I wanted to break this discussion off as i think it may be interesting in of itself, rather than derail another thread.

This came from the thread The Insult of Disbelief.

Here are some further comments from that thread to put it in context



[then the OP with Johnson's response to me]

Think of it in terms of how calculus refutes Zeno's Paradoxes. Asymptotically, one over infinity equals zero. This assumption is used in calculus to define continuity, for the angle of the tangent to a curve, or the area beneath a curve. Calculus explains Zeno's paradoxes of why Achilles can overtake the tortoise and why an arrow moves between separate moments of time.

Calculus uses the fact that a line is smooth and continuous, against the wrong idea that a line is a set of separate points. Applying this insight of continuity to the distinction between confidence and faith, our confidence in observation (as only near certainty) is like the error that a line is just a set of points. Faith that corroborated observation is reliable and true is like the recognition that a line is continuous, as in Zeno's example of the motion of an arrow through time. It seems logically counter-intuitive, but it is necessarily true.

The multiverse speculation is irrelevant. It deals only with speculation about possibility at the margin of knowledge, not observation of reality. Science is certain that observation of reality is accurate and true, demonstrated by abundant confirmation such as the discovery of Neptune solely from the theory of gravity, of the precession of Mercury's orbit solely from the theory of relativity, and by the ability of spacecraft to use gravity slingshots to visit the outer planets. Speculation about things we don't know (the multiverse) does not affect the truth of what we do know.

I see this issue causing failure of understanding all the time. Scientists do not want to say they have faith in their claims because that looks like a capitulation to pre-modern irrationality. So, abundant proof of the theory of evolution, or of anthropogenic global warming, or of Biblical errors, continues to be dismissed as 'just a theory' by those with vested interest in opposing it.

I first started thinking about this issue when I read Martin Heidegger's refutation of Cartesian solipsism, the idea from Rene Descartes that it is logically possible that an evil demon is deceiving us into thinking the world is real. Descartes' cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) seems to be logically sound, but it leads to this error of science accepting solipsism as a logical possibility, when in fact (as Descartes himself argued) we are fully justified in having faith in the reality of the universe. For those who are keen my paper on Heidegger and Descartes is here.

That would be a side effect of certainty. How can you be certain about something if there is a possibility that some of our contradictory speculations may be truthful? Limiting the possible input to our pool of knowledge to only what can currently be observed is doesn't match up to how the world works. We will observe things in the future which will seem as far fetched as alternate universes.

As soon as you declare certainty, you are saying that the knowledge is absolute. You could apply the condition that it's only certain if you assume certain axioms, but that isn't certainty. Your claims are based on assumptions. Certainty is a mental condition, rather than a truthful status of some parts of our knowledge. It may be a necessary illusion, in that certainty is needed for some psychological motives to be fully effective.



Common sense involves heuristics, which are often false rather than logical. I believe humans have a natural inclination to favor heuristics and shorthand approaches to understanding reality. Energy economy, if you follow. I also think this leads us astray quite often. Also, what is so absurd about thinking the sun may explode tomorrow? What is the probability, to the best estimates of science? I know the answer is not "it's impossible". If there is a chance, why would you think that acknowledging that chance is absurd? The chance is so small that I care nothing about it, but I at least acknowledge that it exists.



Those would be things you "know", not things you have faith in. If your knowledge is mostly justified, and you bridge the remaining gap with faith, that is a little different. But it still places you in the position of placing more stock in a belief than is epistemically justified. Here the overlap of ethics could come into play, in which some beliefs have a positive moral net sum in what they inspire or motivate. Yet it would be dishonest to claim that your confidence is entirely "knowledge", rather than a mix of faith and knowledge. The honest approach would be to recognize how much of your belief is justified through knowledge, and how much is justified by it's moral implications. That would be an idealized approach, as the ratio could only be intuited rather than quantified.

The multiverse does not contradict the existence of the solar system. We are certain the solar system exists as it is observed, but we are not certain if our universe is the only universe. Even if there are other universes, that does not contradict the physics of the solar system, or for that matter of how the cosmic microwave background radiation provides a signature of the Big Bang.The axiomatic assumptions for scientific certainty are such no-brainers as that the universe exists, and that abundantly corroborated observation is reliable. Your question casts these assumptions into doubt. That is a recipe for nihilism. The universe is not illusory, it is real.Science has heuristics, in its experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. The fact that some heuristics are unreliable does not imply that all heuristics are unreliable. Yes it is possible the sun may explode, but no, it is not possible that Mercury is further from the Sun than Neptune. Again, I would disagree. If we are only 'confident' in things that we know for certain, we admit an epistemically unjustifiable chink of doubt. Some statements are absolutely true.
Ethics is about values, not facts. Values are subjective, whereas facts are objective. While it can be a good thing to have faith that our values are correct, value statements never have the epistemic status of fact. This is illustrated by the problem of evil, that we cannot really say that anything is objectively evil. Yet even this ethical skepticism is generally seen as repugnant, as most people do want to assert that good and evil are objectively measurable.

