Friday, March 14, 2008

Knowledge vs. Belief

The one thing i have realized as a staple in our recent conversations has been the idea of knowledge and belief and how flimsily we sometimes interchange them. For the purpose of clarity as i continue this blog, knowledge refers to the things that we have evidence of; factual accounts of some sorts whereas belief will typically mean things we have strong convictions for and may sometimes lack the evidence to prove their validity.
I know i am a man ( by man i mean of the male gender) and i can back this up from genetic research which prove that i have xy chromosomes and not xx ( which will make me female). I also have anatomical and sex roles that are associated with being males from my enlarged vocal codes to the fact that i can't give birth ( lack of a uterus) that confirm my knowledge that i am indeed male.
Now to the question of belief, i believe that there's a God or at the very least a supreme being that is responsible for the creation of our universe and its entirety as we "know" it. The belief stems from my belief in the biblical recounts of the old testament to the new testament as well the accounts of the Qua- ran and the Kitab-i-Agdas as well as most historical books. Some may question this belief for there's no prove of a God but how many things do we belief in or rely on as true (knowledge) but can't prove?
What we know or what we belief are two different things but philosophers like Ernst Von Glasersfeld have stipulated that there are some aspects of knowledge we will never attain; for the most part we will always believe in what we know as the truth.

1 comment:

David K. Braden-Johnson said...

For simplicity's sake, I would define knowledge as those beliefs that we have good reason to think true.