Blurts & Spasms

In Response to Quora Question: "Is faith, as a methodology, good, bad, or indifferent? Please include how you define faith."

Thanks for the A2A. Faith, as the primary component of predictive confidence, is central to all human behavior. None of us can operate effectively without faith, because (if we are being intellectually honest) we know that humans are fallible critters with perceptions, understandings and abilities that are malformed or incomplete - regardless of our methodological rigor. The question is simply where our locus of faith resides and how it is synthesized and maintained over time. Along these lines there appears to be a spectrum of faith, where at one end we have rigid, reactive, exclusive, dogmatic, tribalistic and self-protective faith, and at the other we have more nuanced, self-critical, intuitive, openly inclusive and perpetually evolving and adaptive faith. So as a component of any methodology, faith that tends toward what we might call the critical-intuitive-inclusive end of the spectrum would seem productive and beneficial, but faith that tends toward the dogmatic-protective-exclusive end of the spectrum would seem to cripple methodological efficacy. But faith, as predictive confidence, is going to be inherent to almost any methodology...even when someone claims that it isn't. So, to my mind, it would seem wisest to consciously refine where in the spectrum of faith we would like to operate. My 2 cents.