Good input guys.

Here's the disconnect i am having.

Isn't the word faith misused here? Isn't the fact of that reliability the proof of the reliability? That's really what we are talking about here right? How do we know it's reliable? Because it proves to be.

It's hard to articulate this basic connection for me.

I realize that our perceptions are a construct, a "picture" of the world, and not the world as it actually is. But our perceptions, in so far as they are able to detect anything, are reliable in their perception. I say that because while a car is not really smaller simply because it is far away, we can use that scaling short-hand construct to reliably avoid being run over.

The fact that it works is the demonstrated proof that it's reliable.

Do you think i am missing something here, RT? I'm not seeing why there would need to be an element of faith in the mix.

Maybe this boils down to how i conceptualize the words faith and confidence. You've seen me break down my working definitions of these words often enough by now. Are you using a different flavor for your definitions which might be causing this mental bunch-up?

It basically boils down to this in my mind. For those things which there is evidence, and experience to extrapolate, having an expectation of the future is not a matter of faith, but confidence. We know it will work because everything tells us that it will.

For those expectations held based on hear-say, fantasy, or blind speculation, those are called articles of faith.

As in, if there is good reason to have any expectation, then that good reason is built on evidentiary support, and therefore the word faith does not apply.

I see it as a definitional problem. You can call a square a circle if you want, but the word cannot apply and still retain it's meaning.

OK, let me have it!

I think this may be what i was missing from you.

So are you saying your problem for the use of confidence is that it indicates a less resolute expectation than a word like faith, which can mean an un-shakeable expectation?

It's true that confident does have that measure of human evaluation attached to it. That is, we might be sure it's true, but we could be wrong. Whereas gravity exists independant of our certainty of it's existence.

Well, faith has that problem as well. And of course, we see it all the time. Much more so, in faith, than in confidence. People are wrong about the things they have faith in precisely because the things they believe which require faith, require faith because there is no good reason to believe it otherwise.

Saying you are confident does admit that .000000...0001% chance of being wrong, but that's the whole point of science.

Improve understanding. Improving understanding can't commence if you will not at least consider the possibility, no matter how vanishingly small, that you aren't right.




Earlier you spoke about love and justice. True, these words have different meanings for different people, and so there is no external gold standard of love, or evil, or justice which we can calibrate our emotions against. But each of these words does have with it a sensation in the mind, and a requisitely objective biochemical response in the brain. These things are indeed evidential, we just haven't figured out a standard for them.

So, while my saying the death of a loved one hurts deeply is not exactly quantifiable, the fact of my misery could be observed biochemically, and of course superficially in my evident anguish.

perhaps the atomic clock of moral relativism is our communal standard? There is no atomic wavelength we can judge goodness against. It doesn't exist independant of sentience. So if we are looking for some yard stick, we really do have to find the statistical average to set that value. It's people we are talking about which need to be good, instead of evil, so it's people we have to rely on to set that standard.

There's no getting a stone, or starlight to be good. Goodness isn't a fundamental law of nature to which everything must bend. But we do have within us emotional arrays which can be shaded with labels. Happy, sad, joy and pain. Subjective expressions of objective biological activity.

I was trying to boil this down a bit, and here may be a good example of what i mean.

Imagine what it means to have confidence that your brake pedal stops the car, or faith that it will stop the car.

Faith really only admits the bare knowledge that there is a conneciton. Hitting the brake pedal stops the car. I have faith it will happen.

Confidence points at an understanding of the situation. My expectation that the car will stop is predecated on certain conditions. If those conditions are not met, then i will no longer have that expectation. If i am on a sheet of glare ice, for instance, or if i noticed brkae fluid pooling under the car before i got in it. Not only does my understanding of the car's workings inform my confidence, but also when and where i would be wise not to have that expectation. So it's no surprise to me when the brakes don't work, after seeing the brake fluid on the garage floor. It is also no mystery how to rectify the situation.

If a mechanic gets in the car and says he has faith that the brake will work, that is really the mis-application of that word, as far as i am concerned. he knows why brake pedals work, and under what circumstances they would not work. it isn't a matter of faith.

The minute you have real working knowledge of the situation, your confidence takes over and faith slips to the back.

