Belief

[Mike MacLeod]

For a good long time I have struggled with the concepts of belief, disbelief, skepticism, knowledge, understanding, and others that orbit around what we call epistemology.

My main interest is in belief. I have passionate feelings about it, dating back to the rabid atheist days of my youth, and I have somehow managed to preserve my dislike for the concept through many intellectual twists and turns.

A comprehensive essay on its interrelationships with human psychology is beyond the scope of a blog posting - this one, anyway - but I wanted to note what an extraordinarily murky concept belief is.

In short, belief means pretty much what people want it to mean - believe it to mean. See where we are headed?

But to plant a stick in the sand to mark where we are, in the social setting I swim in belief pretty much means a big sticky blob of hope, fear, received wisdom, fantasy, ambition, id, and self-delusion. Belief is often conflated with faith, but the two are as different as humour and wit, or intelligence and cleverness.

To come to a point, I beli...heh heh, almost got me... in my opinion, what makes belief such a problem (on a superficial level) is that it is an obstruction.

You may be familiar with the lock-and-key metaphors that describe how various biochemical processes work. There are various receptor sites that sit waiting for a very specific chemical "key" to bump into them, at which time some biochemical process is initiated or ended. In normal operation, the lock is cleared afterward and reset for the next triggering.

It turns out that the most deadly poisons are chemicals that either elbow the "right" keys out of the way, bind to the receptors and prevent them from doing their work, or bond to the "lock" mechanism in such a way that it is jammed and permanently disabled. Cyanide compounds interfere with oxygen metabolism in this way, triggering cellular suffocation.

My contention is that the kind of "belief" described above "fits" into what we could crudely call a "spiritual receptor" in such a way as to render it either inoperable or operating in a faulty way - perhaps causing effects analogous to intoxication with alcohol or cannabis or indole alkaloids, if this is not pushing the analogy too far.

This assumes, as I bel... hmm... suppose to be the case, that there is such a lock-and-key function that has a specific spiritual "key" that needs to be supplied to operate correctly.

This particular thought experiment has no conclusion - from me, at least. Where would you like to take it?

[Mike MacLeod]

I tend to swing between the extremes.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Sophie,

There have been times when things did happen. I'm only contrasting with those. I never expected anything to happen or not happen, but when things do and then they don't, I don't know what to make of it. I'm well aware of the kind of culture we live in, but wasn't setting things in that context. It's not a matter of emotionality, but purely of observation. I'm not restless, nor excited. I'm in a neutral place.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Sophie,

A really interesting post. Yes, I see what you mean. However, I'm wondering if there are just the two options - to give up and rely on faith, or to "leap into the void". I recognise myself in the student in the story insofar as I've been through phases of asking questions and more or less realise that there are no answers, but I can't say I've either leaped or turned to faith.

I seem to be in a place where it's very "flat", where there's neither enthusiasm nor despair. I do the exercises I'm supposed to do, etc., but I'm not doing them out of faith, hope, or even habit. I'm just carrying on even though nothing seems to be happening. In a way, this is quite a hard thing to deal with, maybe more than despair. I mentioned this on the old Hidden Recess - it's a middle place, like a few hours after a meal, when you feel neither hungry nor satiated. I don't know what to make of it...

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Pedro,

Well, the answers I or anyone can give are just words, and can only be intellectually grasped. Experiencing the teacher's words and the effect they have is something that is lived. But one doesn't even know whether the words of the teacher in the story are relevant to one's own particular situation.

Yes, there is turning back, or repentance, but beyond that is repentance of repentance. What does that mean? Possibilities:

1. One shouldn't get locked into never-ending repentance; that can become a vice of the accusing self. At some point, repentance is sufficient and it is time to move on.

2. Repentance may be merely a helpful attitude for a time; what is the source of actual forgiveness, however? Does the repentance actually cause the forgiveness? Or does the mere realisation and acceptance that one has made a mistake cause it, or more than that, constitute the real definition of forgiveness?

Mistakes may just be various forms of resistance, and resistance is built into the creation - if it weren't, the universe wouldn't be one that evolves in space and time. Hence the Absolute is the source of resistance, and therefore, all our mistakes. So in a sense, there may be nothing to forgive. Just inevitable mistakes, the object of which is to come to understand them as such and thereby evolve nearer to the nature of the Creator. Once one realises this, one can see that repentance may be pointless.

More important than repentance may be restitution – to oneself or to injured parties; because, by making mistakes, one usually encourages oneself to repeat them, or others to emulate them. We all know, for example, how abused children may become abusing adults. By making mistakes, we are retarding the evolution of all humanity, and by not making them, promoting its evolution. If we can’t make restitution to injured parties, well, at least by ceasing to make the same mistakes, we aren’t going to have further deleterious effects on others.

As I see it, blind belief is the source, or effect, of mistake. When we don’t know, we still want to feel we know, and so we substitute the counterfeit of knowledge, a false certainty whose characteristics are built around the need to satisfy desires for security, justice, affection, or whatever.

Human beings try long and hard to make their universe certain, even if that means denying that the universe makes any sense at all. The dearer something is to one’s heart, the more rabid becomes the belief in a made-up remedy: that we are members of the one true faith; that our suffering is a test, and through forbearance, we will gain our eventual reward; that Jesus loves us; and so on. It doesn’t matter if there’s a kernel of truth in our blind beliefs, the key issue is that we don’t know it is so. Nonetheless, we think we know it is so, and so that stops us looking any deeper for the real truth. We become ossified in our blind belief, incapable of evolution.

