Faith is a pathway to knowledge

evidence and truthCon has misunderstood my example about scientific evidence. I am not trying to argue that all evidence should be assessed against scientific criteria. On the contrary, I was trying to demonstrate that there are different perceptions about the link between information and truth. To a child, information from a trusted parent is evidence of truth; however, this is not the case for a scientific observer.In my story, the child's faith in medicine was justified later by scientific evidence and this might have made it confusing. Let me separate faith and knowledge with a story where the evidence is more obviously false:****************A man is sick, and his daughter comes to the hospital to visit him, bringing her new Dr Barbie. A passing nurse says to her, "Dr Barbie! Is she going to make your Dad well? That's good that you brought her, isn't it!"The girl takes this statement from authority as evidence that Dr Barbie has healing powers. She takes care to hide her Barbie in her Dad's bed every night and, sure enough, he recovers quickly. She accepts this as further evidence.In later years, she goes on to become a world expert on Barbies. Her early faith in Barbie's healing power shapes her interests and is a pathway to knowledge.****************The nurse's comment and her father's recovery are information, but are they evidence? This is important because in this debate we are defining faith as belief without evidence.Con has agreed that evidence is information that indicates whether a belief is true. I suggest that the nurse's comment was not information that indicated that Barbie has healing powers, although the girl interpreted it that way. I think it was meant more as an encouraging pleasantry. Similarly, her father's recovery was not due to Barbie's presence but to other reasons. I think he would have recovered even if Barbie wasn't hidden in his bedroom.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.What is faith?Faith is, according to Round 1, belief without evidence. Faith exists.Yet, whenever I have tried to present an example of faith, Con has tried to discredit it. Either he argues that it is a belief with evidence (and so not faith) or that there is no evidence, but it's not really a belief. Take the example of my unfortunate friend who believed a man was in love with her, tried to kiss him, was rejected and therefore gained knowledge through faith.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. 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.If Con continues to claim that one person's feeling can be evidence of another person's state of mind, then I challenge him to provide an example of faith. In Round 1 he said that there are "many people who DO believe that definition is an accurate representation of their faith," and so he should have no trouble providing us with several instances of faith, maybe from his own experience.the pathway to knowledgeCon defined pathway thus:pathway - a route to or way of access to; way of reaching or achieving somethingBut subsequently he has put forward an argument that there is a difference between a "true pathway" and other pathways. Some actions are directly responsible for knowledge, but it is "absurd" to call them pathways, according to Con. He argues that there needs to be "forming of hypotheses from evidence" for something to be considered a pathway. This is outrageous. There is nothing of this in his definition that includes hypothesis testing. It also goes against our common understanding of knowledge. Some knowledge is formed through hypothesis testing, but there are lots of other ways. For example, when we crush a particular type of herb for the first time and smell it, then we have knowledge of what it smells like. This has nothing to do with hypotheses.But Con claims it is "fatuous" to say that events that lead to knowledge are pathways, unless they accord to his hypothesis structure, and that he will leave it to readers to decide. This isn't good enough at all. Con has created a debate in which he placed a great deal of emphasis on definitions. He himself set up the definition for "pathway" and now he is complaining when my examples conform to this definition. If there are events and actions that lead to knowledge then they are pathways to knowledge unless Con can prove otherwise, which he has not done so far.learning from the radioCon provided a story from his own life to illustrate his (false) idea that events and actions can lead to knowledge without being pathways to knowledge.In the story, his fiancée is cooking and yet he leaves the house and goes to McDonald's for food. These events are not explained, but one can only assume his fiancee's cooking is so bad he would rather insult her than try eat it or that his fiancée doesn't like to share with him. Either way, he is possibly in a disturbed state of mind when he hears the advertisement for medical school night classes on the radio. He is influenced by the ad, decides to enrol and subsequently gains a great deal of knowledge about medicine. I suppose if he hadn't woken up, he wouldn't have heard the advertisement, and if his domestic arrangements were such that he could have eaten breakfast at home, he wouldn't have heard it either. He might never have had the idea to study medicine in the evenings. Therefore, waking up and going to McDonald's in the car are part of his pathway to knowledge. I also think his state of mind and domestic situation must have been such that he was receptive to the advertisement, but Con doesn't really elaborate on this aspect of the story. Con claims that it is "absurd" to say that the story describes a pathway to knowledge, because he's tried to present the example in as trivial a way as possible. But consider. Humans are driven by circadian rhythms. We fall asleep and wake up according to a pattern and this drives our lives. We need sustenance. We are motivated to seek food when hungry and we must all negotiate loving-but-problematic personal relationships. We hear advertisements and messages all the time, some affect us more than others, depending on our state of mind, mood, memory, and circumstances. There is nothing "absurd" about any of this. And all the time we act within our human instincts, we are gaining knowledge.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.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.