Question Is there any fundamental difference between an individual's beliefs (say, religious belief) and empirical knowledge (say, scientific knowledge)? The former is clearly based on faith: the individual believes that e.g. God exists because he believes what his religious texts, his parents, his teachers, his peers, the media he chooses to consume say. But is that not the same in the latter case? The individual believes that Earth is round as opposed to flat, not because he has actually seen Earth from above or performed any other relevant experiments, but simply because he believes the textbooks, his parents, his teachers, his peers, and the media. The average individual's "knowledge" that the Earth is round is based entirely on hearsay. The same holds true for many other "facts" (even non-empirical, a priori ones). In this light, isn't our level of assuredness in these facts rather irrational and quasi-religious?

Accepted:
May 30, 2006

Comments

There are a couple different issues here that need to be disentangled.

One concerns what philosophers call "testimony". It's clear that one way of knowing something is being told: If you can't know that the earth is round because you were told, then, as you note, very few people know that the earth is round. Now, as always in philosophy, there is much disagreement about how why one can come to know something by being told. But most people would agree that testimony is only a means by which knowledge may be transmitted: If you tell me that p, and I now know that p, you must already have known that p. Maybe you were told that p by someone else. But the chain has to bottom out somewhere, with someone who knows that p "of h'er own knowledge", as a lawyer might say, that is, not because s'he was told.

Testimony therefore seems a distraction here. The problem of religious knowledge concerns how one might know (say) that God exists otherwise than by being told. If there are such ways of knowing that God exists, then there's no obvious reason one couldn't know that God exists because one was told. But if there aren't such ways of knowing that God exists, then one cannot come to know that God exists by being told. And then the problem is that it is not at all easy to understand how one might come to know that God exists "of one's own knowledge". I don't say one can't have such knowledge. But it's much harder to see what the source of such knowledge might be than it is to see how one might come to know of one's own knowledge that the earth is round.