I see a close link between humility and evidence-based faith. Humility means knowing what we don’t know. This gives us a peculiar freedom of thought and action. There is no notion so dear to us that we won’t reject it in an instant in the light of definitive contrary evidence. When we have to act without certainty, we acknowledge that, and hope for the best. We are then able to learn from the outcome of our actions without aggrandising ourselves if that outcome is successful, or self-flagellation if it's unsuccessful. It’s a kind of neutrality or detachment from the idea of ourselves as being capable of right action based on right understanding, which in another word is pride, the cardinal mistake from which all other mistakes arise.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Pedro,

I have been thinking about the Buber story, but can't say I get it for sure. "Free will" is, I think, only the freedom to resist the will of the Absolute. One can resist only as long as one doesn't know the ultimate truth, but if and when one does, then resistance disappears, and with it, free will.

I can't weigh up whether the rabbi is telling the disciple to turn back, or to leap into the abyss, and whether by "faith" he means belief supported by evidence or not.

[Jane]

Hello Mike

I also like the lock and key analogy. I have heard the analogy that belief is like a type of innocuation, especially if they get you young enough. It knocks the mystery and the search out of it, it knocks out the discovery, where you have the possibilty to discover it for yourself. Stories for children are great but I have avoided anything tradtionally religious with mine.

I really like the idea that the system gets locked down by beliefs, because 'the given answers' get stuck in place. keeping the system open is always allowing for the possibilty of refining,changing, discovering.

Another reason I am for doubt is that if I believe things are the way they appear to me or as I have been told I stop trying to see through to what may lie beyond the obvious.


The Copernicus/Bessel story is great too as is every paradigm changing or science discovery in the face of opposition by the scientic establishment.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Pedro,

Thanks for this. It gives me much pause for thought. Although I understand what you have said in its own terms, I'm not sure how it relates to what Mike or I said - if, for example in relation to my post, it is saying that my view is mistaken. I don't mind at all if that is what you are saying, in fact I'd welcome a little more explanation if that's the case.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Mike,

The biochemical analogy has considerable appeal for me, as I did a year's worth of biochemistry at university, where my "major" subject, as they say in the USA, was zoology. I love the idea of beliefs being like inhibitory molecular forms that bind to protein sites preferentially to catalytic forms.

A similar example is carbon monoxide poisoning, where CO binds to haemoglobin more strongly than oxygen, thus severely affecting the ability of the blood to distribute oxygen around the body. Ironically, the symptom of CO poisoning is what superficially looks like a healthy pinkness to the skin (in Caucasians, of course). So if we want to take the analogy further, many with fervent beliefs feel they are “in the pink” as we say in the UK. They feel fit and healthy, unlike their belief-less brethren, but are unaware that their belief is what prevents them from functioning correctly.

You don’t say why there’s a difference between belief and faith, although hint at it with the difference between humour and wit. As I understand belief, it is conditioned, the result of received wisdom, like the joke that can be learned and parroted; whereas faith has a basis in the evidence of personal experience, and he who has experience can speak outside the constraints of rote. So yes, it’s more like wit; the possessor of faith has a degree of experience and can express himself in terms suited to the exigencies of the moment.

However – hang in there for a while. Copernicus didn’t, contrary to popular understanding, know that the sun was the centre of the solar system. It was actually conjecture, which became widely accepted despite the intense dislike by the Catholic church of the notion that the earth, and hence man, was no longer at the centre of creation. Heliocentricity just gave a so much more simple explanation of the apparent motion of the planets, including retrograde motion (i.e. when the planets appear to reverse direction) than did the old Ptolemaic system, which was geocentric.

Nonetheless, for an appreciable time after Copernicus, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy (which involved the invention of complicated “epicycles” - or cycles within cycles - to explain planetary motions), still gave the more accurate results. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Bessel was able to produce the actual evidence for heliocentricity (using the phenomenon of stellar parallax). So for all the years that intervened between Copernicus and Bessel, heliocentricity was actually unsupported belief, not evidentially justifiable faith. Actually, based on the relative utility of heliocentrism, it should strictly have been rejected or at least held in abeyance as an accepted theory.

So there are more shades here than a stark dichotomy between belief and faith. One can believe in something that is actually true, although one doesn’t personally have experience to back that up. This is like the pre-Bessel belief in heliocentricity. On the other hand, one can have incorrect faith based on genuine evidence. So for example, patients suffering a heart attack were frequently observed to do so when in the midst of strenuous activity. So the evidence pointed to part of the treatment being complete bed rest for an extended period – a nurse told me that they even used to prevent patients feeding themselves. However, it was eventually discovered that the best treatment included just the reverse – trying to get the patient involved in moderate exercise as soon as possible after the attack to stimulate repair of scarred heart muscle. This must have saved countless lives ever since.

As I see it, this also points to another fact about faith. It isn’t ever set in stone. True faith is organic, evolving, and the truly faithful in fact always retain a degree of scepticism, are always ready to change and refine understanding. This notion constitutes the very essence of the scientific method, though sadly, scientists, being as human as everyone else, can become attached to their pet theories and defend them in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. In that sense, they can sometimes act just like the Church did against Copernicus, and a little later, Galileo. Thomas Kuhn in his seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions noted how the “old guard” in the scientific establishment tend to hang on to existing theories as long possible until some new scientific paradigm manages to overthrow them.

Not to go too much further, perhaps the term absolute knowledge is a tautology; all knowledge is absolute, by definition. Until we arrive at knowledge, maybe we just have increasing degrees of faith based on more and more evidence derived from personal experience. I tend to wonder whether the acquisition of knowledge is actually a good thing, because in a way, it signals the end of evolution. The whole enterprise of creation may be a story of never-ending seeking, never-ending refinement of understanding; and without the stimulus of that goal, I can’t help wondering whether existence wouldn’t become totally boring.