is not knowledge that leads him to act, but an unconscious desire to which he is loyal, as Freud, Lacan and Deleuze would say. Then he says: I don't know why I am doing it, but I will continue to do it because I want to do it.
Man can therefore submit to an imperative that he merely suspects - deep down, as Kant would say. Autonomy means that the human being freely submits to the law and obeys it. There is therefore a force in man which makes ethical action possible. Knowing oneself therefore means that, in the very end, in the deepest depths, one discovers - not oneself, but the ethical law. This deepest depth is called the other. In man, therefore, there is an other than himself.
Free will is thus determined by duty, not by this or that object of desire, lust, need or interest. When we speak of freedom, therefore, we mean simultaneously three things: will, desire and duty.
Kant is therefore telling us: a man can adhere to written laws and behave lawfully, but he has another option: to behave freely and adhere to ethical duty for the sake of duty itself, not for the sake of written laws.
Freedom is the subject. The subject may not have access to freedom, so we say that he is not free, but he can also submit and do a free act, which has very empirical consequences.
Freedom cannot be realised in the world unless man, as its subject, does something. So when he does something and the ethical law does not tell him what to do, freedom operates in this world. Freedom works in such a way that a man who is not free, but has freedom in him, as Kant says, tells himself what he is going to do.
The point is this: Kant is not talking about a law that tells man what to do, he is talking about the imperative that man only makes the law by his action.
The pure mind addresses itself to the freedom that is in man, not to man. When we speak of an ethical law, we are not speaking of a law which imposes something on man, who is free to respond or not. We are talking about an imperative which only makes the law exist if man chooses to act in order to exercise freedom itself, which is utterly powerless without his decision."
"Or as Kant would say: reason itself already has ends; men have before them the task of realising them. "
When I post a comment I try to stick to one thing at a time.
Your question, Why did God send Jesus? , was answered in my initial comment to Mattias. I quoted Jesus speaking to Pilate where he said, "For this cause I was born and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth."
He came to answer the truth question. He did that with his life, his message, and again with his death and coming back to life.
His short answer to the reality question: The Kingdom of God
This is not an argument; it is just the historical record. You have been clear that you do not accept the Gospel stories as reliable and I can accept your doubts.
Do you think he was wrong?
When it comes to knowledge of the truth it is not just an academic exercise. Experience is required. This is true in all areas of life; not just in the spiritual.
Let's say you want to know about music. You start with an idea of how good it might be to be able to play. You might study about it and listen to music but at some point you form the intent to make plans and take steps to learn and experience. That's faith.
So knowledge of the truth requires action. I do not know much about God but I intend to act on the little I do know. This leads to the experience of seeing him act with me and ultimately to growing knowledge. That is my experience.
Thank-you Mia for your sincere response.
You and Mattias have proposed that the question of truth cannot be answered.
I on the other hand submit that knowledge of truth (not just belief) is possible.
Let's take your statement, "To affirm that God exists or not is impossible, one cannot prove it..."
Is this a statement of what you know to be true or something that you just believe (your faith)? If it is knowledge then you should be able to communicate your thoughts and experience whereby that knowledge has been acquired.
No one is too interested in what someone simply believes but if they know something it is worth talking about. I know that God exists. I know more than that about God but let’s limit our discussion to this for now. Proving this statement is not difficult. Here I will present some thoughts that lead to this conclusion and you can tell me if you agree or if you think I have made a mistake.
First it is necessary to define what we mean by God. We are not talking here about the God of the Bible or the Koran or some other religious tradition although those traditions may not be opposed to the God that we are speaking of.
We live in a cosmos where much of what we observe follows the laws of physics(science). Now imagine that as you are drinking coffee one morning you look through the window and you see a leaf drop to the ground. If you are in a contemplative mood you might try to consider the string of events that led up to the particular event that you observed; the falling of a leaf. In this exercise of thought you attempt to trace back to the first thing that happened in the sequence of causes that led to the dropping of that leaf. The initial cause that started the sequence must be non-physical. For lack of a better word we will call that “God”. It(God) must be non-physical because if it was physical it would just be another physical cause as a result of previous physical causes.
