What I’m drawing a line between is the faith you have when someone tells you their name and you believe them, and Faith in God.

Faith that your child is yours and not that of another man, and Faith that Christ is what he said he was.

There is “faith” that we need to have constantly, and without we become paranoid and nauseating “conspiracy theorists.” And then there is “big faith.”

All faith is simple, I agree with you there. Maybe I’ll think more on a qualifier that might be more clear.

Isn’t faith always simple? What is complex faith?

I can deduce from your description of simple faith that complex faith is faith in something that has a singular (or very few) distinct records. But I think that’s a misnomer. The act of faith itself is always a simple one. Easy faith and difficult faith might be a better way to describe these two ends of a spectrum.

Yes and no:

1) He said that maximal probability was all we could be sure of. I still think we can be certain of things (and through other means than he enumerated).

2) He did not evaluate specific tenents of the modern day scientific method, that render it incoherent and self-refuting as a system of principals.

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“history being an example of empirical but non-scientific inquiry”

I’m glad you reminded me of this as History provides a great example for “proof” and how meanginful it is.

Of course it’s empirical. That’s obvious. We don’t “reason” our way through it, it’s recorded — history by definition is a record.

But I want to suggest that actually accepting History, requires what I call “simple faith.” That is, since there are so many records, and so much subscription, it’s just common sense that X,Y, & Z events happened, and in more or less the fashion presented.

However, it is possible that they did not. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the possible always remains that even “important” historical events were manufactured — if Joseph Smith can have millions upon millions of Mormons convinced that there are multitudes of Jews buried in New York from an ancient battle — the story of only one man’s story — imagine what a sophisticated totalitarian government might be capable of.

Again, it might be a “stretch” but the fact remains that we were not there to see Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Artaxerxes — that doesn’t really matter though, as it’s common-sensical to believe that they did exist because of inherited empirical evidence. But this requires trust.

Would Dawkins subscribe to the fact that WW1 was myth? No. Because even he cannot live his life without embracing a belief system that takes him outside of his scientific principals.

Again, thankfully, you’ve brought up a point that corroborates mine — we have to lean on other ways of knowing. The living of life demands it.

* * * * *

“What way of knowing do you propose that trumps the scientific method and, more important, empirical observation in general?”

They’re valid and useful. They have a history of some success. I’m not suggesting that we replace them or discard them — I’m suggesting they need augmentation and accompaniment. One possible accompaniment being what has been explained in the previous section of this comment.

You’ll be happy to know, I only have a “summary/conclusion” left to post in this series, then I’ll being a series in the “Ways of Knowing,” that presents what kinds of knowledge, I believe, humans are capable of working with, and what those kinds of knowledge require as evidence.

At times it will be highly unscientific! But that’s a necessary requirement.

Much of what you write in this post only serves to support what Hume says about much of what we know being probabilistic – including the above statement.

You have still not answered my observation of history being an example of empirical but non-scientific inquiry. I suspect that most scientists accept historical truths. I doubt that Richard Dawkins will write a book decrying the teaching of World War II as fact.

What way of knowing do you propose that trumps the scientific method and, more important, empirical observation in general?