Evidence for Believing

[Anomalocaris]

If faith be limited to known demonstrable facts, it wouldn't be faith, it would be facts.   For faith to limit itself to  hypothesis and assumption about the unknown that does not contract what is known and demonstrable, it would be called assumptions or hypotheses and not faith.   For faith to be faith it must either Contradict known facts or treat what could be no more than hypotheses and assumptions as if they were more than hypotheses and assumptions.

So how is this in principle different from superstition?

The difference between faith and superstition appears to be entirely observer centric.    Faith is the superstition of those who loath to be called superstitious.     Superstition is the faith of other people whose superstition does not agree with one's own.

Superstition contradicts known facts, so it should not be difficult to show what is superstition, and therefore it's not relative to the observer (heresy is). Faith is assent to superrational truth. Superrational is relative to human capability. A hypothesis is arrived at through abductive reasoning and proposed for empirical demonstration. Faith might be a kind of assumption depending on semantics. Superstition is an assumption too though, and so are hypotheses.

You should be careful what exactly is a fact and what contradicting fact means.    For example, belief in ghosts might legitimately be called superstition, but exactly how do ghosts contradict known facts?

Also, how is heresay relative to the observer anymore than an observation of a fact is relative to the observer?

How is "superrational truth" not dependent upon the holder of the faith of superrational truth being you?   If you were me, I would dispense with that faith and dismiss superrational truth as overbearing flimflam - a superstitious worship of ego and intuition.


What exactly is "superrational truth"?


How it is different, exactly, from assumptions and hypothesis about what might be true, but might also be false, because they not directly deducible from known facts?    Does really wishing an assumption to be true and seeing all sorts of flowers and rainbows when you think of those assumptions being true makes it "truth"?


If they are essentially nothing more than assumptions, than is the fact you chose to enloften them with the word "truth" a an act of delibrate contradiction against the fact that they are no more certain to be true than any assumption which does not contradict facts that are known today, but may yet turn out to contradict facts that would be found tomorrow?