or The Perilous Landscape of Belief…
I originally wrote this article in 2009 and posted it on Newsvine.
Belief is an amazingly flexible thing. Just look at the stuff we see right here in this forum. Some people believe in God, others assert there is no God. Some people believe President Obama has a nefarious plan to subjugate the American people, others believe he is a smart man with good intentions. You name it, people believe anything and everything, and for every belief there are dozens of counter beliefs. The purpose of this article is not to debate politics or religion or any other specific belief. Instead, it is to discuss what belief is, and why we adopt our beliefs.
All sides argue for their beliefs as though their lives depended on the outcome (for some it may). It is very common for people to attack differing beliefs, as if the mere fact someone else has another idea presents a threat.
If we believe something does that make it true? Of course it doesn’t. When Galileo was forced to renounce his confirmation of Copernican heliocentric theory that didn’t cause the sun to start revolving around the earth. The truth doesn’t care what we believe… it just is what it is. But some of our beliefs, right or wrong, do affect the course of events and the nature of the world in which we live, and that is one reason we argue for them so passionately.
So, what is belief? I see it like this… At birth we know nothing about the world in which we have emerged, we are helpless, and our senses are not fully developed. Even so, we begin gathering information about our surroundings… what feels good, what doesn’t. We discover our parents are a source of comfort and essential need fulfillment. As we age we gather more information, but the more we learn the more questions arise.
Some questions are easily answered… What happens if I touch a hot stove??? It hurts! Other questions are more difficult to answer… Why am I here??? What will become of me when I die??? Even so, we do our best to find answers to these questions. Our sense of touch provides us the information we need to answer the hot stove question. That tactile experience is very compelling, and so we “believe” we have discovered the correct answer. But the “Why am I here?” and “What will become of me when I die?” questions are much more difficult to answer. Other than the hearsay provided to us by other people, we have little or no sensory input to help us in answering those questions, so we resort to reasoning. Not a bad tool, but highly susceptible to error. Many of us adopt answers to those questions, and we call them “beliefs.” Actually, our answers to the hot stove question are beliefs every bit as much as our answers to the “Why am I here?” question. There is not a lot of disagreement on the hot stove question because our experiences of hot stoves are quite consistent, but the scarcity of information on those more difficult questions gives us more freedom to establish widely varying beliefs.
So… what is belief? In my view, our beliefs are our “best guesses” about the truth. I am open to hearing another description of beliefs, but I gotta tell ya, my belief about “beliefs” is pretty darned set.
Now that we have a clear idea of what I think beliefs are, let’s look at why we adopt our beliefs. I’ll bet just about everyone will say they hold their beliefs because they are confident they represent the truth. In fact, I believe (there’s that word again) most people put a quest for knowing the truth as a top priority in establishing their beliefs. But almost all of us are also drawn to beliefs that comfort us in some way. The desire to be comfortable with our beliefs is so compelling that sometimes we de-prioritize our quest for the truth in favor of being more comfortable. Let me be clear, there are many different factors that influence our beliefs… self-image, security, wealth, and many more. But all of those factors boil down to our desire to be comfortable with our beliefs and the actions we take in consideration of our beliefs.
Our desire to be “right” can be so strong that our preexisting beliefs may influence how we go about researching and verifying those beliefs. We may avert our eyes from evidence that is unsupportive and direct our focus toward things that do support our existing beliefs. Making matters worse, some of us fear discovering an error in one belief will threaten the credibility of our other beliefs. If my belief house of cards comes crashing down, the idea that I might be left adrift in a sea of uncertainty can feel overwhelming, so each and every belief becomes inviolable, cast in concrete… for the sake of comfort.
So that is pretty much it… when they are boiled down to their bones, the only motives I can think of for establishing our beliefs are:
- A quest for the truth
- Comfort
Did I leave something out???
I am suggesting that our desire for comfort can be sort of a corrupting factor in our quest to know the truth. If that is correct, and if we say we really do want to know the truth, then shouldn’t we be skeptical of our “comforting” beliefs? Shouldn’t the fact that a belief is comforting be sort of a “red flag”? Shouldn’t we constantly try to shoot down our own comforting beliefs just to be sure we aren’t kidding ourselves???
There is one other thing I can think of that influences what we say we believe. That is, some people say they believe something not because they really believe it but because they have some ulterior motive, and they believe (there it is again) that professing a belief, even though they really don’t hold that belief, will serve them in some way. We call this lying or hypocrisy.
So what do you believe… about belief???
