I Believe in Knowing Why I Believe

Here is a belief. The belief in belief should end. That is, the belief that belief as belief has value in itself and should be protected from challenges should end.

But we all have beliefs. If we didn't have beliefs we would be paralyzed and could not act. Our actions in the world are based on a set of beliefs that we carry around with us as guides for action. If we didn't have these beliefs, we would not be able to take a single step.

So beliefs are necessary, but which beliefs? First, we need to clear up some issues with how the word "believe" is used. First, there are two main forms, "believe in" and "believe that".

Let's take "believe that" first. When we say that we believe that something, we are making a truth claim. We are making a prediction that some kind of experience will happen. If this kind of belief is well tested against experience and for coherence with other beliefs that are well tested against experience, we may even venture to call it knowledge. But even here, it is subject to possible revision based on future experiences and challenges.

When we say that we believe in something, it is a sort of endorsement. That is, we are recommending something as a guide for action. It might be an expression of desire. For example, "I believe in compassion" and "I believe in destruction" are both expressions of desire, that I would like to see compassion, or destruction. But I could also say that I believe in science or that I believe in a holy book. When I say I believe in science, I could simply be saying that I believe that science is a useful tool for predicting and controlling experience. Then the belief in science can be played out in the rough and tumble of concrete practice. When I say I believe in a holy book, I often mean that when it expresses desires (like rules and commands) I endorse those as a good guide for action and that when it states claims about experience, those claims will be shown to be true in actual experience. But my belief in the holy book could take a softer form. It could mean simply that it is good guide for action when interpreted within a community in particular ways.

So believing in something is most often simply an endorsement of some desire or some guide for action. The reasons why we endorse it need to be made clear. The most common reason is because authorities such as our parents or community leaders endorse it. Or it could be because "everyone" believes in it. There are many times when accepting an endorsement from someone else who we trust makes sense. But we should have reasons to believe that they have good reasons, like personal experience or expertise in a well tested set of texts. We need to be aware that the authorities in turn may only be carrying forward an endorsement from other authorities in the past. And who knows how the chain of endorsement started. Because of this weakness, the authorities sometimes claim that the endorsement chain ends with an invisible agent, and that it would be in our best interest to accept what that invisible agent says without question. This seems to combine an unverifiable claim with a threat, but it still comes down to an endorsement, "or you will be sorry".

Given this situation it is tempting to say that it is always wrong to believe anything without good evidence. We should just suspend judgment until enough evidence is in. This is a good conservative policy for minimizing errors and extreme actions. Because once we loosen the connection to justification, history has shown that people may be "guided" to some truly terrible acts.

On the other hand, if we were to really suspend judgment on all beliefs until all the evidence is in, we could become paralyzed and unable to act. Sometimes we need to make working assumptions and just act. But there is danger here of doing something truly unfortunate based on just a working assumption.

So here is my recommendation: Know what degree of justification your beliefs have and give greater priority to beliefs that are well justified. Beliefs that are well tested against experience and are coherent with other well tested beliefs have the highest justification. Then there are beliefs you get from others who you trust to have done the testing. Then there are beliefs that are at least plausible, that is, they are at least in line with more justified beliefs. It goes on from there on down to situations in which there is very little to go on but feelings and intuitions but you nonetheless have a real need to act and must make working assumptions. In such cases, going with beliefs that your family and community have found useful may be the way to go, if they are not contradicted by more well justified beliefs.

One more type of belief needs to be fit into this recommendation, that is, those cases where "believe in" is an expression of desire, like "I believe in compassion". There is no way to test desires directly against experience. Here is where a working assumption is needed. I assume that most people want some basic things, like survival, enjoyment, and group membership. Since I also share these basic desires, I justify my desires by how well they help meet these most basic desires. This usefulness then becomes an empirical question, and I feel justified in saying that a belief in compassion is much more justified than a belief in destruction.

Now how justified is this recommendation itself? That depends on goals. Why do I feel the need to make such a recommendation? I feel such a need because of the problems that belief can cause. This has become all to painfully evident recently with suicide bombers, but belief has always been a problem, preventing systematic investigation, limiting freedom, and fomenting violence. In particular, religious belief has had a very mixed record. The recommendation from such books as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is to end belief that cannot be well tested. So in the range of justification I describe above, they would say that we should just do away with belief beyond some point when the justification becomes too weak. They would justify this recommendation by pointing to all the harm that such unjustified or weakly justified beliefs do.

So, for example, they are critical of the so called religious moderate. I would define a religious moderate as someone who in effect takes my recommendation in that they do allow themselves some weakly justified beliefs because of their strong intuition that there is something more and a strong need to explore that something more, but they would give preference to better justified beliefs in concrete action. For example, basic human compassion and practicality would prevent them from bombing innocent people because of their beliefs. Now I may be overstating their case a little. Probably, it would be more correct to say that my recommedation would be more in line with the approach of religous liberals, but I would also claim that religous moderates operationally follow the recommendation even if they do not want to admit or recognize the weak justification their treasured religious beliefs may have.

So the justification for my recommendation is a "don't throw out the baby with the bath water" justification. I largely accept the arguments of these authors for the human nature of religion and the potential harm of religious belief. But I do not think that we need to do away with religion to reduce the dangers of religion. We just need to know what we are doing when we accept beliefs that do not have good empirical justification and why we are doing it - because we want to explore and be open to the "something more" and because of the good that comes from religion. But at the same time we recognize the dangers and make sure we give preference in action to the beliefs that are better rooted and grounded in our common human experience.