I'm always on about
ideology. To the point of being tired of it, but I see it as a
tarnish of sorts of everything. A sort of tyranny produced by ego, mostly. The man who coined the term called it the science of ideas. That's good, but I prefer it as the study of ideas. Wikipedia gives the etymology as: The term
ideology originates from French
idéologie, itself coined from combining Greek:
idéā (ἰδέα, 'notion, pattern'; close to the Lockean sense of
idea) and
-logíā (-λογῐ́ᾱ, 'the study of').
Scientia (Latin
knowledge).
I see things concretely. In a practical sense. Definitive and conclusive doesn't imply, to me, stagnant, but rather evolving. Concrete is rigid temporally but disintegrating. Like everything, there is good and bad facets and aspects of it. Words have definitions, meanings and etymologies. The reasons behind words evolve. They have history. So does knowledge. Knowledge can become stagnant, dogmatic. Science explores or examines, investigates. I would explain ideology as an idea that has become stagnant and upheld as dogmatic. Tyrannical.
I always scratch my head at the fundamentalist science minded militant atheistic perspective on science and faith. It seems science is a crutch to them. Dogmatic. And faith is satanic (adversarial) to their world view. They are vulnerable, it seems, to the possibility of being wrong since their "knowledge" or ideas of the world around them are fragile or evolving.
It seems to me that you are saying this is what faith is meant to be so your faith makes you this and there's no other explanation regardless of how poorly constructed your understanding on the subject might or might not be. You dictate.
There are people who believe in things that are not supported by evidence, be it ideology, politics, religion or just winning the lottery this Saturday, it happens, and in this instance 'faith' is defined as a belief held without the support of evidence.
I often use the Latin word
credit, which means believer. From that word comes credible, credentials, credulity, incredible, credibility. I often find it necessary to define evidence as the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid. Most everything has evidence for and against it. Evidence is argument. Evidence and faith can be, but are not necessarily blind. One man's evidence of evolution can be another man's evidence of creation.
Natura naturata.
To say that anything exists without the support of evidence seems to me odd. It's as if saying evidence dictates my reality rather than reality dictating my evidence. This, it must be agreed, is infallible truth because of the evidence I accept or conclude with, in agreement with these credible sources. It just seems - desperate?
If there is no evidence for the existence of something, there is no justification to believe that it does exist. If it's something possible but hidden and evidence comes to light, that is the point of justification for a conviction.
You are taking faith into the realm of what is assumed to be true? They call it faith, credit, credential, for a reason. It's trust, confidence. Paul's definition you may be familiar with? "Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” (
Hebrews 11:1) When it comes to God everyone, whether atheist or theist is agnostic in the sense that they don't know.
Science is built on systematic observation, experimentation, and evidence-based reasoning. But faith - not as blind belief, but as a kind of trust. Scientists have to trust that the universe is orderly and consistent, that patterns they observe today will hold tomorrow. That’s not something you can prove with a single experiment; it’s an assumption, a working faith in what’s called the uniformity of nature. Without it, the whole scientific method would collapse - you’d never be confident that gravity won’t just switch off next Tuesday.
Then there’s faith in the process itself. Scientists trust that rigorous testing, peer review, and replication will eventually sift truth from noise, even if it’s messy along the way. Think about how many times a hypothesis gets tweaked or tossed out - yet they keep going, trusting the system will refine our understanding over time. That’s not knowledge in the moment; it’s faith in a method.
And on a personal level, scientists often lean on a kind of intuitive faith - call it a hunch - when picking what to study. There’s no guarantee a theory will pan out, but they trust their instincts and dive in anyway. Einstein’s pursuit of relativity started with a gut feeling about how space and time should fit together, long before the math and evidence caught up.
So, faith in science isn’t about abandoning evidence for dogma. It’s trust acting as a scaffold - holding things steady where knowledge hasn’t yet solidified. The trick is, that scaffold gets replaced with data as soon as possible. Faith keeps the engine running; science fuels it.
Some things are just so unlikely that that there is no point, the Greek gods atop Mt Olympus....how likely is Allah and the 72 virgin prize on offer?
Sure. But you also have to look at what things are actually meant to be. I always use Shinto gods and goddesses as an example. Luck is another example.
