A Conversation About Belief

Our Christian faith is in large part founded on beliefs. Many of us who take our life seriously often find ourselves hesitant because of our skepticism about “belief.” So many people believe so many things – which we often consider silly – and even our faith sometimes seems to ask us to believe things that test the limits of our credulity. “Why should I be interested in ‘belief’ in the first place?” I hear you say… “I’m a skeptic precisely because I don’t trust “belief”! I value knowledge!”

I’m here to point out that belief is inevitable. We actually “know” very little when you get right down to it! Much of what we think we know is really a form of belief, as we shall see when we examine the nature of knowing. We live, however, in an era when “belief” has a bad name. We are obsessed with “facts” and “evidence” and consider “belief” so inferior that we want nothing to do with it. In this pamphlet, I want to show you that believing is not necessarily intellectually dishonest, and that it is an inevitable part of our knowing process. Even skeptics can find a way to appreciate belief through the discipline of “responsible belief.”

I want to use “belief” in the traditional sense of holding some proposition as true. When we speak of “my beliefs” we are referring to some set of statements about the nature of things, to which I subscribe.

The question really is this: in the absence of true knowledge in some domains, what degree of uncertainty is acceptable for me to hold a proposition as valid and useful, even though I can’t quite confirm it? When is belief responsible, and when is it irresponsible?

For this pamphlet, I define “belief” as a hypothesis about something which has not been thoroughly proven, but that, for practical purposes, we accept as factual.

It might be useful to examine very briefly what is involved in knowing: we have experiences; we try to explain them with hypotheses which we generate; and then we try to confirm them. Once a hypothesis has been thoroughly verified, we conclude it to be a “fact,” and we value it as such.

If that is the nature of knowing, we can quickly see that we actually “know” very little, because we do not tend to spend much time verifying our favourite hypotheses about things. Moreover, a lot of what we say we “know” are hypotheses we have merely accepted from others whom we trust – more or less – but we have not ourselves taken the steps of verification. Maybe it’s a teacher, or a parent, or a clergyperson, or even an influencer on social media! We accept what someone says as accurate, because we trust the source that has told us to accept it as true, or because we are comfortable with it, or because we don’t think we need to look further, etc.

For some skeptics, though, this state of affairs is unacceptable. We would rather admit that we don’t know over believing something we have not personally verified. An understandable stand. Unfortunately, it comes at a considerable cost: most of the areas of our lives are governed, not by what we know, but by some form of belief we have acquired from others. It is inevitable. We read; we go to school; we go to church; we listen to political leaders; we watch influencers on social media; we accept or reject what they say. But when we accept, we rarely take the time and energy to verify for ourselves what they are proposing. We accept on the basis of some form of trust.

Every day we are provided with ready-made meaning structures to make sense of our experience. In the sermons we hear, in the books we read, in conversations with trusted friends. Often, we are not invited to check out the validity of the assertions for ourselves, but are essentially told that such and such is so. Sometimes we’re told it’s because God has said it in a sacred text; other times we are told it is ecclesiastical authorities who have declared it so; or a respected teacher has taught us so; or a political party has issued an ideological manifesto which they insist is final and normative; sometimes, an author we value says it. We decide – or not – to take someone else’s word for it.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it is not “knowledge” in the true sense of the word – i.e., a hypothesis about the nature of things which we have thoroughly verified until we have no further questions. The question now becomes one of the trustworthiness of the authority. All this does, of course, is push the knowing process one step further: if we do not – or cannot – rationally validate a hypothesis we are told is factual, surely we must at least perform some sort of validation exercise on the person or persons or sacred texts we are trusting “on faith” to have done the work of rational validation. From childhood on, we have the experience that our elders – parents, teachers, clergy, political leaders – know what is the case, and our task is to remember and obey. Unfortunately, we often learn that those we thought were “authorities” knew less than we were lead to believe.

The problem is confounded by the fact that most faith traditions have sacred writings which declare themselves infallible or inerrant or written by God. And the only proof we have of that is that the sacred writings – or religious authorities – declare it to be so.

If this were not enough, as we become exposed to the world’s religions, we discover that each major world religion is based on sacred texts which also claim to be the “word of God” in some form or another. And they too use a self-authenticating method of proof. So we are asked to suspend our natural knowing process of verifying our hypotheses, and to accept “on faith” a particular hypothesis into the nature of things. Our sacred text even tells us that we are “blessed” if we believe without seeking proof.

