This is something that is inspired by a conversation I had (by which I mean an argument into which I injected myself) with someone while ministering on Sunday about postmodernism vs. Christianity and the word “belief.” This is written to clarify our understanding of knowledge which I put into the categories of (you guessed it) opinions, weak beliefs, confident beliefs, and unfailing knowledge.
First off, opinion is not something that I would actually classify as knowledge though it may be true in some cases. Opinion is either something that cannot be true such as “red is better than blue” or else is a claim that is formed either without access to relevant unfailing knowledge or confident beliefs or else is formed without analysing them. Opinions are usually results of emotion or influence from an unquestioned authority and should always be cast aside in favor of real knowledge.
A belief is an item of knowledge that is either true or false. This statement is true of both weak beliefs and confident beliefs but what distinguishes common beliefs is that they lack certainty. A person who has a weak belief may have some understanding of the subject of a belief but their knowledge on the subject is limited and does not include all major perspectives. A weak belief is either a good or a bad thing to have depending on whether or not you are satisfied with it; a common belief makes a wonderful stepping stone but a very poor endpoint.
There are two kinds of confident beliefs, beliefs about the physical and beliefs about the nonphysical. At the present I believe that I am typing this brief discussion on a computer and I also believe that what I say here is true. Either belief could be false but they are still both have and extremely high probability of truthfulness. I am confident in my physical belief because I currently do not have any reason to doubt my senses and I am confident in my nonphysical belief because I have studied the topic in depth and have experience with it (note that this claim is itself a confident belief which, while technically nonphysical, is similar to my previously stated physical belief in that my confidence comes from my lack of any reason to distrust my memory). Not all confident beliefs have the same level of certainty and how much study is required for a claim to count as a confident belief may depend on the subject such as with my confident belief that what I am saying is true which is a claim that requires relatively little study due to the basic and comparatively simple nature of the topic. It is completely acceptable to treat a confident belief as fact though it may need to be defended in a debate.
Unfailing Knowledge is knowledge which we can inherently know without any need to justify it. There is very little that can be put into the category of unfailing knowledge and this is (arguably) the existence of oneself, basic moral mandates and values, numbers, and the laws of logic. Some people would disagree about putting morality in there but I don’t feel like refuting relativists and naturalists right now so instead I’m going to just tell those people to shut up and ask them if that means there would be nothing objectively wrong about them being murdered. No matter what any given person’s philosophy says, in our heart of hearts we are really do believe and act on the belief that there is objective moral truth. Except for psychopaths but those people are defective so they don’t count.
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