is all knowledge based on faith

It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.

Not all knowledge is based on faith. The flaw in this chain comes early on.

Look, I’m a Stoic, I know that my senses and the inputs they give me are flawed and those flaws are out of my control. I know that my mind is flawed and those flaws are out of my control. I also know that they’re the only tools I have to perceive the world and I have to do my best with them.

BUT.

Confidence intervals are a thing. It’s not a binary between the poles of “I know for certain” and “I don’t know at all”. We can say, “I am confident, based on multiple observations by myself and the reported observations of others, that the sun will rise tomorrow, water boils at the same temperature adjusting for altitude, and the traits of the parents and grandparents can predict the traits of the offspring via Punnett squares.”

The virtue of the scientific method is that the experiments must be repeatable. We don’t have to take it on faith. We can repeat variations of the experiment to raise or lower our confidence to acceptable levels.

Observation isn’t reliable, that’s why science depends on falsifiability: I have observed things and drawn conclusions from those observations Here is an experiment that, given a specific outcome, will prove me wrong, please do your best to show that my conclusions do NOT adhere to your observations.

How do you know that you know anything? How do you know you can rely on your senses?

Consistency and predictability. My only access to the world is through my senses, and my ability to navigate that world depends on my ability to understand and predict things in it.

The consistency of that model means it’s an amazingly good model of the way the world really is.

Half of dozen thiests have asked me this same question pretending to be athiests.

Everything in science is a model. Clockwork that function like the reality and produces similar results, so we can make predictions about the reality, but it’s still a model. You can have several of them that function differently, but long as they produce the same results that match reality, all are equally correct.

Your perception of reality is also a model. Produced by your brain using input from your senses. “Construct” for you to live in.

Science is about probing elements that remain consistently same for everyone and using those to build more extensive models. Belief is not a component of any value.

“God is real because I see rocks” is a pretty wild take ngl.

I know my universe is at least internally consistent from experience. I think therefore I am after all.

Not all science relies on our senses but it does rely on our interpretation of results which is why we often use meta analysis looking at multiple studies to try to control for as much human bias as possible.

The top comment currently is about null hypothesis, you don’t prove your assertion you disprove it under specific measured circumstances, it’s really hard to prove the existence of, well anything really, but we can at fairly reliably show we are at minimum sharing a simulation as people can have the same experiences of events.

Does it matter? Endlessly pontificating about the true nature of reality serves no purpose. If I’m driving and I’m about to hit a tree, reality doesn’t give a single fuck if I consider “well maybe the tree isn’t really there. How can I truly know?”

Like, I was talking with a guy and he was saying shit about how can we truly know that what I say is the color green is the same as what you see? It just feels mastubatory. It’s what words are for. If that guy asks me to go to the store and buy forest green paint from a certain brand and I come back with forest green paint from that brand he’s not going to worry about whether or not we see the exact same shade.

I don’t need to validate my disbelief in a made-up being. Science works. Math works. Good enough.

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It’s completely impossible to prove, without making any assumptions, that anything other than one’s own mind exists. However, it’s also completely impractical not to assume one’s own perceptions are generally valid (them being invalid is the exception rather than the rule).

Belief in things seen (accepting the validity of perception) is fundamentally different than faith which is the belief in things unseen (equating imagination with perception). The former is necessary to function in the world. The latter is not necessary to function, even if some people derive value from it.

Edit: I probably should have said “a mind at a moment” rather than “one’s own mind”. But perhaps identity is a topic for another day.

Firstly, I would just like to refute ‘If all knowledge is based on faith, then is science reliable?’ because I’ve seen it been made before to argue [random-bullshit-thing] is worth considering. Science isn’t based on knowledge, it’s based on experimental results, models, and extrapolation. Actual faith is not based on that.

There’s a really good argument to be made that our senses are not telling us the truth, they just tell us what is beneficial to survive and reproduce. However, this is not the case for instruments that measure, say, gravitational waves.

There is a real reality out there, and it’s unlikely we can perceive it. Perhaps the universe happened all at once, but our brain processing happens in consecutive slices of reality, so we perceive time.

Personally, my (pessimistic) gut feeling is that we don’t exist. How could anything? It’s that Prime Mover argument. Because the Big Bang, because multiverse bubbles colliding…

I think the universe might not actually exist, nothing does. But the potential possibilities make it exist relative to the baseline of nothing. Just like when you climb Everest, your total altitude change is 0 because coming down cancels out going up. The universe is just a potential that is cancelled out by something else, so existence remains at 0 in total.

I do not think, we can guarantee our senses to sense reality. But what distinguishes science from faith to me, is ultimately a principle known as Occam’s Razor.
Essentially, it says: When trying to find an explanation for something, prefer the explanation that requires fewer assumptions.

So, in regards to our senses sensing things, there’s two possible explanations:

1. What they sense is real.
2. Or what they sense is some imagination, simulation etc…

And with 2), you have to make the assumption that your entire perception is somehow being imagined/simulated and you presumably have some other form of existence, too. Because well, if you wouldn’t exist, why would you be imagining things?

So, on the basis of that, 1) just seems less far-fetched. You’re just perceiving what’s real.
If we ever find evidence that this isn’t actually the case, then of course, we should change our minds, but until then, there’s no point in seriously considering 2).

It can be argued that Occam’s Razor isn’t inherently guaranteed either. My preference for it certainly comes from what I have perceived.
But well, if there’s a religion that assumes everything exists in all places all the time, and that every time I lift my finger when typing, there’s an invisible coffee table there with Santa, the tooth fairy, Big Foot and a pink space unicorn, I would be down for that religion.

i mostly dont care to check

how do you know your senses are valid and not solipsistic

if I’m the only real person on earth and everyone else is NPCs that means my senses are even more reliable and valid