Belief without Verification or Certainty

[emjay]

James recognizes that verified knowledge is stronger precisely on account that it is less prone to error. THAT is what the skeptic does, according to James: he avoids error. (Also, "justified knowledge" may be the better term, I agree.)

I'm also inclined to think that "verified" may be on the strong side for what you're talking about. To me it has a nuance of certainty. 

If the passengers in the train have verified (by subtle communications among themselves, unheard by the robbers) that all will rise as one, then much less faith is required to act. 

I looked in the dictionary just now, and I see that the definitions for "verify" and "justify" are almost the same, except that it says a "justified decision" may be a "reasonable" one, not simply a proved one. To me, that's the space where it gets interesting -- what is reasonable, despite a lack of total verification. In what cases are we justified in going ahead when we have 51% confidence, rather than 99% confidence. 

At the simplest level, as has been pointed out, a total lack of faith means you won't even try. And if you don't try you're bound to fail. There has to be some adequate feeling that success is at least in the realm of possibility, and then the mere fact that you're making an effort raises the chances above 0%. But we have to factor in desire, also. If you think the chances are 10%, but you don't want it very much, then you might not make the effort. If you really really want it, you would surely increase the odds, just because you'd put in more effort. 

(And I know you're not ready for the religious angle yet, but most Christians say that their faith is justified, by experience and by history. We may not buy that, but to them, it's not a matter of total faith in the complete absence of evidence.)

I'm still trying to parse the general meaning of this thread so don't really have anything meaningful to say about all that, as yet, but to the extent that we're talking about confidence and motivation and their relation to belief, as you seem to be doing, I've always found that little dance kind of interesting. In my experience, confidence and motivation can be very fickle, especially in harder/unfamiliar tasks, and depends an awful lot on almost shifting goalposts and how you frame the task, which can change on a moment by moment basis.

Like for instance when I'm doing my exercise on the treadmill, which at the moment relies on 'high volume, low intensity' it can sometimes be quite hard to keep motivated for the whole 100 minutes I'm trying to do it for... so I end up doing a lot of mental gymnastics whilst I'm doing it to try and keep motivated. One way is by essentially splitting the task into easier tasks... I think of it in terms of four quadrants of twenty five minutes each, which in my experience get progressively easier, with all the muscle pain etc usually being in the first quadrant, and by the last quadrant I feel like I could keep going much longer. So that is one approach; where the mental framing of the actual difficulty of the task is changed, basically in a turning mountains into molehills kind of way. The other approach I have is to put some sort of narrative/story around it and essentially role play... I think of the famous galley scene from Ben Hur; "we keep you alive to serve this ship, so row well and live" I know it doesn't compare to that really but it is all about maintaining a pace (and it wouldn't be the first time I said 'Battle speed, Hortator' if I wanted to increase that pace )... and in a sense you could say that that narrative approach is about giving meaning to the thing, possibly.

So I guess overall I would characterise this as an ongoing sort of cost/benefit analysis or risk/reward analysis, updated moment by moment by how you're currently framing the task, and with a certain delicate balance/tipping point deciding whether you should continue or not, taking into account, like you say, the effects of just trying or not trying on the actual outcome, as well as the contribution of desire. Basically I like the way you've described it there, and it's a pretty interesting subject.