Faith is the bridge to all knowledge

Faith is the bridge to all knowledge. Any person who would make a case, who would prove their point, who would plea for truth in their notions will come to rely on faith in some form. It is the necessity of every syllogism. It is the animus of every argument - even the argument that there is no "faith" to be had. It is here that we find the dark specter of the Aristotelian error. Strip away the world, peel back each action and they say you find some thing a priori. But the matter which comes first is stripping and peeling the ideas of the world. And at the base of every idea you will find that thing one will not be denied. That thing one may not even be aware of - or able to express. This is the idea prima facie. This is the axiom to which all other ideas are like dew clinging in the morning. Under the light of the mind the dew will be gone, but the faith in one's axiom remains.

Whence come these axioms? How are they formed? Where do they find ground to grow and nourishment to thrive in one's mind? Does all that beg the question of mind? What is mind that it should bring forth axioms and the dewy notions that cling to them? The philosopher can not hope to hold sway over these answers any more. Science is the source from which all ontology must flow or be considered nonsense. We question the dew in the morning, but we can only do so by acknowledging the sun, the grass, the day, the earth and all that which common sense codified in process and method shows us. We live on a planet named Earth. The stars are distant beyond imagining and burn like a fire larger and hotter than anything we will ever truly know. The moon circles round the Earth, but the Sun stays fixed relatively at the center of our little part of the universe. Any first world child can tell you all these things, yet they were beyond the reach of all but the greatest minds for most of humanity's existence. All this science has laid bare. What we take from this - and all the other sundry input the world offers us - that is where the axioms we have come from.

We put a stake in the ground and take the moisture clinging to it in the morning light as nourishment. We ponder, or not, and we reach a place where we feel we understand what is going on - how ill fated a thought to have, but we all succumb to it. And it all starts with the morning of our minds, stirred by the rising of a fixed sun and aware of the fading, changing moon; when we look around at all that is plain to see and choose to think something of it. Our will binds us to an idea so real that the dew finds it solid enough to cling to. From there, we make the world's image.