Blogworld, I have a question

I've been reading this book. It's a bunch of short essays about people's personal philosophies and guiding principles.

Unsurprisingly, lots of people talk about faith. Faith in God, faith in humanity, faith in their prospects for success, faith in themselves.

I have a funny thing to tell you about myself. When I tell you, you're going to look at me like a small child who is trying to figure something out. I know this because three different people have given me this look when I explain this to them.

I don't understand faith. I don't have faith in things. To me, faith is a very surprising and foreign concept. It baffles me that faith is something people do.

I want to explain this carefully in order to be understood. When I say I believe something, I mean precisely the following: I have a picture in my head of a pie chart describing all the possible outcomes or explanations for the situation in question. The size of each slice of the pie represents how likely I think it is, as determined by all the information I have. If one of the slices takes up almost the entire pie, then I believe it.

However, faith appears to be a whole different ballgame. From what I understand of faith, the idea is to believe something with certainty, without checking what the actual probability of it is. Or, believing something in spite of what the probability actually is.

The example that came up recently was this: What if The Superhero came down with a terminal illness, and the doctors said that people in her condition died 80% of the time and were cured 20% of the time. Would I have faith that she would be one of the 20% who lived?

I said of course that in that situation I think she has an 80% chance of dying, and a 20% chance of living. The reason is that the doctors' opinions are the best information that I have available. In the absence further evidence, my working theory about this illness would be that The Superhero would most likely die.

The reaction I got was this funny smile that you'd give a child who doesn't understand something very simple.

Since I've been investigating the nature of faith, I've had a few similar conversations. It always leaves me with the creepy feeling of being in a madhouse, like I'm the only sane person left and everyone else has taken temporary leave of their senses.

Let me try to explain how I feel about this with an analogy. A group of intelligent people who's opinion you typically respect are standing around playing with an ordinary 6-sided die. You've been rolling it for a while, and you've gotten each of the numbers 1 through 6 with similar frequency. Then people start talking about what the probability is that the next roll is going to be a 6. You say calmly that the probability of a 6 is about 1 in 6. Everyone looks at you like you've made a very simple and fundamental error in judgment, and they proceed to explain to you that the probability of rolling a 6 on the next roll is nearly 100%. You look at them suspiciously and ask if there's some trick, like they've stuck a magnet or a weight in the die or something to influence the outcome. They maintain the same patronizing smile as they explain that not only have they not messed with the die in some way, but they arrived at the conclusion that the next roll would almost certainly be a 6 specifically by not analyzing how a die works and what is in fact most likely to happen.

This is how I feel. I feel as though some kind of mind control has taken over people who otherwise appear to be sensible most of the time.

So Blogworld, please enlighten me! What is this faith business?