In response, someone might propose that the sequence leading to the event that you observed is infinitely long (i.e. that there was no initial event); no event that is not simply the result of a prior infinite sequence of physical causes. This idea, however, is easily debunked. If there were an infinite number of prior physical causes in the sequence that led to what you observed, then you would still be waiting for that infinite sequence to arrive at the present event that you observe. It would not have happened yet. That is the nature of infinity.
This has proved that God, defined as the non-physical first-cause of the event that you observed, exists. It has not considered what God is like other than that he is not physical (we might use the word spiritual). If we are interested we will try to learn more but we will no longer question the existence of God.
If I may join in, you speak of God as the primordial origin, but it seems that He is still in time.
Let us go out of time. God is the necessary condition; He is that which conditions everything but has no condition itself. Only then is it easier to understand how nature and soul/consciousness are related. So, we are talking about a third element that conditions both; it is their source.
Consciousness is in the world, you are right, and we can look for physical causes of how it came to be, but there will always be an explanatory gap in relation to consciousness, to the qualities of consciousness. So, we have to understand there is also another truth: the world is in consciousness. Everything is in consciousness. This is where the opportunity to relate to Jesus opens up. We have to understand him in the context of the "symbolic" (Lacan), knowledge. Here spirituality acquires its "materiality", Lacan describes is it with the theory of the signifier. I would say that Mattias thinks in this context.
Isn't God something that acquires meaning in the context of knowledge and awareness? What can we know? What can we be absolutely sure of? What we cannot doubt, as Descartes would say.
In the study of consciousness, we collide with the necessary structure that makes consciousness itself possible (and with it everything that IS). Consciousness itself can ask what makes it possible, what is its condition. Where does consciousness stand in order to be able to think or be? This is why Lacan says that God is the unconscious. There is another place that speaks. There is a need for an inner split that makes us in the world but not part of the world. Don't you think the key question here is who am I? Do I really know myself? What am I (as Ramana Maharshi would ask)?
What if God is the answer to this question of existential uncertainty? God originally, I think in Sanskrit, means sacrificial smoke. So, it also refers to the sacrifice of illusions. Knowledge is within God, Spinoza would agree. We accept this (unconsciously) out of necessity, invoking the reality that He guarantees. He guarantees meaning. We have, on the one hand, states of ignorant consciousness and, on the other hand, an awakened consciousness - a God-consciousness that is aware of a certain necessary difference that is its source. God is important in this transition from ignorance to knowledge. He is a kind of reference point, an absolute ground, a ground of being.
But it is still not clear what its nature is. Mia, this is where your concern about the indeterminacy of the world comes in. Awareness of God is awareness of the inner split of the world, the necessary condition that makes the world finite but open to infinity. Awareness is always in relation to finitude/nothingness and infinity. In this sense there is no absolute place in the world, but there is a place of absolute division. The world is stateless, indeterminate... all that Mattias says.
Jesus affirms this difference, the God who is dying. We can say that he articulates the truth, we are talking about full speech (Lacan) and what Mattias associates with soul speech. Jesus is the subject of the new possibility, of impossible.
I'm not saying I know what Mattias thinks. But I know the approximate context because I have read his books, including the one on Lacan.
Hi Mia,
There may be many interpretations, but not all of them are good. Psychoanalysis and certain philosophies offer better concepts. But I am not here to lecture anyone; I am commenting to see if anyone will respond if they "vibrate" with what I am sharing. It is certainly possible to reflect without going into the specific philosophy of this or that author, but it is also possible to have a very fruitful dialogue with them.
Good reflection leads us to recognize the duties we have to the Universal. It is not just a question of wanting to help this or that person, the environment, etc. It is also about recognising that this is your/my duty.
Let me point out that psychoanalysis is not analysing other people, it is the facilitation of a particular environment where one is enabled to know something about oneself (the truth of one's own desire). The analyst would only block the possibility of continuing the analytical process by interpellating (as Freud did, and quickly ran into problems). Lacan therefore interpreted this classical task of the analyst's interpretation in a new way, in which it is now an interpretation in the sense of a play (as an actor interprets a certain text and the role he plays)... So the important thing is that we can change certain emphases in life, not that we come up with a "scientific explanation".
