Faith is a pathway to knowledge

====================Contention #1=================="The girl thought she had evidence of Barbie's power, but she did not. Hers was a belief without evidence: it was faith in Barbie. And that faith fueled her interest in dolls and an accumulation of knowledge that led her finally to becoming a leading planganologist. Her faith was a pathway to knowledge."You are committing the equivocation fallacy. Evidence, as you agreed, is information that indicates whether a belief is true or not, but you are fallaciously saying that the evidence AND the object of the belief must actually be a true causal link, which is just a misrepresentation of terms. Evidence and belief are not contingent upon the proposition being true.This can easily be demonstrated:1. I am cooking dinner in the oven.2. While sitting on the couch with a friend watching TV I smell something burning and see smoke.3. My friend says that they think I'm burning dinner.3. The smoke and burning smell is very good evidence that this is true.4. I run to the kitchen to check only to find the food is not burning.5. I later find out my washing machine's motor burned out and that is what causes the smell and smoke.The smoke was an indication that my dinner might be burning, but it simply turned out to be false. In this case, it was incorrect evidence, or evidence with a false causal connection, but it was evidence. What you are doing is saying that I had faith that my dinner was burning, which is untrue. The belief was false, the evidence was false, but I still had evidence and therefore it was still not faith, whether it was true or not.================================================ ====================Contention #2================== "The girl thought she had evidence of Barbie's power, but she did not. Hers was a belief without evidence: it was faith in Barbie. And that faith fueled her interest in dolls and an accumulation of knowledge that led her finally to becoming a leading planganologist. Her faith was a pathway to knowledge."With my previous contention in mind, this is easily demonstrated false. She DID have evidence, but it was silly and incorrect and naive evidence with no real actual causal connection to her belief - but that doesn't make it not evidence. In this context, though I am arguing that she did have some form evidence, this evidence was NOT a pathway to knowledge simply because it was a motivating factor to her becoming a plaganologist. She obtained knowledge later on from some other means unstated in your story.In this case, her silly belief about barbie's healing power was poor evidence, but was evidence nonetheless, and irrespective of this it was not a true pathway to her real knowledge that she obtained later simply because it motivated her. ================================================ ====================Contention #3================== "Con has tried to discredit this example on the two grounds mentioned. First, he argued that she did have evidence he was interested in her. Con took it upon himself to add an extra character to the story: a friend who told her that the man liked her. Sorry, but that didn't happen. The only "evidence" she had was the strength of her own feelings. Her crush on him was so enveloping that she believed it must be mutual. "The reason why I added the extra character to the story was to provide another example using the same context to make my point more obvious. My ENTIRE point in response to your story about your friend was to demonstrate that EVEN IF the person acted on their belief that was based on no evidence, that it wasn't the true cause of someone obtaining that knowledge.THIS was the only example you gave of someone truly acting on faith, because it seems that she did not have any evidence at all for her belief, but I have demonstrated that saying this was somehow a true pathway to knowledge is absurd, and my response in contention #5 reiterates this.================================================ ====================Contention #4================== "Next, Con tries to argue that she didn't really believe in his attraction to her, that it was only a hypothesis that she tested out. Hardly. She's not nearly confident enough for that and after the rejection she spent the rest of the party in the upstairs bathroom crying and eating chocolate biscuits. She really believed he liked her, and was devastated to learn the truth." I never made such a claim - this is a misrepresentation. Quote where I said that she didn't belief it if you want to claim I said it. I said it was a belief AND a hypothesis that she tested out, they are not mutually exclusive. Every hypothesis we have is some preliminary belief with a nominal amount of evidence.================================================ ====================Contention #5================== "Therefore, waking up and going to McDonald's in the car are part of his pathway to knowledge."My argument involving the car ad/medical school story was made with the sole purpose of forcing you to accept the proposition that you just accepted. I commend you for being logically consistent in this respect, but also MUST point out that if THIS is what you mean by something being a pathway to knowledge, it is silly and ridiculous. If you accept the above two things as pathways to knowledge, we are definitively discussing different concepts.================================================ ====================Contention #6================== "Humans gain knowledge all the time and everywhere. It's not just through formal study. We grow in knowledge by talking to people, experiencing nature, listening to the radio...there are countless pathways to knowledge. Some of them are surprising. We gain knowledge through relationships - good and bad - and through making mistakes. We gain knowledge though anger, through love and through faith."We don't gain knowledge through anger, love, or faith. None of those concepts cause us to have knowledge in any meaningful way. These emotions are caused by experience and evidence, and they might cause us to act whereby we have more experiences and gain more evidence, and it is all that evidence we get along the way that is the real cause of all the knowledge we have. We have beliefs, and they may or may not be true, but until they are justified in some way with evidence, we have not gained knowledge. To say those emotions are pathways is silly, and my previous contention showed this.================================================ ====================Conclusion===================== "Con has taken on the burden of proving that faith cannot be a pathway to knowledge. It's an ambitious and extraordinary claim, given the variety and scope of knowledge pathways. I still don't understand why he has chosen faith of all things as not leading to knowledge when it so clearly does."I have chosen faith, of all things, because people claim all the time that they have faith, and it is clear to me that faith cannot tell you anything about the universe. Faith has no explanatory power and has no grounds in reality and therefore is useless. That is why I chose to talk about faith.It is clear that definitions and phrasing has lead to this debate being muddled and silly. If it has come down to arguing over something being a pathway to knowledge or not, and other pathways to knowledge include waking up and driving to McDonalds, we are clearly not discussing the right thing.I started this debate, using the phrase "pathway to knowledge" specifically because I heard a long debate between two people on this same subject, and that phrase was used multiple times so it stuck in my head. It seems obvious to me that this debate has come down to semantics and the ultimately frailty of operating using loose definitions/phrases like "pathway". After this debate and others that I've had recently, I would much rather have changed the concept of "pathway" to "cause" to make things more clear and demonstrable, and to actually demonstrate that faith could not the cause, both a necessary AND sufficient condition, of knowledge. That would be something worth debating.I wouldn't be opposed to doing this debate over changing some definitions/phrases in order to make it clearer for both of us.================================================