If you know something is true, why would you say you have faith in it?

Faith is when you don’t know, yet still believe. It’s often seen as a virtue and it’s not a reliable way to come to the truth. Why have faith? I’d rather know for certain, or withhold my judgement.

Faith is used as an epistemology in religion, and it’s unreliable.

Peter wrote a book on this topic. In the bitcoin community where “verify, don’t trust” is a virtue, faith is the literal antithesis of that phrase.

Here is how I see it... There are things science can know, and things it can't; the beyond.

If science can't know something, you have the freedom to choose what you want to believe, and if you don't want to be accused of being illogical, the only requirement is that your belief be consistent within itself. By assumption, it can't be inconsistent with physics. If it were, it would be false, which would put it in the realm of science and not the beyond.

A self-consistent belief that can't be proven or disproven can't break anything. For example, you can choose whether to believe our Universe and the evolution of life on Earth was a pure coincidence, or there was some higher intelligence outside of this realm behind it; neither belief contradicts physics. So it doesn't even make sense to say it's objectively true or false; in a way it's subjective and whichever you believe becomes true within the unique frame of reference that is your consciousness. I've thought about it in the context of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and the way I see it, it still holds true. The naysayers say the fact you can't prove it makes it illogical. I offer that the fact you can't disprove it makes it logical.

At the end of the day, people choose to believe what makes them happier, gives their life more meaning, hope, purpose etc. There is nothing wrong with looking after one's own mental well-being and finding one's place in all that is. You're also free to believe we should strictly follow Occam's razor and in particular, that the pursuit of happiness is redundant, because it doesn't serve logic. But whatever we believe, I think respect for other people's cosmovisions makes for a more frictionless life.

Faith is pretending to know what you don’t know.