on faith

The whole concept of faith is one with which I have struggled immensely. Those close to me have told me on more than one occasion that I am one who possesses too many doubts to be that certain of anything that I would just "have faith" without some other sort of evidence to corroborate it. And yet, I have found I often inexplicably rely on my intuition, which is really just a kind of knowing, but a knowing that depends on faith that what one's gut is saying is somehow as reliable as any fact.

Something in that assessment doesn't sit right with me though. I am tripping over the relationship between faith and belief and the difference between that and knowing. Knowing doesn't really require faith, it is not a supposition; for all intents and purposes, it is fact. But where is the basis for this fact? Sometimes we know things to be true until further information comes along to upset that equation. The earth was known to be the center of the universe and the geocentric model persisted until greater knowledge upset what had been accepted as fact. You can thank Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler for the heliocentric model. That, too, persisted until new knowledge came into being when Herschel and Hubble posited our earth in the middle of our galaxy, which existed in relation to other galaxies... which is to say, how does one manage to have faith when even facts fall apart in the face of our ever increasing apprehension of reality?

I don't know that I have a satisfactory answer to this question. I just know that it has something to do with the heart and observation of the universe and, I feel, not a whole lot to do with doctrine and dogma. It is a participation in the act of knowing, then?