If you beleive the sun will come up tomorrow or that a dropped rock will fall to the Earth, it doesn’t necessarily take faith. This would mean that this belief would be based on some sort of evidence? Is there a name for this type of evidence?
It’s called “inductive reasoning.” The physical facts themselves would be “empirical evidence.”
Overwhelming.
Actually, it goes beyond inductive reasoning and empirical evidence. We not only have seen it happen (empirical), and seen it happen a jillion times with no exceptions (inductive that it will continue to happen), but we can explain why it happens and build an unarguable case that makes belief that it will happen the only sane viewpoint.
Historical evidence could be a candidate.
Yes it does. Your reasons for embracing your mental model of the world-as-you-understand-it are eventually emotion-driven. You like the model because it feels right, it fits. And you’ve invested a lot of yourself in crafting the model you carry around with you, there is a bit of craftsman’s pride of “This is MY understanding of universe” involved here.
It’s not like you can ever directly compare and contrast your model with What Is Actually So. The overwhelming vast majority of “universe” as you understand it is composed of interpretations, extrapolations, and intuitions; only a datapoint here and a datapoint there really consist of empirical data, and even there you have a lot of faith in the schema you’ve built up since birth for making sense of sensory data.
Every bit of it is creative puzzle-solving: the human love for generating a theory (or even a hypothesis) to make sense of the datapoints at our disposal. We craft one, then discard it in favor of an improved model when predicted datapoints don’t match up with genuinely perceived ones…or sometimes just because a better, more compelling model seems to make better sense of the same datapoints.
The art of theory-crafting.
a priori based on historical evidence.
Well, not quite. The mathematical equivilent would be a postulate. It’s an assumtion because it always has happened in the past, repeatedly and without fail. This does not remove the requirement of faith that it will happen again.
You’re using such a broad definition of “emotion-driven” that it includes nearly all forms of reasoning. That’s fine, but it undercuts your argument that the conclusion is necessarily based on faith. Faith is belief without reason. You’ve only shown that the belief in the OP is “emotion-driven” in your sense of the word. However, if reason itself is “emotion-driven”, then we could still have this belief with reason and, therefore, without faith.
I have some difficulty with “Faith is belief without reason.” as a blanket statement without explanation of what you mean by the terms. But that’s a GD question – I’m simply caveatting the point here.
I think part of the problem is that faith has several meanings.
You can have faith in a God. There is no evidence for that, but you believe in it. that’s one definition of faith. (= religious belief)
You can have faith that gravity will work on Earth. All through your life, the Earth’s gravity has pulled objects towards itself. Therefore you have faith in gravity. (= co-nfidence)
I would call this belief confidence in completely consistent empirical evidence.
sidetrack, but I’ve always been interested in an obscure aspect of such questions like “Will the sun rise in the morning” or “Will the sun come up tomorrow?” - namely… “Is or isn’t that a matter of definition?”
Namely, if the sun by some unlikely stretch of the hypothetical DIDN’T rise at some particular expected time… would that mean that it wasn’t morning? That it wasn’t tomorrow? Obviously, that depends on how you define the terms, but I still like the idea.
I think the difference is that with religious faith, there’s a certain amount of evidence one way and the other on the truth of your religion. Your conclusion requires both the evidence you have and faith on top of that. Whereas with science, any conclusion must be fully supported by the evidence, or it isn’t a conclusion.
The mistake being here is, I think , that science concludes the sun will come up tomorrow. That’s not the case. Science would say that all the evidence we have suggests the sun will come up tomorrow, that rocks will fall to the ground etc, which is a very different thing.
It means I could sleep in!