What is the relationship between faith, belief, truth, facts, cognition, and the perception and grasp of reality?

Home - Quora Link

Think about the way Santa Claus works. When you were a kid, you were told by your parents that a jolly fat man rode in his sleigh and delivered them to you overnight. Think about that blissful state of naivete that your parents inflicted on you. Why do this horrible thing to kids? Because it’s fun, of course! Traditions give a sense of weight and meaning to living. You do them because doing them is better than not doing them.

This is how everything in this world that humans built came about. All of civilization and human progress was based on people making individual judgments that one thing is better than something else. This past year my mom called me up wanting my opinion on replacing our Christmas tree ornaments. These ornaments have been in our family since we were children. My mom packages them up every single year after Christmas and stores them until next year.

So, look at that image for a second. Think about what the term ‘applied’ means. It means you can set an entire field of knowledge inside another field of knowledge. Chemistry “contains” biology. Chemistry has many fields, of which biology is just one of.

So what contains mathematics? Philosophy. Philosophy contains within it an entire field dedicated to the study of how we know things. That field is called epistomelogy. Study this image for a second.

This diagram illustrates the commonly-accepted definition of knowledge according to epistomology since the days of Plato. Belief in the epistemologcal sense refers to a personal attitude towards the likelihood of something being true. All of Western thought is built upon this definition of knowledge. Every single one of those fields in the above comic consists of this kind of knowledge.

So where does faith and religion come in to all this? Well, the ancient Greeks invented philosophy, but how do we explain this invention? What did people do before the Greeks made the discovery of knowledge? Well, with no ability to actually determine truth or justify it, they simply believed in things because they wanted them to be true. Stories were passed down over hundreds of years and refined to meet the needs and wishes of the new generation.

Every year, the tradition of Christmas changes a little bit. A hundred years ago, A small New York department store called Macy’s decided to make a parade celebrating Thanksgiving. People loved it so much they still do those parades every single year, and they only get bigger.

The Greeks didn’t invent truth when they set out the foundations of academic knowledge. They just described a particularly interesting subset of truth, that which we call knowledge. It grew out of the already-accepted way of defining truth, the act of believing in things because you want to believe in them. New parents the Western world over renew the tradition of Christmas in their kids, because Christmas is fun and it teaches you useful lessons and making your own traditions is hard and why throw away the old ones?

Look, I know you want verification of this thing you want to be true, that people who choose to believe in things are just dumb. But the tradition of knowledge came out of the tradition of pure belief. If pure belief didn’t work, we’d never have ever had knowledge. The Greeks had their myths and legends and traditions and religion that came from even more primitive cultures.

I didn’t argue with my mom that we should keep the old ornaments. I know my mom, she wouldn’t have asked me unless she knew it was necessary. And it was, the old ornaments were made of glass and they’re getting brittle. It’s not a matter of if, but when. And the new ornaments really do look nice.