The Problem with Beliefs

I went to a talk yesterday. The topic aroused my skepticism, but I determined to listen with an open mind. It didn’t take long before my heart began to sink. Yet again, I realized, yet again, I am in the midst of belief disguised as knowledge. I don’t mind hearing about someone’s beliefs. It can be edifying and entertaining. But when it dawns on me that the person sharing his beliefs does not understand (or care about or respect or acknowledge or permit) the basic distinction between the two cognitive functions called believing and knowing, I become disheartened.

What about this distinction? Do you accept that there is one? Is it a distinction that makes a difference in actual life? And might it be healthier to allow the void of “don’t know” rather than fill it with a belief?

I think that a case can be made that the distinction is a serious one, with real-life consequences. In an article called “The Problem with Beliefs,” Jim Walker bluntly reminds us of an extreme, yet all-too-common, result of belief:

People have slaughtered each other in wars, inquisitions, and political actions for centuries and still kill each other over beliefs in religions, political ideologies, and philosophies. These belief-systems, when stated as propositions, may appear mystical, and genuine to the naive, but when confronted with a testable bases from reason and experiment, they fail miserably. I maintain that beliefs create more social problems than they solve and that beliefs, and especially those elevated to faith, produce the most destructive potential to the future of humankind.

The vast majority of people who hold beliefs–even strong, far-reaching ones–don’t resort to violence over their beliefs. We can ask, however, whether other kinds of personal and social damage are being done when we seek out, accept, hold, and spread beliefs. Might belief, for instance, be a symptom masking something that screams out for knowledge? Might beliefs be strategies for circumventing uncertainty? In his Devil’s Dictionary (see page above), Ambrose Bierce offers a definition for the term “religion” that works equally well for “belief”: “Noun. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” That may sound harsh, but is it unjustified?

If I have learned anything in life, it is that people cling tenaciously to their beliefs. Beliefs are indeed precious. They serve as a salve to fear, worry, and pain. They offer a refuge in times of loss. They provide us with a vessel for navigating the often nauseating vicissitudes of life.

When things are going well, though, and you feel somewhat secure, can you consider Emerson’s claim (in “Representative Men”): “The supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge.” Knowledge and reality do not require belief. They do, however, require courage. Emerson will ask you to discover to what extent “Knowledge is the antidote to fear.”

Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. (From “Courage”)

Short of this experiment, would you consider this one? In Majjhimanikaya 95, Gotama asks us to be cautious about our truth claims. There, he mentions five bases for having conviction in a belief. The belief can originate in:

1. faith (saddha)
2. inclination (ruci)
3. oral tradition (anussavo)
4. careful consideration of the grounds (akaraparivitakko)
5. reflective acceptance of a view (ditthinijjhanakkhanti).

It is acceptable to make a truth claim on the basis of any one of these modes; but the “truth” being claimed must, in honesty and fairness, be limited to the scope encompassed by the particular mode of conviction. That is, the person who posits “Obama is a Muslim” or “dreams are messages from the unconscious” or “God created the universe” or “the Buddha was enlightened” on the basis of faith is “protecting the truth” (saccam anurakkhati) when he says, “thus is my faith,” and acknowledges that he has no warrant to make a more elaborate claim or come to a definite conclusion. Thus the person may not justly claim: “only this is true, anything else is wrong.”

So, while it may be true that elaborate worldviews may be constructed around beliefs, while it may be true that weighty authorities and institutions espouse beliefs, while it may be true that beliefs are “fully approved of by society and tradition, well transmitted, well conceptualized, and well reflected on,” it does not change the “empty, hollow, and false” nature of the universal claim to truth required by the belief. (The quoted words are Gotama’s.)

I put Walker’s article up as a page (look above the mast). For those of you who won’t read the whole thing, please consider this summary.

Beliefs and faiths represent a type of mental activity that produces an unnecessary and dangerous false sense of trust and wrongful information (thinking coupled with the feeling of ‘truth’). Faith rarely agrees with the world around us. History has shown that beliefs and faith, of the most intransigent kind, have served as the trigger for tragic violence and destruction and sustained the ignorance of people. Replacing beliefs with predictive thoughts based on experience and evidence provide a means to eliminate intransigence and dangerous superstitious thought.

Beliefs and faiths do not establish “truths” or facts. It does not matter how many people believe or for how many centuries they have believed it. It does not matter how reverent or important people think of them, if it does not agree with evidence, then it simply cannot have any validity to the outside world. All things we know about the world, we can express without referring to a belief. Even at its most benign level, beliefs can act as barriers to further understanding.

I present a very simple observation at the limits of ignorance and knowledge: If you don’t know about something and you submit it to nothing but belief, it will likely prove false; if you know about something, then you don’t need to believe it, because you know it. Between ignorance and knowledge you have the uncertainties about the world, and the best way to handle uncertainties involves thinking in terms of probabilities. So what use does belief have?

If you have awareness of abstracting, you can then begin to replace believing with thinking.

Instead of owning beliefs, we can utilize hypothesis, theory, and models to make predictions about things in the world. In its semantic form, we can replace “belief” words with “thinking” words which better describes the formation of our ideas. We can use our imaginations to create new hypothesis towards desired goals. The wonder of the universe gives us a powerful feeling of inquisitiveness. Certainly we will fail sometimes, but disowning beliefs allows us to correct our mistakes without submitting our ideas to years or centuries of traditional time consuming barriers. Theory coupled with imagination can yield inventive thoughts and points of views. By further understanding our language and eliminating unworkable essence words, we can communicate without resorting to preconceived ideas based on past beliefs. Our feeling of wonder about the universe provides us the fuel for exploration; how much more magnificent the results from useful thoughts than ones based on faith.