I appreciate your honesty. You are raising a real tension, how can we trust something passed through human hands without assuming it has been distorted beyond use?

But this touches a deeper point, one that challenges rationalism itself. If you fully commit to the idea that nothing is trustworthy unless it can be logically deduced or empirically verified, then you also have to question your belief in the past, the existence of other minds, and even the reliability of your own perception.

You cannot prove any of these things through pure reason, yet no one lives as if they are unknowable. We trust them because we believe our cognitive faculties are designed to grasp reality, even if imperfectly. That is why thinkers like Alvin Plantinga argue that belief in God can be properly basic, rational, warranted, and grounded in experience, much like our trust in memory or our perception of an external world.

Christianity does not reject reason. It simply refuses to confine truth to what human reason can contain. If God is real, infinite, and personal, then revelation, not deduction, would be the most fitting way for Him to be known. And the question is not whether humans are fallible, they are, but whether God is powerful enough to ensure that what He most wants us to know is preserved.

So the Christian claim is not that we figured God out, but that He made Himself known and ensured that knowledge could endure through flawed people. That is not naive. It is coherent, if you accept that reason has limits.

We all live by faith in something. The real question is whether your framework can support the weight of the trust you already place, in your thoughts, your memory, and your relationships. If those are not irrational, then perhaps faith in a revealing God is not either.