subject: While belief can be knowledge, knowledge does not represent belief actually! [print this page] While belief can be knowledge, knowledge does not represent belief actually!
While belief can be knowledge, knowledge does not represent belief actually!
In the Theaetetus dialogue, Socrates discusses a definition for knowledge, defined as identifiable truth and reduces it to a thing that can be accounted for', in other words, it can be established as evident to everyone, with meaning explained and defined. However, Edmund Gettier (known as the Gettier problem), some two thousands of years after, in 1961, showed that this is not always the case. You can believe in what is evident but the truth can be hidden and so knowledge is short of evidence.
Thinking and believing meet at one point, for you would say I think there is a God and I believe in God.
Both indicate one's positive convictions in Gods existence. This might be a representation of truth or not.
But when we apply knowledge we have a truthful observation, for example we say the sky is blue. This represents our acknowledgement of a true thing. If we say I think the sky is blue or a believe the sky is blue, demonstrates the uncertainty of our premise and this would not knowledge, which is a description of what is true. If we say I do not think the sky is blue then we are emitting a false statement and not a true one.
The criterion of knowledge in epistemological thought reveals the truth of an observation. Experimental knowledge has its conditions of validity. But our problem becomes evident, but more complex and more difficult, if we can produce evidence for the presence of Antares in the universe by calculation or by photo. The atom is there, we can establish its true existence but as to quarks and strings, it is not possible, at the time being, and hence the Theory of Strings is not accepted by many scientists.
The problem become more acute and indefinable when we come to grips with the concept of God. Dealing with the sensible can be asserted with true evidence but when we tackle the intelligible, especially with regard to first or second principles and causes, it is not evident we can identify it as true knowledge.
We have no knowledge of the existence of God, nor the angels, nor the devils, but we have evidence of scriptures ascribed to the divine. No one full true evidence is advanced for the Divine by the mere presence of these scriptures. It is all a question of belief.
It is this very crossing point that separates the believer and the disbeliever in God, or any of the metaphysical arguments, produced in the scriptures or by metaphysicists and philosophers.
Here, and in this respect, the argument that the presence of the universe is more denotative of a God than the absence of the universe, defies out thoughts and beliefs, though not subject to true epistemological identification in the proper sense of the word.
