Well, I can't see them. Maybe you've just covered them up?
So what knowledge do you think I am displaying in this scenario, just so I am clear in what you are trying to say?
The knowledge is that the weather report does (or does not) correlate to weather. If that knowledge wasn't there, under normal circumstances, given that scenario, there would be no question of considering taking the umbrella.
Confidence, not faith. Faith is complete confidence, whereas mere confidence is rather more of a sliding scale. Brownie points duly restored.
No, faith correlates to action. There may be various degrees of confidence, but the faith one is placing in a certain thing is necessarily singular, one way or another: it either is or it isn't. At the end of the day, you either have faith or no faith in the weather report, as characterized by either taking the umbrella or not taking the umbrella. There is no halfway or sliding scale since you cannot partially take the umbrella. There is no middle ground.
Yes, I have some confidence, but I don't walk out of my house with the brolly open, and I don't know that it is going to rain. So what knowledge do you think I am displaying here.
Knowledge that the weather report is or is not reliable in regard to weather.
I'm not saying there isn't any on show, I'd just like you to clarify, please. And importantly where you see "faith"... those Brownie points are important to me!
Just to be clear, in that example faith either manifests in a yes or a no, as characterized by the decision to take or not take the umbrella. If you have faith, you take the umbrella. If you don't, you leave it behind. All sorts of ideas can come and go before or even after making that decision to act, but once you act, you have determined your faith (at least you have determined it, at that moment).
Maybe you have a different understanding of faith than I do. To me faith is complete confidence. How do you view it?
In case you haven't worked it out yet, I am in the process of describing three different nuanced approaches to defining faith, as characterized by action. People (especially atheists!) commonly talk of faith in a singular sense when they are often mixing and matching things to suit the current form of their arguments.
To go back to the umbrella eg, the "completeness" of the confidence in the weather report begins and ends at the point of taking or not taking the umbrella. That is the point it is defined as an "act of faith" (in this case, in relation to the weather report).
There is certainly a higher level of confidence than in the weather forecast, but I still can't claim to know that any specific driver won't, for whatever reason, crash into me.
The point is that you trust that they won't, unless there is some untoward behaviour (at which point you would instantly disregard whatever protection painted lines, etc offered).
IOW the knowledge here is a certain prearranged agreement on traffic signs, road paint etc. The consequent action is adopting a "standard behaviour". Unlike the umbrella scenario, which culminates to a momentous yes/no, this sort of faith is stronger, and runs as a perennial flow in the background (and delivers an instant erraticness if it is broken or wavers in any way).
Just to be clear,
the act of knowledge is not "knowing other cars won't crash into me", but rather acting for all intents and purposes like they won't (the specific act being flying through a green light at an intersection or quickly passing oncoming traffic on a narrow road).
Even though this faith is stronger, it tends to develop at a painstakingly slow rate (think of a person taking their first driving lesson) and if it is severely undermined can potentially be damaged irreparably. There is some space in this definition to introduce a spectrum (unlike the example with the umbrella)
If we all knew this then there wouldn't be such things as accidents,
The very fact they are termed "accidents", suggest there is a standard of knowledge already at the fore. IOW calling them an "accident" is to identify the precise point the knowledge is transgressed.
which happen precisely because there are times when the belief that another driver won't crash into you is false.
At which point, our trust is broken.
To me that ability for a belief not to be true means that I can not know, at least until the event has passed. To me knowledge seems to require certainty. (Although I obviously don't know that with certainty.
)
You can sit back in your armchair and get all cerebral about it, but the field of activity demands an instant response.
If you do have faith in the weather report, you do take an umbrella.
If you don't trust an oncoming car doing donuts on the wet road, you adopt evasive action and don't rely on the road markings, etc to grant you safe passage.
It may or may not rain.
You may or may not be involved in a traffic incident.
But that is neither here nor there when faith demands a follow up action.
Then you sleep in and you miss your flight or get fired.
Sometime later, you have another similar development on your calendar. Science has, as yet, not discovered immortality (or even a means to avoid missing a flight or getting fired), so once again you ruminate on the inherent impermanence of life as you contemplate setting or not setting your alarm. What do you do?
