Most of the time we talk about theism and religion when it's about things to be taken on faith, belief without evidence. However I wouldn't call just anything taken on faith as theism, since theism demands there is deities involved. I wouldn't call belief in Santa, vampires or reincarnation theism.
Sure some theistic beliefs include reincarnation, but as an idea of its own, reincarnation isn't exactly theism. Anyone got a good word for it? I mean, other than calling it good old fashioned BS?

Well, some of it is plain supernaturalism

Ah, of course. Yeah, I would probably agree that that's one of the best words for it.

believing things without evidence is called "believing"

Is there really a need to have a word that covers every single belief that is not supported by evidence?

michael^3 wrote:believing things without evidence is called "believing"

Not so fast there. I believe that if I jump off my roof that I am going to hit the ground, and there is pretty good evidence to support my belief. Some people believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but have very little if any evidence to support this belief.

There are other words that could be used for believing things without evidence: "Delusion" comes first to my mind with "credulity" running a close second if not a tie. "Faith" in certain contexts fits where people are told to ignore the evidence against belief and just continue believing despite the evidence.

Anyone can believe in anything, the point of the matter is how that belief is founded and supported. I believe that the the earth rotates around it's axis and that tomorrow morning the sun will appear to rise from the east. I have very good evidence to support my belief. On the other hand there are people that think that any day now God will jerk good Christians straight to heaven with no notice. Some people believe this so strongly that they are willing to pay, in advance, people that they think will be left behind to take care of their pets afterward.

So in summary:
There can be founded supportable beliefs, and there can be unfounded unsupportable beliefs.

Religion is based on unfounded unsupportable beliefs. It is faith/belief without evidence and in many cases in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Superfluousism

Superfluousists <- accepting of claims without evidence without a clear reason. Belief doesn't need to be supernatural [in nature ] Their counterpart are not a-superfluousists, but occamists.

Believing things without evidence is the opposite of scepticism, but I don't think there's a general term for it. It doesn't have to be supernatural. Good examples in the non-supernatural realm are homeopathy and other non-evidence-based alternative health treatments, anti-vaccination lobby, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers and those that maintain that all the evidence of anthropogenic global warming is just a giant conspiracy involving all the world's scientists and governments, intended to hand power over to a world government and take away our rights and guns.

What about credulity, or gullibility?

askepticism?

Has the benefit in Australia of sounding similar to "arsexceptism". Actually that doesn't quite work. I was looking to make the exceptism equivalent to exceptionism; making of exceptions in argument in favour of x... or something.

Who's epticism? And why would he know?

Hehe. As you wish; a-skepticism.

sennekuyl wrote:Superfluousism

Superfluousists <- accepting of claims without evidence without a clear reason. Belief doesn't need to be supernatural [in nature ] Their counterpart are not a-superfluousists, but occamists.

/thread

Faith...or gullibility.

Not much difference.

Credulity.

See my sig for an example of its use by a master of the English language.

Rog wrote:Most of the time we talk about theism and religion when it's about things to be taken on faith, belief without evidence. However I wouldn't call just anything taken on faith as theism, since theism demands there is deities involved. I wouldn't call belief in Santa, vampires or reincarnation theism.
Sure some theistic beliefs include reincarnation, but as an idea of its own, reincarnation isn't exactly theism. Anyone got a good word for it? I mean, other than calling it good old fashioned BS?

I call it "Psychological/ Emotional need".

What about the person who goes back to an abusive relationship again and again and again and again and tells themselves, "It won't happen this time"?

It's a coping mechanism. It's denial. It's a need to believe something that overrides the evidence.

Here´s something I believe for which there is no evidence, which I nevertheless think does not deserve any of the epiphets above:
There is no largest prime number.
There is no evidence for this, but there is a mathematical proof. It´s a justified belief, a rational belief unless one is willing to argue that logic is irrational, but the justification is not based on evidence.
Another belief with no supporting evidence is this:
The scientific method produces genuine knowledge of the phenomenal world.
This again is justified logically, using a minimum of assumptions. It´s worth noting that if you don´t hold this belief the notion of evidence is meaningless (and for that very reason evidence can´t support it - that´d ammount to circular reasoning).

susu.exp wrote:Here´s something I believe for which there is no evidence, which I nevertheless think does not deserve any of the epiphets above:
There is no largest prime number.
There is no evidence for this, but there is a mathematical proof. It´s a justified belief, a rational belief unless one is willing to argue that logic is irrational, but the justification is not based on evidence.
Another belief with no supporting evidence is this:
The scientific method produces genuine knowledge of the phenomenal world.
This again is justified logically, using a minimum of assumptions. It´s worth noting that if you don´t hold this belief the notion of evidence is meaningless (and for that very reason evidence can´t support it - that´d ammount to circular reasoning).

