Belief and knowledge: types of knowledge and degrees of belief

Abstract

Human knowledge, such as: experience; opinion; impression; inference; intuition; insight; feeling; introspective awareness; reasoned conclusion; ideology; plan of an engineering construction; scientific theory, is essentially belief since one cannot be certain about its validity or correspondence to reality or truth. There are degrees of belief regarding empirically based knowledge. In this context, belief is equivalent to probability. There are potentially limitless ways of obtaining new evidence for or against a belief about the empirical world. When someone has faith in the truth of a religious tenet or of an ideology, that means he is not interested in testing it, and this provides for this person a subjective certainty. In everyday life we implicitly try to test our opinions and beliefs about the events in the empirical world although it is not always possible due to the pressure of time or our biases. In those areas of knowledge where a person professes faith, on the other hand, it is either impossible to test, as it is the case in having faith in a religious tenet, or there is refusal to test as it is the case with believing in an ideology. It is argued that the conflict of religion and science on any matter is philosophically absurd although it is an historical fact, because knowledge based on faith and scientific knowledge are not alternatives of each other: the first is not testable by the observations in the empirical world and held to be certain, and the second is testable and held to be only probable.