Faith’s perceived truth validates whatever facts appear to support it

Evidence

Data were chosen because they were useful to an exalted end; writers did not think in terms of truth for its own sake, although they would have been sincerely horrified and understandably annoyed at any suggestion that their ‘truths’ were untrue; the whole good of true religion, of humanity, made a ‘fact’ seem probable, and probability is usually a ground of belief. The truth of the end made the data which seemed to demonstrate that end seem true. They seemed to prove the Christian faith, but what really happened in the mind of the polemist was that the Christian faith proved whatever supported it to be true. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1393

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the usual direction: instead of evidence proving doctrine, doctrine ‘proves’ evidence — a mechanism for how Islam’s vilification gets embedded in scholarship, reinforcing the vault’s genealogical thread.
• SEED: Angles toward an essay on how committed belief shapes evidence selection across epistemic communities — how sincerity and motivated reasoning coexist.