Ok, I probably going to indulge in some DBD idiocy here, but try and get the sense of what I say, rather than the clumsyness in the way I may express it.
Why is circular reasoning always such a sin? If we posit that life started by some ribozyme or something functionally similar, we can say that life is self-referrant. Life gets all its information from the environment: other genes, their interactions with each other, other organisms, and physio-chemical events. "Survival of the fittest" is not only a circular argument, but a true one, once you expand it.

If life did not have this prejudice [given by the natural selection mechanism] towards selection information that was context and survival dependent, we would not be here to talk about it. So anthropomorphising it a bit, life itself "believes"/ has the assumption that phenominal reality is reality. Genes that "don't pay attention to reality" [as I imagine Cali might put it] don't survive long in the gene pool. This is not ignoring the stochastic effects of drift, but drift alone is statistically unlikely to climb fitness landscapes.
I emphasize that I am not saying that genes are aware, merely that natural selection is a baising process so powerful that genes have eventually done the "impossible" by producing creatures like us that can conceptualise the first ribozyme!
This is extremely fuzzy logic, and poor argument, but I hope you can get my drift. Naive reality, the conflation between phenomenal world and reality is built into us, because that is the only way genes could do it-the only [known] way that natural selection could work. Just a screwy hypothesis, but there it is.

michael^3 wrote:believing things without evidence is called "believing"

Ahem. One needs to enforce a rigorous distinction here, because the word 'believe' is used to two separate purposes in everyday colloquial speech. One of those purposes being to describe the process of extracting an inference from insufficient data. Which is something we all do. Indeed, possessing an ability to execute this process successfully has been a contributory factor to our survival as a species. However, the mere fact that real world observational data exists pointing toward a particular conclusion, means that said inference is evidence-based, even if only partly.

On the other hand, the word "believe" is also used to describe the process endemic to supernaturalism, namely the treatment of unsupported blind mythological assertions as purportedly constituting "axioms" about the world, in an uncritical and unquestioning manner.

This distinction needs to be reinforced. Consequently, I propose reserving words such as 'belief' and 'believe' for the latter, and using 'infer' and 'inference' for the former. Which solves the taxonomy problem in the OP neatly.

Consequently, I agree with your above statement, but not for the reasons you probably think.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:Ok, I probably going to indulge in some DBD idiocy here, but try and get the sense of what I say, rather than the clumsyness in the way I may express it.
Why is circular reasoning always such a sin? If we posit that life started by some ribozyme or something functionally similar, we can say that life is self-referrant. Life gets all its information from the environment: other genes, their interactions with each other, other organisms, and physio-chemical events. "Survival of the fittest" is not only a circular argument, but a true one, once you expand it.

Well, in this case it´s an extension of the liars paradox. Let´s assume you have a method X that checks whether a statement Y is true. Either method X works (and tells us that Y is true when Y is actually true) or it doesn´t (and it does the reverse).
Now if you propose the statement "method X works", method X will tell you that it´s true regardless of whether it works and so it doesn´t tell you anything about whether method X actually works.
Survival of the fittest is not circular. Fitness is the expected offspring number and survival of the fittest means "a law of large numbers is applicable". This means that the random variables Xi giving the offspring number of the ith individual have some restrictions on the degree of correlation between them. That is a testable statement and not circular at all.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:So anthropomorphising it a bit, life itself "believes"/ has the assumption that phenominal reality is reality. Genes that "don't pay attention to reality" [as I imagine Cali might put it] don't survive long in the gene pool.

As far as I can tell, genes don´t have to pay attention to reality, but to phenomena only. It´s worth noting that not all genes are phenomena themselves - we can operate with abstract genes as well to construct hypotheses.