Can we know anything at all or are we only left with beliefs?

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InterfaithForums.com-Where your ideas and beliefs count.

Are faith and belief the same thing? I mean you have to have faith in something. Like when you have faith in sitting in a chair. There is some reason you have faither in that chair. You didn't just develope the faith in it for nothing. There are many examples of people having faith in thing, but behind the faith there has to be somekinda knowledge that you can have the faith your giving.

In religion, sometimes when people are tought that they can have faith in something by their pearents they just believe it. You trust your mother for everything as your a child and you don't even think about if you should be trusting her or not. So some people do the same thing about being tought about God. Not including the rebelious among us all, though.

So, finally, me personally, I have always had this total blind faith and so I did always believe in God. Also, I did feel God in my spirit before as a child. i wont try and explain it away, but I did feel it and I know it, and as long as I know it nothing else is important. Then I feel off of a cliff. I had an experience that let me know for sure that my faith was real. I do not let anyone try to explain that experience away. No matter how much I may come to look upto them or admire their knowledge.

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When a man sleeps in his bed, his soul leaves him to soar above, each soul according to its own way.......
The Zohar

If the possibility exists, the belief is valid is one of the rules that I follow. Knowledge is a source in which to understand (K(NOW), strenghten (favor), weaken (oppose) or conclude (to a Truth or Untruth) our beliefs, not faith.

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"There is one thing that organized religion is not qualified to teach and that is an individual's purpose."-GOD

Beliefs are our hypotheses. Knowledge is never absolute. We can only have probable knowledge--hypotheses that have been supported by the evidence.

I agree that knowledge is unlimited. Knowledge is information and we as humans have the ability to create/ believe/experience anything and even create the knowledge behind it, which when discovered becomes knowing.

The only thing I know for sure is that I create through my beliefs my experience.

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May your awareness be perfection

We must be on the same wavelength today. Everything I have read from you today, I have agreed with. It is slightly freaky. LOL

I think that true knowledge is near impossible to gain, but like Stratrei says that we can have supported knowledge. This supported knowledge may someday become absolute knowledge, but I don' t think that I will live to see that day.

How do you know?

I have to disagree, if something is truly known, it no longer requires belief. Most of our beliefs today align with high degrees of probability, but that does not make them knowns. I think people confuse the term knowledge as "the accumulation of one's intellectual experience". I know that I am aware, but I only have a belief in the interpretations of that awareness.

-TC

Here are the six types of belief according to my philosophy teacher, and the heirarchy of cognitive justification in a descending scale:

1. Axiom: The awareness that one is making judgements about the logical necessity of principles of the natural or theoretical world, not only without any evidence, but to which there can be none, yet thinking, feeling, and acting upon these judgements as if they were truly self-evident

2. Scientific belief: The awareness that one is making judgements with sufficient evidence about the natural world to justify a conclusion but aware that, in principle, it may be challenged, modified, or rejected in the future by choosing another model or by additional critical evidence yet thinking, feeling, and acting upon these judgements as if the supporting proofs, demonstrations, and experiments were final, or verified

3. Simple belief: The awareness that one is making judgements about the natural world with insufficient evidence to establish the truth but still thinking, feeling and acting upon these judgements as if they represent an actual state of affairs

4. Supernatural belief: The awareness that one is making judgements about oneself and how the divine participates in the events of the natural world, not only without any evidence but to which there can, in principle, be none, yet thinking, feeling, and acting upon it as if it truly represents the actual state of affairs

5. Prejudice: The lack of awareness, or only with some awareness, that one is making a judgement about events in the natural world with insufficient evidence to establish its generality, while being unable to accept that there is sufficient evidence to deny its generality, yet thinking, feeling, and acting upon them as if they were self-evident general truths, an irrational belief

6. Pathologos: The lack of awareness that one's judgement about oneself and the nature of reality are derrived from particular experiences in one's past, generalized to all, and being unable to relate to or accept that there is sufficent evidence to deny the genrality of these judgements, yet thinking, feelin, and acting upon them as if they were self-evident general truths, an irrational belief

The cognitive justification scale descends as follows:

a. logical necessity
b. sufficient evidence
c. insufficient evidence
d. lack of evidence
e. denial of evidence
f. unable to relate to acknowledge the evidence

In this system, an irrational belief is only one that either denies evidence or is unable to relate to or acknowledge evidence. Lack of evidence itself is not enough to rule a belief irrational, but it is not as rational as those justifications higher on the scale.

-TC