having faith like a professional

The word faith is much abused. Faith makes many think of something very specific. It is a word the conjures religion. "You must have Faith, my son." "Faith is your only weapon in the fight to save the world!" But faith has a much less grandiose meaning here. Faith is a belief without proof. A belief is an idea we would attest to being true (True in some way. Gödel spoils truth with a big "t", but truth will serve as a word still, for now.). An idea is a thought we can express to some satisfaction in communication. And a thought is just a species of meme. What a meme is is best explained by others. I have understood a meme to be data capable of causing in-formation, where in-formation is a verb that is a process leading to information the noun. I struggle with whether the capability to inform is required for a meme, but the informing meme, even if there are other types, is the only type of meme that is interesting here. It is from this simple origin in a meme that an idea forms we feel is true so strongly that even in the absence of any evidence we will attest its truth. That attestation is the act of faith.

The more common forms of faith - faith in gods and supernatural occurrences - are indeed forms of the faith considered here. But faith in the supernatural is not the only form of faith. One may have faith in almost anything, though many things do not compel faith. Some would say it requires faith to believe that the sun will rise each day. The deep skepticism and cynicism required to doubt the inferential arguments of eons of daily sunrises coupled with science's demonstrations of the mechanics of the solar system is not common though. To rule out a lifetime of seeing the sun rise each day as evidence is, to me, excessive. That is not to say it cannot be done. One may have faith that the earth will not be hit by an earth destroying object from space today. The inferential evidence here is, of course, weaker. It is only negative evidence one can offer - so far this has failed to happen every day we have recorded history. There is also less evidence from science about what is out in space potentially ready to hit the earth. Again, it comes down to a question of the line drawn for evidence. How one considers evidence is core to how one draws up articles of faith and belief. What is considered good evidence for a belief? That is the question. For that which we feel is true but cannot rely on evidence, we have only faith as an option. Failing to have faith in the absence of evidence means giving up a belief and resigning the idea to being untrue.

Clearly, this is all very formal. The abuse of faith is abuse in the public square. The arguments offered in the informal world of everyday communication do not have such strict definitions of concepts like faith, belief, evidence, ideas, etc. And thus the abuse is in the eye of the beholder - the eye of the stricter practitioner of reason. Much in the same way a professional driver must shiver every trip through the streets of his home town watching how other people drive, much like a celebrated chef must get chills each time they stand in the kitchen at a friend's home watching them prepare a meal, the philosopher will be disturbed by how people argue their points in the public square. The lack of formality, the gross abuse of terms, the misuse of evidence, the offering of eons old fallacies as good bits of argument, all these things are like the grating sounds of fingernails on chalkboards. But, without any doubt, the reason someone pays the professional driver to drive is because they are so much better than average. Is it a good thing to wish everyone to be an expert? The world would benefit little if everyone was as adept at driving as professionals. But wouldn't the world benefit greatly if everyone could reason as well as the philosophers? Wouldn't it be good if simple words like faith were understood and not abused?