Just because they arrived at the conclusion through methods that we do not find accurate today doesn't mean their discovery hold any less weight. Would Darwin be laughed at if we proved evolution to be done through some other means then survival of the fittest? Probably not. Just because they weren't 100% correct doesn't mean they were just guessing.
Then what, necessarily, is the definition of knowledge? Lets use a well known story to illustrate my point:
You are lucky enough to be invited to a party hosted by a wizard. Upon arriving to the party another guest tells you that the flowers on the mantle are an illusion, because at every party the wizard hosts, he creates the illusion that there are flowers on the mantle. There is no discernible trick to this. At no angle can you tell the difference between flowers that are real or flowers that are fake. In essence it is a perfect illusion. However today the wizard's girlfriend has given him a beautiful bouquet of real flowers that he decided to place on the mantle instead. Therefore the flowers that currently reside on the mantle that you see are real. However the wizard nor his girlfriend has shared this information with anyone, so the entire party is under the impression that the flowers are an illusion. Do you, the guest to the party, have knowledge of the flowers on the mantle?
Another example:
Lets say you are on a field trip with all of your 100 classmates to a very interesting field. Within this field are 100 red painted barns that appear identical in every way. Upon viewing all the barns your professor informs you that only 1 of the barns is real, whereas the other 99 are just holograms. He then instructs each person to pick a barn that they think is the real barn, using any deductive reasoning they like. One person looks at the imprints in the grass and decides that his is a real barn. Another decides that the grain of the paint is brighter on another barn and chooses the other barn as a real barn. This process goes on until all 100 students have picked a barn. One student has to be right in this situation because there are 100 barns and 100 students. There is no realistic discernible difference between the barns even though the students have used what they think is logic to pick the barn of their choice. So does the lucky student who just so happened to choose the real barn have knowledge of the real barn? Even though he thinks that he has used deductive logic to pick his barn, any sort of reasoning would be incorrect. If he does have knowledge of the barn, then why? Since all of his reasoning of his argument is false then how is that different then guessing?
Much faith is based on evidence. Such as a doctor's faith in a particular medicine to ease or cure a condition. They have faith that it'll work on a person since it's worked on a bunch of other people before.
I have no problem with faith. I just think that religion is blind faith. It's essentially believing in something that might be there, with no way of testing if it actually is or not.
I'm not sure your stove example is a good one either. Human experience has taught us that a stove is hot, and it's passed down to you as a child to help prevent you from touching it and getting burned. Whether you touch it or not, if the stove is on it'll be hot. You don't even need to touch it, since you can feel the warmth. And maybe you do touch it, or accidentally touch something that's been in the oven, and you find out for yourself it's hot. And you do your best not to touch it again, and you'll probably pass this info down to your kids just as your parents did to you.
There's no faith involved in that decision, more just rational decision making based on a rather simple fact.
What is your evidence and why do you believe it? Is it because your eyes have proven to you that your stove is black, or that your bread smells delicious? I think that it is undeniable that there are people in this world who have disorders with their senses and their consciousness that they believe that hallucinations are actively around them. Why are they wrong and your view through your senses right? Is it just because that I can ask Famine or Dotini if he can see the same stove and they affirm that it is indeed there?
There are too many rhetorical questions in that paragraph lol. Nevertheless what you think is empirical evidence is nothing more then you "
blindly" believing in your senses. Since I can see my computer screen that means it must be there. Since I can feel my desk it therefore must be there as well. All are assumptions basing solely on the idea that your reality is the true reality.
A common retort to this is: What evidence do you have that the things that I see and taste and touch are not real? It isn't an attempt to prove that existence is not real. It is merely expressing that there is a reasonable doubt to the things that our senses are telling us. You can take common pills that will cause you to taste things in your mouth that "aren't there". You can do illicit drugs that make you think that there are things in front of you that "aren't there". Or are they really there, and the pills that you take are the only thing that can connect you to the ACTUAL reality?
Don't be so quick to judge all that is around you based on the flawed systems of the human body. Once you view things in this manner you can see that our everyday "faith" is very similar to the "faith" that people who believe in god exhibit. The only difference is that their illusion is something that they claim they can obviously see everywhere, whereas you don't share that perception.
