So, what is faith? “Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true. — Tom Robbins, author. Think about it: If the “something” you believe in is actually provably true, you wouldn’t need faith.” So writes Tom Durkin in the 14apr22 Union. From this I can’t really tell if here we have the misguided quoting the more misguided. Robbins is clearly off the rails. Belief in a tenet (proposition) is the assessment of its verity which can measurably vary from 0 (certainly FALSE) to 1 (certainly TRUE), where either extreme will reject falsifiability (i.e. new evidence) in the mind of the believer.
Robbins definition is cognitively impossible (i.e. insane). However, in our daily round we all operate heavily on the basis of faith, since many/most(?) of the things in our knowledge base we hold to be true are really based on the fidelity of the intermediaries who brought that knowledge to us. By experience or experiment we have confirmed a fairly small share of our knowledge base. Technology today allows us to reason correctly in such unreliable environments through the use of belief networks, whether applied formally or informally. Beliefs between 0 and 1 are falsifiable by the incorporation of new evidence. So, in the correct common usage of ‘faith’, we understand it to consist of beliefs which cannot be falsified.
And as we conclude this reflection, we must always remember that beliefs are subjective, and therefore vary in their measure of verity from person to person (depending on the series of belief networks they have solved in traveling their particular world line). What to one individual may be compelling evidence to support/reject a tenet, may not be at all acceptable to another. Thus endeth the epistle for today.
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