I think faith contains a component of emotion similar to conviction. There may be "ego" within confidence, but I don't think it includes the emotion of certainty. Faith also expresses somewhat of an immunity to contradictory information, where confidence wouldn't necessarily have that immunity.



I didn't say the intuition pump means there is no solar system! It's a mental tool used to show how silly the notion of certainty is. If you're certain the solar system exists as it's observed, you're making a claim. You're claiming that there is no knowledge that we will come across that will show us to be mistaken in some way. There is no new knowledge concerning the solar system that may overhaul our understanding. In fact, you're saying that it's impossible such knowledge exists!

Here's the thing, I agree with you completely that we know what the order of the planets is. But I do not agree that that knowledge is absolute. I understand that reality has a way of slapping us across the face with new unprecedented discoveries that throw everything into a jumble. But I'm still exceptionally confident that I know the order of the planets. I would defend the order of the planets against the most decorated critic, because the amount of corroboration and various 'methods' of observation make it nearly impossible that we're wrong. But I will not make any claims to certainty, because that would be false as I see it. "Nearly impossible" isn't the same as impossible.



How does my question cast these assumptions into doubt? An infinitesimal chance of error most certainly doesn't equal doubt. Besides, these are "assumptions", which aren't synonymous with certainty. Think about the size of the numbers here Robert. I would bet my life on these things, but that doesn't mean they are "absolutely" true. It is the best we can do. I use the word "certainty" as well, in everyday conversation, to include concepts more doubtful than the order of the planets.

I think there is a way to word different synthetic propositions to make them nearly analytic. If we are to apply a name to everything that exists, we would say that is the entire universe. So to say 'the universe exists' is a simple enough proposition that you could argue it's analytic. Analytic statements are true by the definition of it's constituent words, so can be considered absolutely true.

Another game we can play with words is to nest uncertainty in a different term. For example, I could say I'm certain my car is reliable. My car could break down a few times and my statement would still be true, as long as the frequency didn't pass a certain threshold. If you say our corroborated observations are reliable, that would still hold true even if some of our corroborated observations turn out to be false. Nested uncertainty alleviates the issues I have with certainty; that it entails absolute knowledge. The absolution is buffered, and I think I could swallow that pill. But there still seems something amiss, as though it's a problem with language itself rather than with the concepts. I'll think on this last one.



My paragraph may have been confusing. I was speaking of the ethical value of certain beliefs in justifying faith or confidence. The belief that some human races have evolved into better specimens has moral weight due to the implications.

Thanks Johnson and Interbane, I will reply later to specific points you have both raised. For now, I want to share a prayer I read out at church yesterday. I wanted to share it on this thread to show how I approach the question of faith, presenting allegorical language that I try to make accessible to Christians while also holding to a mythic view of the nature of Jesus Christ, as a way to retain the meaning of this myth as a driver of ethical change. What I am trying to do is to 'colonize' the terrain of religious language from an entirely scientific perspective. So when I speak of God, it is from the atheist perspective of Spinoza and Einstein, equating God and nature, and when I speak of the Son, I am talking about the Sun.

Prayers for Others
Kippax Uniting Church
18 September 2011
Heavenly Father, your abundant gracious blessing upon our living planet is the source of our hope and faith. We know that you love all living things without limit, through the grace you have shown us in the rising of your Son Jesus Christ. Lord God, your living creation tells of the wonder of your holy spirit. We pray for the salvation of all life, for plants and animals and human beings. We pray today for your intercession for all the animals of our earth, in their amazing biodiversity.
We confess that we do not care enough for your creation. We often fail to think about the ethics of the food we eat and the products we use. Some scientists estimate that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct in this century. Extinction is forever. Species that have evolved in their fantastic variety and complexity over millions of years are being lost every day, due to our heedless failure to be good stewards for creation. We are sorry for our faithlessness.
Lord, we pray for wisdom and discernment in regard to climate change. Scientists say our planet could be four degrees warmer when our children are old if we continue our current rate of carbon emissions. Four degrees is not just the difference between Brisbane and Melbourne, but between healthy life and a raging fever. Animals and plants that are abundant today would not be able to adapt to such rapid change. Our social and economic systems may face upheaval. We pray that you may enlighten us to learn about our climate and what we can do to respond to the global challenges we face as a species made in your image.
Job told us that we cannot fathom your eternal ways. You who made the animals of the fields, and the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, could even let us destroy your creation if we do not care for it. Job was a good man, but you let the devil torment him. We pray Lord for your mercy on us and on your creation. You made the sun and the moon and the stars. We pray that our living planet may endure to give you glory.
Today is Animals Sunday. We pray for our pets and give you thanks for the joy and companionship they give us. We pray for farm animals, that they may be treated humanely. We pray especially for wild animals, that they may continue to live and prosper independent of human control, and that current catastrophic rates of species and habitat loss may be reversed.
Eternal God of mercy and love, we know that you are our salvation. With Jesus Christ, we pray for people who are hungry or thirsty or sick, who lack clothes and shelter, and for prisoners and refugees. May we care for those who are least in our world, but who are first in your love. May our planet become your kingdom, as it is in heaven. May the spirit of Jesus enter our hearts and inspire us to do your work in faith.
We pray now for those who are near and dear to us, either silently in our hearts or shared with our congregation, especially for those facing problems in health or relationships or work.
Loving God, you made yourself known to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus gives comfort for the lonely and mournful, and shows us the path of truth and love. Jesus cares for the meek and defenceless, including for the natural creation as it suffers the burden of rapid change and loss. Jesus atoned for human sin in his death on the cross, and his rising from the grave gives us hope of salvation, in the way of life in truth. May our prayers for others extend to all people and to all of your creation, and make us more sensitive to the results of our actions. We pray for an increase in attitudes that make us more sensitive, and for a decrease in behaviour that makes us less caring.
In the name of Christ, Amen.

