Since we don't have time to independently verify everything, how does knowledge differ from faith?

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Not having enough time to independently verify everything is precisely the problem that the philosophical domain of epistemology seeks to solve. And the very thing that epistemology seeks to define is the concept of “knowledge.”

Faith, on the other hand, relies on an older form of understanding, one that is not by its very nature philosophical. Curiously though, people didn’t start calling their beliefs faith until after epistemology had already arrived at a definition of knowledge.

So what’s going on? What happened, some 2000 years ago, was that the ancient Greeks figured out a new way of thinking about the world. They had religion like everyone else. What they also had, due to their heritage and economy, was something very few other cultures of the day had, which was a intricate understanding not just of their own theology, but also how other nation’s theologies worked as well.

This allowed them to come to a meta-understanding of the concept of truth. It can be said that the very idea of truth, an objective form of understanding, one that couldn’t be invalidated by any specific theology, was invented around this time. Surely you don’t see any written thought of this sort before the Greeks, collectively, devoted many brilliant individuals’ entire lifetimes to the pursuit of.

The name given to what the Greeks came up with with all this effort is philosophy, with the root philos, the study of wisdom. Epistemology is one of the strains of this domain of understanding. Epistemology concerns itself with the various ways in which to derive objective truth. The standard they came up with is the justified true belief. Something held in the mind, (belief) shown to be true, along with a rationale for why the thing held in the mind is considered to be true.

This rationale, justification, is what separates epistemology from any random individual’s understanding of how things come to be considered to be worth spending your time thinking hard about and studying.

So now that we’ve dealt with knowledge, let’s consider faith.

Let me be real, faith couldn’t really be codified with the domain of epistemology. Because the philosophical ideas of the Greeks deeply inspired the Hebrews, and later, the Christians. It was Greek ideas of purity that enabled Christianity to reach the lofty heights that would enable it to supplant Roman pagan religion to become the official religion of the Roman empire hundreds of years after Jesus’ death.

Faith, in epistemological terms, is another kind of justification. It’s a justification that comes from at first yearning for the deity, the all-powerful manifestation of divinity, and second, the internal realization that acceptance of the existence of the deity is inimical to the conduction of righteous, proper life. It’s the ultimate codification of a form of thought that is as old as the human race itself. The form of thought which, through the Greek’s unique way of looking at things, became known as theology.

Before the Greeks, random people would describe the Egyptians as a weird, insular culture who is weirdly rich for some reason. People inculcated in Greek ways of thought however, came to understand the Egyptian pantheon and beliefs as not random. The Egyptians didn’t just believe in their gods, they had faith in them, and that faith could be analyzed across the entire civilization. And the ideas the Egyptians had could be traced through their influences throughout the near East.

But they could only understand that faith was different from ‘mere’ belief because of the great inventors of monotheism, the Hebrews. The Hebrews were a people who, even when the visible manifestations of their beliefs were destroyed, the belief still persisted amongst the common people. This was fairly unprecedented in the ancient world. Everybody else tied their belief to silly physical manifestations, the Hebrews insisted that their god was real, that it had chosen them, that it is bigger than belief itself.

This idea, bigger than belief itself, eventually became known as faith. If God leaves you, that says nothing about God. It’s you that was the problem, not that your god wasn’t good enough. The Hebrews put God first.

But they still wouldn’t be able to understand it in abstract terms until they became Hellenized, a process chronicled in the books of the Maccabees. Hellenization was the process of learning how to think and live as the Greeks did. This was very very difficult for the Hebrews, but eventually yielded a new, surprisingly ‘heretical’ prophet, who demanded a very specific thing from the Hebrews, who now by then considered themselves Jews.

You see, the Jews thought the most important part of their religion, their connection with their deity, who they thought more important than their culture or their history, was in their obeisance of the specific things that said god had commanded them to do. This new prophet insisted on a new way of thinking about God’s law.

This way of thinking about God, in the hundreds of years after the prophet’s death, can only be thought of as having been thoroughly inspired by the previous 200 years of Hellenization. Because it sought to explain the laws of God in a more abstract fashion, and abstract in and of itself had to be invented by the Greeks.

Faith is what happens when you take Greek ideas about knowledge and apply them to matters of religion.

So what is this domain of epistemology which supposedly unites the domains of faith and reason? How can faith be considered knowledge?

Well remember, the Greeks, hundreds of years before Christ, figured out that knowledge is created through justification. We are mostly aware of one form of justification, that of empirical verification. Empirical means “using the senses” and so the justification of empirical verification is what we nowadays call science.

Well not everything we call true is empirically verified. One important exception to this is mathematics. Physical sciences are informed by math, but math is never informed by science. Even in quantum physics today, the science is always informed by the math, never the other way around. Math gives us ideas like string theory, which need empirical verification before they can be considered science. But never has science created new domains of math.

Similarly speaking, the deity is not empirically verified, the existence of God is assumed, in what math students would call an axiom, before knowledge is built on top of it. Assumptions of truth create the domain of understanding we call theology. The assumption of truth of the Hebrew God had gotten them so far, in fact they even had a conceptual framework regarding this assumption that can be analyzed called covenant. Covenant is assumed to be true and so all events can be contemplated in regards to that conceptual framework.

Faith changes this somewhat. Whereas the Hebrew covenant affected all of society equally, each person’s faith in the deity is theirs and theirs alone. It’s a personal understanding of deity and its relevance. It’s knowledge, albeit on the individual scale.