Jeremy asked:

What is faith, in the context of our life-view? If our actions are based on what we believe (about God,
our nature, the afterlife, etc.), then what is the basis of our belief? It seems that faith goes beyond
knowledge. To know and to believe are quite different, although they affect each other. Is faith merely
empirical, or is it based on more than evidence?

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If you sit down on a chair — is it by "faith" or is it by "knowledge"? What then is knowledge and
evidence? You cannot in earnest "suppose" God to be, like you cannot in earnest "suppose" the chair
to be — that would make you crazy. Of course you can say, as Laplace said to Napoleon when asked
why God didn't show up in his great work on astronomy: "I didn't need this hypothesis". That's what
most people in practice think on the existence of God — they don't need this hypothesis. But you
cannot build cathedrals and you cannot roast martyrs on hypotheses. For the true believer God is not
a hypothesis but an experience (as I myself know "by experience") like trusting in your mother or in
your best friend. "If you cannot trust then you have to bust" — there's no choice.

Note a twist logic in this: You cannot "have to" believe. If you "have to" trust, then you are not trusting
anymore. If you "have to" believe, then you don't believe anymore. You never "have to" believe that
the chair you are sitting on is real. If you cannot accept the reality of God in the same way as the
reality of the chair, you are not believing in God. That's the content of "you cannot build cathedrals on
hypotheses." The whole of Christian culture could not have been built on a God taken merely to be a
hypothesis. But of course that doesn't exclude the possibility that God is just that — a hypothesis and
not more. For Othello to strangle his wife it is not relevant if she is indeed deceiving him. It suffices
that he thinks so. In this sense "faith goes beyond knowledge".

But what then is "knowledge"? Ask Sir Karl Popper.

Hubertus Fremerey

Philosophically (that is, theology aside), faith is the fundamental belief underlying and underpinning
the formation of all of one's other beliefs. It is a belief about the ultimate intelligibility of the world,
which is always more unknown than known, such that our effort to understand it is not an exercise in
futility. Even to ask seriously whether it is such an exercise is already to presuppose that it is not.
Faith that the world is ultimately intelligible is not a blind faith: it simply has no coherent alternative.
Having no coherent alternative, it is rational, but not empirical: it is not discovered empirically, but all
empirical inquiry presupposes it. It is known a priori. On the basis of this faith, we judge as reliable
sources of information that we do not, cannot, verify for ourselves (e.g., a newspaper, or a calculator).
We can, for example, personally verify that we read the newspaper this morning, but not what it
reports. The latter we judge to be probably true because we made a prior judgment about the
newspaper's reliability. We act on the basis of such judgments, sometimes verifying what we had only
believed, and we report our experience to others, who do not verify it but regard us as a reliable
source of information. The progress of human knowledge rests on this collaboration, the mutual
"affecting" of knowing and believing that Jeremy refers to, the support that value judgments and
factual judgments provide each other.

Tony Flood

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