[philophyse]

In my own epistemological thinking, I like to distinguish between "belief" and "faith".

Beliefs are convictions based on observations of phenomena for which no satisfactory empirical explanation has been found. Their key properties are that they are required for an understanding of the world, and they are capable of being modified or supplanted. On this definition, all human knowledge necessarily rests on a body of tacitly accepted beliefs.

Faith, in the other hand, characteristically has no reason for being. That is, it is a conviction, or set of convictions, that are superfluous to an understanding of the world. It also typically deep-seated within the psyche, so that the abandonment of faith usually leads to severe trials of readjustment, if not downright nihilism.

This is not to disparage faith, as much as it might seem so. It is just an attempt to distinguish and separate between two concepts, the confusion of which makes approaching the kinds of questions asked in this post even more difficult than they already are.