I think of 'confidence' as strongly related to 'probability'. In statistics, confidence is used as a term to describe the certainty (or lack thereof) of a predicted outcome. Many things can affect that confidence but a critical ones are sample size and randomness. Perhaps people innately perform probability calculations all the time because we know nothing about the future, not even if the sun will rise tomorrow, with absolute certainty. When we are satisfied that the track record of sun rises over millions of years and the science that supports future sun rises sufficiently predicts at least one more sun rise then we are confident in tomorrow's sun rise.

It is my view that we live in a subjective, relativistic world so the existence of an absolute (like sun rise tomorrow) is problematic and maybe impossible. (Of course, since I believe this, I don't know with absolute certainty that our world is relativistic, but I am fairly confident of this). Confidence and faith in such a world is critical to life and healthy functioning because the lack of absolutes means that other guides and goal posts are needed and confidence and faith help to fill these gaps.

I see confidence as related to the sum total of multiple and ongoing 'calculations' of probability (or likelihood). I do not see faith this way. Perhaps faith is something you fall back on when confidence is low due either to lack of data/information or inability to analyze the available information to ones satisfaction while still wanting 'X' outcome to be true. Faith is loaded with desire for X to be true and in many cases I'm sure it drives 'the truth', effectively producing its own truth, something I can't see happening with confidence so readily.

I am not suggesting that confidence is purely objective, I think there are millions of subjective criteria that one uses in determining level of confidence. A specific example, like 'investor confidence', shows right away that non-objective criteria often hold sway ... but still the investor considers probablility of outcome and the attendant risk even if the criteria are mixed objective and subjective.

It sounds from the discussion that faith is a strong, but unwarranted, confidence. It's unwarranted because faith necessarily proceeds from a lack of evidence. But where does the push come from to assert something that can never be proven? You have to ignore standards that you must recognize in daily life in order to survive or not be judged as crazy. I find an answer in the willing suspension of disbelief. That idea was originally proposed to explain why supernatural stories can get to us even though we don't believe in their supernatural parts. We give in to them or suspend our disbelief because we find the mental experience the story gives to be attractive. It's not all that different with religious faith, in that wishing for something to be true--and having to suffer no apparent dangers in wishing it--makes us suspend our everyday, survival-based, logical thinking. Thus I find faith to be much different from confidence, in which normally, I think, our desire for something to be true plays only a small role.

I've done some introspection about how I feel about various beliefs I have. Strangely, my answer depends on the source of the question. If a stranger next to me on an airplane asked if I believed the Big Bang was how the universe was created, I'd say "yes". Intellectually, I know the answer is more complex. That is the likeliest theory at this time, so I ascribe to it. Answering "yes" reflects this, but the answer comes naturally and without any additional need for thought. It's economical.

On the other hand, if I were in a college class, I wouldn't answer the question with a yes or no, because both answers are false. The question begs a dichotomy, and a dichotomy does not apply to the status of knowledge I have on the topic.

In the first example, there was no need to expand my answer, and I didn't even feel my "filter" pop up to analyze in detail. It didn't occur to me to answer any other way but "yes" in that situation. I think this represents the roots of faith, the suspension of disbelief is no different than not applying a "truth" filter at all. Simple acceptance, no additional thoughts concerning the veracity.