When we accept someone’s hypothesis as “fact,” it assumes that we have enough trust in that person’s credibility to accept it. “Trust” is like a social credit which a person – or a political party, or a religious figure, or a professor – builds up over time. But trust is always subject to checking. And the more we are asked to trust, or the more important the matter is, the more we need to check. We are checking for consistency, for congruence, for a match between words and behaviour. A slip on any of these, and the social credit gets used up fast. The more we trust, and the weightier the matter about which we are trusting, the greater the social credit is counted on, and the greater and faster the fall when there is a slight dissonance. (And, yes, as you read this, you are involved in a similar process: do you trust the person writing this text? Who is he? What are his credentials? Are you fairly certain that he has done the verification process behind his claims about knowledge?)

In the complete knowing process, we are invited to go beyond the generation of hypotheses to explain our experience. We are encouraged to ensure that we have generated all the hypotheses possible to explain that experience. We are challenged to not play favourites with the hypotheses that we have developed around our experience, but to subject them all to rigorous verification.

In this scheme, a “belief” ought to be merely a provisional state in the knowing process, pending verification until there are no further questions. But this is often not possible.

One of the ways for skeptics to feel a bit more comfortable with hypotheses that have not been completely verified is to think of a scale of “truth-worthiness”.

A belief can be merely possible, or it can be plausible, or even probable.

A merely possible belief is one that is one among a number of other possible beliefs; it contains no truth value per se; it is simply affirmed as not out of the realm of possibility. One really wants to avoid merely possible beliefs. They have no claim to factuality.

A belief can be plausible. This implies that, upon critical reflection, the hypothesis has merit: it is consistent; it is logical; it does not contradict anything else one holds as factual. It is worth pursuing.

A belief can also be probable. This implies that critical reflection has eliminated most competing hypotheses; there is little one can think of that would invalidate the hypothesis; without being able, at this time, to confirm it as “factual,” it is a serious candidate for factuality.

When we examine all of our current beliefs, if we have been reasonably selective, few of our beliefs are merely possible. If we find some, we should quickly take steps to eliminate them or subject them to further testing to move them at least to “plausible.”

If we are honest with ourselves, we will see that many of our cherished beliefs are simply plausible, i.e., there is no compelling reason to discard them, but we don’t have the evidence that would move them to a firmer category. In the area of faith, a lot of our beliefs are plausible.

It takes quite a lot of work to get our beliefs to the stage of “probable.”

The truth is, in our daily life, we can get along quite well with beliefs which are somewhere between plausible and probable. We each have to determine where a belief lies: is resurrection probable or is it simply plausible? The same goes for the virgin birth, or Jesus’ miracles. What degree of certainty do you need in order to live out your life honestly and faithfully? Knowing that, in most areas of our life the same holds true as it does in our faith life, does that give us a bit more leeway in our assessment of the validity of the Christian faith?

We can do this because, in the end, our Christian faith is not a set of propositions requiring our assent, but a life-style we are invited to live out. The beliefs are merely the rationale behind the life-style. We must also remember that there is great distance between the Jesus who walked the earth, taught humility and compassion and equity, and the great doctrines that evolved over the centuries afterwards about, say, the Trinity, the Virgin birth, the resurrection, original sin, heaven and hell, etc. We can be fairly certain about the characteristics of the life-style Jesus taught and at the same time have some doubts about a number of doctrines which evolved later. What really matters, in the end, is not what we believe, but how we treat others and the environment.

And so, over time, we evolve our “theology from experience.” We review the doctrines we have been taught, in light of our experiences, in light of what we have read and heard from people we trust, and we assign various levels of “truth-worthiness” to them. And we try to weave it all in some form of consistent and coherent whole that helps us live better. Some doctrines matter more than others and deserve much more attention; others are more peripheral, and perhaps less relevant to the life-style we wish to follow. In the end, we judge it all on this basis: does this or that doctrine help us love others better? Treat others with respect? Help build communities of distributive justice? Encourage us to forgive ourselves and others?

Try it out! Look at aspects of your stock of knowledge that you rely on in your daily life. What degree of truthfulness do these have? What degree of truthfulness do you need in order to feel comfortable with our hypotheses? How do you – how will you – go about testing your hypotheses more thoroughly to move them up one notch of truthfulness?