Psychoanalytic knowledge is therefore not so much a theory in this first sense, but a theory of truth, a theory of interpretation itself... it is concerned with formal processes, not so much with content. What the analyst does with himself is crucial. And it is a "science" of the singular rather than the general.
It is a matter of recognizing a Law that applies to me, to you, or to all people. There is something that transcends my particularity or your particularity. That we have a duty to the other, and through the other to the big Other, cannot be "scientifically" proved, ethics cannot be proved (empirically), but we can try to point to, to point to this necessity.
Here universality is not something given, easily determined, because we arrive at it through thinking. The universal is an empty set. It sounds abstract. But I believe you have felt at a certain moment that you have to do something. Mattias Desmet talks about the fact that he had to speak out about all that was happening...
That means he had to actualize his own potential, he had to become "the other"; he had to go beyond his own ego, his own particularity, his own excuses - we know what the consequences of that were in the time of the covid. Maybe he didn't even want to do that, but he felt something in himself that in a way made him have no choice.
That is the paradox of freedom. Man can only act freely when he follows the Law, which transcends the rules and all that is offered to us by the imaginaries of society, governments, parents, etc. There is, of course, a paradox - man is subject to a law which he voluntarily, freely imposes on himself.
It is true that we live in society, but at the same time we are in relation to something that transcends us and transcends society. You cannot do whatever you want... and legal laws are not the only prohibition. We feel the consequences if we are ignorant about it... Maybe you don't like the word duty, maybe you could talk about vocation, responsibility, a call to response.
There is a source on to which we depend. Apart from having duties to other people, you have a duty to the Universal, whether you realise it or not is irrelevant. We have a moral sense. We can recognise its necessity or pretend it is not there.
Universality is not a mere mental construction, but is inherent in the symbolic itself, because we are speaking beings and creatures of relationships. There is something that transcends both you and me.
Systems, relationships, etc. fall apart without law, that is what we are living today. Today we live in a world where the law has failed, instead there are rules everywhere, prohibitions etc. But it is not an external law, it is a law that we follow with our hearts. When the law is not written in the heart, as Jesus said, then it becomes a dead letter on paper, corrupted, read in a distorted way. Ethics will therefore always be important, not just for a certain period :D!
The point of the law is precisely that it gives you the freedom to
https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-il-lecito-l-u2019obbligatorio-e-il-proibito
https://lenabloch.medium.com/giorgio-agamben-on-the-disappearance-of-law-916aa4027de5
So I don't think it's just about warnings and consequences. There are simply limits...and beyond them there is evil. It doesn't just seem that way to me, but it's universally right in the sense that anyone thinking would come to the same conclusions.
A few more quotes, translated into Eng:
https://mail.za-misli.si/kolumne/dusan-rutar/3077-kar-nas-dela-bolj-cloveske-1
"Kant showed that people who are not responsible, autonomous, and do not fulfill their duties are not free. Individual autonomy is only possible if it depends on the otherness of the ethical law itself. The otherness of the ethical law means that it cannot be written down in any form that tells us what to do to obey it: it is therefore not advice, not a formula, not an equation, not a statement, not a sentence. It has a universal form and no content.
What makes the individual autonomous and free, then, is the subjection to the otherness of an ethical law which cannot be written down in the form of a code, a rule, a formula or advice on how to behave. Man can be a subject, a subject of freedom. Kant puts it this way: freedom as a force animates man through the ethical law. It animates him by directing him towards the highest good.
Freedom is not conditioned by anything. It is something unconditional and unconditioned. It is the cause of something else, and has no cause of its own. It is an empty space, a pure differentiation in the mind. That is why we can speak of openness, of opening. Without it there would be no opening and the world would be closed. With freedom, a new series of events, a new chain, a new sequence, as Badiou would say, begins again and again.
Freedom has precisely the status of the other, which thought cannot encapsulate and describe directly, because it cannot become the object of description. Man as subject is constituted as free precisely in relation to this other, to freedom itself, that is to say. The free man acts as something unconditioned, as something that is not caught up in any known chain of events, causes and effects. It is the very beginning of something completely new. We say that his action in the social field is contingent.
