semantics, philosophy, belief, epistemologyIn trying to assess whether atheist thought renders a positive epistemic question, an interesting corollary came up:
What is the practical, functional, operational relationship/difference/correlation between belief and knowledge, pragmatically speaking for an atheist?
Direct, Summary answer: There is a pragmatic value to distinguishing between belief and knowledge, because Knowledge (in sane people) informs one’s choices about which belief to adopt, and about what can or will be accomplished by taking action based on the belief. Knowledge informs the degree to which one will be willing to act on a belief, based on past results/evidence. In other words Knowledge helps us avoid taking stupid actions based on “mere” belief.
Supporting argument and assumptions:
Belief is an agreement to a truth claim, which you are then willing to act upon. Example from previous conversation, “I believe my wife loves me. She says so, and as yet has not violated any of the criteria by which I define the word, and so for the day I will stay married (action) and reciprocate my love for her (action).”
A Belief (and the action which makes it tangible/real) always carries the following characteristic:
There are absolutely NO guarantees that your belief will align with results that will occur.
Example: I could hold the belief, “I can jump from this rock to that rock” and then ACT on the belief. Midair, I truly believe the proposition…i.e., it is a belief. And yet, having acted says nothing about the outcome.
Knowledge is a confirmed belief, but it is provisional: based on the results of the action, in no way guaranteed to recur (no matter how many times it has in the past), and agreed upon by the interpretation of observers who share your terminology. Knowledge is peer reviewed. (Let’s not devolve into a total philosophical hole about whether or not there is any shared reality.)
If I make the jump from one rock to another, and fall short in the grass, the following becomes true:
I KNOW (provisionally, for this one test) that I can not jump from one rock to the other.
I could CLAIM to know that my belief is true, and that I really CAN jump from one rock to another, but based on the evidence, that would be a claim about a future test… i.e., it’s back to being a belief. (You can hold beliefs even though initial results don’t support the belief. “Try, try again. You have to “believe” in yourself!)
I could claim that I DID make the leap, and that therefore I KNOW I can… but this would not hold up to peer review. Knowledge, while always provisional, requires the ability to survive peer review… otherwise it is a delusion… or an as yet unproven “belief.”
However, holding onto unproven beliefs amidst a consensus of others whose shared reality suggests “knowledge” that YOUR belief is false, or stubbornly denying that evidence does NOT disprove your belief or at least make it least probable among all possible explanations, is either a delusion or a “religious belief” … if, per Dawkins, that is not a redundancy.
Note: Another hallmark of religious belief, aside from willingness to hold unfalsifiable beliefs and claiming to KNOW them, is being too willing to accept evidentiary claims, without subjecting them to tests, without any personal experience, while ignoring other “knowledge” you already hold that contradict the religious claim (virgin birth, resurrection, miracle cures from water, etc.)
I suppose it's all about falsifiability. If I say there's no God and make this assertion falsifiable, someone could provide me the denied matter (God) and the assertion "There's no God/deities/supernatural beings" automatically becomes false (while staying falsifiable): "There is supernatural being".
I don't need to believe, I just make an assertion and allow it to be falsifiable.
EDIT: It's also known, that if you do some scientifical research in the lab, you, ad interim, become an absolute skeptical about everything (say, an atheist), despite your religious beliefs. So why not just stay skeptical when you leave the lab?..
When you lose your wallet, you are either a skeptic (atheist) or not a skeptic, and got the following fork:
If you're mostly skeptical, you're first trying to figure where you forgot your wallet, or remember who were near you and could possibly stole it, then, if you're not making any progress, you're calling the police and continue searching. If you're lucky, you get your wallet quickly or discover who's a thief.
If you're not skeptical, but rather asserting that your wallet was stolen by martians and attempting to convince everyone of it, you lose time and powers for verification of unlikely versions, because wallet are rarely stolen by martians or suddenly get decomposed into atoms.
That's why being skeptical (atheistic) is cheaper and more rational (wiser).
EDIT2: Einstein's General theory of relativity can be verified. According to general theory of relativity, light beams are attracted by the gravitation of the massive celiestial bodies. The light of a distant star, which can be seen near the Sun, changes its direction, and the star looks shifted from its place, when it usually observed at some more distance from the solar disk. This effect can bee seen during the full solar eclipse, when solar light doesn't prevent one to see the stars near the Sun. If during verification the effect wouldn't take place, it's absence would proove the failure of the General theory of relativity, i. e. this kind of experiment, in theory, could have falsified the General theory of relativity. The experience was made by Eddington during solar eclipse at 29th may of 1919 and showed the predicted effect.
If observations show, that predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is just declined, but still falsifiable.
I guess scientist rarely operate on unverifiable (unfalsifiable) subjects. If there's something that can be either true or wrong, but unfalsifiable — you can neither prove it nor falsify, — there's no practical meaning to "work" on it.
So, being skeptical (an atheist) is practically justified.
It’s all about how you define the words.
Reasoning about the world is hard, because we’re faced with massive amount of uncertainty everywhere. When we make a conclusion, we can to some extent “trace” what this conclusion is based on, and how high our confidence level is about it. Reasoning is then the process of drawing new conclusions from existing ones, and evaluating one’s confidence level about it.
This process is not really like the mathematical logic in my opinion, because facts are never known with absolute certainty. It’s always about probabilities. If you trace your conclusions all the way to their origin you will invariably find that your senses are the ultimate source. We usually place a very high degree of trust into them, taking what we perceive for a fact.
Some people are good at drawing logically sensible conclusions and confidence levels in this imperfect-information “game”, while others are really bad at it. At one extreme is not noticing fundamental flaws like circular reasoning, or massively mis-assigning confidence levels, or taking a conclusion as a 100% certain fact instead of evaluating it properly.
Ultimately though, even people who don’t make such basic mistakes are still drawing conclusions with imperfect information, from “probabilistic facts” whose probability of being true they can only estimate very approximately. I don’t think there’s a right way to make these conclusions in the absense of an accurate probability measure.
So, what I’m getting at is that this is a spectrum. We have propositions in our brains in which we have a certain degree of confidence. We casually classify them as knowledge or belief based on the degree of confidence we have in the reasoning chain that led to a particular proposition. If you reckon the reasoning chain is massively flawed, but a person has a high degree of confidence in the result, you casually call it “belief”. If you think the chain is not too far off, you call it “knowledge”. Postmodernist philosophers might still call it “belief” though.
To conclude, I think I’ll compare it with “hot” and “cold”. The terms are convenient, even though there is no qualitative difference between them; the line between them is arbitrary and undefined, and they are relative to the context in which they are discussed. For example, sun’s corona is cold compared to its core, but hot compared to snow - just like the existence of dark matter is a belief in comparison to the existence of gravity, but knowledge in comparison to the existence of god.
It may simply come down to some threshold of confidence in the truth of a given belief. Believers know there is a god in the same way I know that if I step off the side of a 100 story building I’ll die.
With knowledge you’ve researched it and have trusted sources and evidence backing it up, while with belief it’s either inductively assumed or something that sounds plausible but you haven’t bothered backing up with facts. There is little difference between how you would use them, except when discussing a specific piece of knowledge or belief, except that it may be smart to hedge a bit more for something you just believe.
Knowledge is based off of veridical evidence. Belief is based off of conjecture.
If someone asks you the time, and you look down at your watch, do you declare: “I believe the time is 6:30pm.”? No, because the necessity for belief is trumped by the knowledge of the time.
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