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Taking 'faith' to mean: an effective trust or acceptance of the veracity of certain statements of fact, or the truth of existential claims. I.e. the kind of faith/beliefs that are cardinal to the worldview, or the "ism's" one subscribe to. Eg: "he takes it on faith that Math is sound", "she can sleep soundly in the faith the sun will rise tomorrow", or Wittgenstein's "hinges" below (thanks @Conifold).

I seems to me that there are many conditional beliefs we cary for the sake of day to day functioning. We don't contemplate "cogito ergo sum" everyday, but I could hardly hold down a job without some faith in a future benefit from its proceeds. We all have what we think of as our worldview, but only some actively work to adjust our view. Regardless our efforts to improve, or simply leave most of our understanding to contingency, we all have an idea of what we would call fact and faith.

What would the minimal statement of faith be, could we assert: "I have no faith"?

EDIT: Though I haven't expressly excluded (with reason), religious statements such as "God is doing all of it", those tend to trivialize the question somewhat. So I'll request that answers on the religious vein be kept to something that are at least to some degree rationally rooted, i.e. it can be reasoned about within the broader context of 'purely rational' answers.

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    Do you mean "faith" as "belief without proof" and not as "religious belief"... I think.
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Dec 29, 2018 at 10:25
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    If so, from a metaphysical point of view, quite all our "everyday beliefs" are "by faith".
    – Mauro ALLEGRANZA
    Commented Dec 29, 2018 at 10:26
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    In Peirce's paraphrase of Bane, "belief is that upon which is prepared to act". So the minimum is not a statement, but action. When verbalized, Peirce called such non-propositions "indubitables", and Wittgenstein called them "hinges":"We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put", see IEP.
    – Conifold
    Commented Dec 30, 2018 at 4:09
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    I’m curious what sort of statements you would consider to not be statements of faith. Every noun you use assumes that there is something to which that noun refers to, and each verb assumes that a corresponding action “exists”. (Otherwise, your statement is meaningless, in which case I worry that it’s not even a statement.) Maybe interjections would not count, though they often assume that there is someone to hear them being said, even if that “someone” is yourself. Almost all sentences inherently state some sort of faith about what exists in the world.
    – Pro Q
    Commented Dec 31, 2018 at 9:25
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    @ProQ You give a good overview of one extreme of the problem I'm thinking about. That other extreme being someone that claim to have no faith, which is of course not impossible since the that view would require, at the very least, a belief that something can actually be self-evident. So then the problem is: does there exist a formal/normal minimal acknowledged 'faith set', and how could it be established?
    – christo183
    Commented Dec 31, 2018 at 14:00

1 Answer 1

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Michael Polanyi claims (page 7)

...all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.

Here is Wikipedia's description of tacit knowledge:

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it.

Here is Wikipedia's description of explicit knowledge:

Explicit knowledge (also expressive knowledge) is knowledge that can be readily articulated, codified, accessed and verbalized.

From this perspective an answer might be able to be made to the title question:

What is the minimum statement of faith?

A statement of faith, because it is a statement, is verbalized explicit knowledge. Given Polanyi's claim that explicit knowledge is rooted in tacit knowledge it is unlikely there is any minimum explicit statement of faith. Any minimum would be part of the non-verbalized tacit knowledge that is not explicit.

The second questions asks:

What would the minimal statement of faith be, could we assert: "I have no faith"?

Any statement of faith, viewed as a kind of knowledge, would have its roots in tacit knowledge which is not verbalized. Even the explicit, verbalized claim that "I have no faith" is rooted in tacit knowledge and so cannot be true if one includes faith as tacit knowledge.

Polanyi, M. (1966). The logic of tacit inference. Philosophy, 41(155), 1-18.

Wikipedia contributors. (2019, March 25). Explicit knowledge. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:26, April 9, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Explicit_knowledge&oldid=889420248

Wikipedia contributors. (2019, March 28). Tacit knowledge. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:16, April 9, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tacit_knowledge&oldid=889863893

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  • Also compare "declarative" and "procedural" memory: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory
    – christo183
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 6:11
  • In that article both declarative (explicit) and non-declarative (implicit) memory are based on data or information, one we are conscious of and the other not. That seems similar to Polanyi's explicit and tacit knowledge. However, if knowledge can be reduced to data then I imagine there could be some minimal statement (information) that we are unaware of. For Polanyi it is all rooted in tacit knowledge, but I don't know if he would call that tacit knowledge information.
    – Frank Hubeny
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 9:53
  • As long as we keep to a generic understanding of declarative memory = data = explicit knowledge your answer presents a good working theory. But yes, tacit knowledge = implicit (eg. procedural) memory, presents a lot of unknown... :) areas where some surprises may lurk.
    – christo183
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 11:08

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