Man freely chooses to be free, even though he should necessarily choose only freedom. He can only choose causality. In retrospect, he understands the emergence of his own independent subjectivity. Kant speaks of the power of choice. Man chooses himself as the addressee of the ethical law. He imposes the law on himself and becomes the author of a new causal chain. He does this out of respect for the law, not out of respect for his neighbours or any authority.
For the world is indeterminate and does not exist as a coherent whole. It operates according to necessary laws, but to all the necessities we must add freedom, which Kant calls the uncaused cause. It can manifest itself in the world, but only under a certain condition.
It manifests itself or is realised through an ethical law, a universal principle or maxim. Freedom thus motivates the individual to submit to the law and to act ethically. Man therefore submits to freedom and wishes to submit to the ethical law, even though he does not necessarily know what he is doing in doing so. It is not knowledge that leads him to act, but an unconscious desire to which he is loyal, as Freud, Lacan and Deleuze would say. Then he says: I don't know why I am doing it, but I will continue to do it because I want to do it.
Man can therefore submit to an imperative that he merely suspects - deep down, as Kant would say. Autonomy means that the human being freely submits to the law and obeys it. There is therefore a force in man which makes ethical action possible. Knowing oneself therefore means that, in the very end, in the deepest depths, one discovers - not oneself, but the ethical law. This deepest depth is called the other. In man, therefore, there is an other than himself.
Free will is thus determined by duty, not by this or that object of desire, lust, need or interest. When we speak of freedom, therefore, we mean simultaneously three things: will, desire and duty.
Kant is therefore telling us: a man can adhere to written laws and behave lawfully, but he has another option: to behave freely and adhere to ethical duty for the sake of duty itself, not for the sake of written laws.
Freedom is the subject. The subject may not have access to freedom, so we say that he is not free, but he can also submit and do a free act, which has very empirical consequences.
Freedom cannot be realised in the world unless man, as its subject, does something. So when he does something and the ethical law does not tell him what to do, freedom operates in this world. Freedom works in such a way that a man who is not free, but has freedom in him, as Kant says, tells himself what he is going to do.
The point is this: Kant is not talking about a law that tells man what to do, he is talking about the imperative that man only makes the law by his action.
The pure mind addresses itself to the freedom that is in man, not to man. When we speak of an ethical law, we are not speaking of a law which imposes something on man, who is free to respond or not. We are talking about an imperative which only makes the law exist if man chooses to act in order to exercise freedom itself, which is utterly powerless without his decision."
"Or as Kant would say: reason itself already has ends; men have before them the task of realising them. "
How to learn more about the spiritual God?
Observation of the world is not enough but that is where we start.
I see 3 great masterpieces
- Physics, mathematics, precision, power, matter, light
- The phenomenon of life, diversity, fun all inexplainable by physics
- The human race, creativity, art, music, language, love, laughter, and a yearning for transcendent meaning all inexplainable by biology.
All of this shouts day and night of a person who creates, speaks, loves, laughs.
It does not explain everything but it is enough to compel us to look for more.
Hi Mia,
When I post a comment I try to stick to one thing at a time.
Your question, Why did God send Jesus? , was answered in my initial comment to Mattias. I quoted Jesus speaking to Pilate where he said, "For this cause I was born and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth."
He came to answer the truth question. He did that with his life, his message, and again with his death and coming back to life.
His short answer to the reality question: The Kingdom of God
This is not an argument; it is just the historical record. You have been clear that you do not accept the Gospel stories as reliable and I can accept your doubts.
Do you think he was wrong?
When it comes to knowledge of the truth it is not just an academic exercise. Experience is required. This is true in all areas of life; not just in the spiritual.
Let's say you want to know about music. You start with an idea of how good it might be to be able to play. You might study about it and listen to music but at some point you form the intent to make plans and take steps to learn and experience. That's faith.
So knowledge of the truth requires action. I do not know much about God but I intend to act on the little I do know. This leads to the experience of seeing him act with me and ultimately to growing knowledge. That is my experience.