With a different question, another thing pops up that Giselle mentioned. "Do you think there are multiple universes?". The most brief, simple answer I can envision myself giving is "yes"(in most cases, my answer would be "I don't know"). However, the evidence for multiple universes is very limited, even controversial. The proper stance is agnostic. If I had a chance to expand my answer(which I would anyways concerning this topic), I would explain that my belief could change with the slightest amount of new evidence to the contrary.

Which makes me think the conversation about faith is very complex. There may also be a component of inflexibility. Not being willing to accept new contradictory information. However, that component may not be a necessary component. Instead, it would be a side effect of whatever specific belief a person has faith in. My beliefs include the philosophy of science, in which our answers are always provisional. A macro-level belief such as that influences the way that we use faith/confidence. Faith and confidence will never "lock in" a belief, if you hold it to be axiomatic that beliefs are provisional.

Another macro-level belief is structured as such: A = If you don't believe in A, you are tortured eternally. It's a nested belief, where you believe something about the belief itself. This formula does well to embody what I always say about some beliefs being a trap. Internally, they are circular and self-reinforcing. From the outside, the problem is obvious. Children would be extremely susceptible, since they couldn't explain the "yes" answer, and would likely not even search themselves to see if they truly believe it. Then, once believed, it locks the belief in place, and new information is learned that is cemented all around the belief, strengthening it by association.

I think this is one of the main problems for science.

To even explain what the big bang really means requires paragraphs of information. Especially to anybody who is not familiar with the underlying topics which have to be understood to even get as far as "telescope".

Faith isn't burdened with long explanations, because they can just stamp out some sound bite that is appealing to people with no regard for accuracy.

God did it satisfies people, for some reason. And they can't keep their attention focussed long enough to understand the big bang.

Just try explaining the difference between scientific theory and the everyday use of that term. Even that takes explaining.

This analysis seems purely logical on the surface, but we have to ask how we constitute an observation as a fact. This claim rests on axiomatic beliefs that are so simple that they seem to be true by definition, or tautology. Assuming the universe exists as science observes it seems to be the most basic fact, except that it stands in direct contradiction to supernatural faith, which is very widespread. So science pits correct faith in reality against false faith in God. The fact that science rests on real faith provides the basis for how science has an ethical message - that we should base decisions on evidence, not on dogma. Science is always open to revision in the light of new evidence, but really, modern science has such abundant corroboration of its core knowledge, whether in physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology or biology, that the prospect of that knowledge being overturned is frankly ridiculous. Where science is uncertain it recognises its limits. The certainty of mainstream science is as rock solid as any religious faith, and more so because it is proven by evidence instead of resting on fantasy.True ideas represent reality through language. So our mental pictures can be accurate mirrors of the world as it actually is. Again, assessment of the truth of ideas requires a series of presuppositions. For science, these assumptions are so obvious they are generally ignored, until we come up against people who do not share them. That is where physics requires a metaphysics, a set of ideas that explain why physics is true. For example, the laws of logical deduction, confirmed to date by all induction, say that the universe obeys consistent laws of physics, and that a statement cannot be true and false. These simple logical axioms are seen as necessary foundations for any true theory. But these logical laws are so obvious that they cannot themselves be proved, which is why we call them axioms. All physics rests on such axioms, whose truth has a rational logical ideal deductive status that can never be proven by observation, even while observation confirms it, but just has to be assumed. I just think the word faith has been corrupted by the debates between science and religion. In the popular mind, faith has come to mean belief in things that are not true – acceptance of claims for which there is no evidence. So faith is a target of mockery, with Dawkins saying it is intrinsically blind. Science rightly exercises extreme caution before adopting a mainstream consensus that a claim is absolutely true. And we know that consensus can often be overturned. But still, and again this is just my opinion, there is much mainstream scientific knowledge that is so abundantly corroborated that it is never going to be overturned. Within a wide number of finite topics, science understands the nature of reality. This understanding is never complete, but it is absolutely accurate as far as it goes. Why I think faith should enter the picture is essentially political - that the opponents of science use uncertainty as a way to cast doubt on scientific knowledge. It is an ethical clash between true faith and false faith. True faith is scientific, while false faith is supernatural.It is not about calling a square a circle, but rather saying that the scientific caution embedded in the principle of induction (extrapolation from evidence) is too cautious. Induction has been so wildly successful in providing a coherent picture of the universe that we are justified in presenting it within a deductive logical systematic framework. Any such framework constitutes a paradigm, a set of ideas that exclude other ideas that do not fit. Science currently operates as a paradigm. There are tensions between the scientific paradigm and other cultural paradigms, especially in such controversial topics as religion and climate science, but these tensions do not detract from the internal coherence of science as a reliable framework of certainty.