How can you not believe in belief?

Your question reminds me of this article, which isn’t without its criticism. Rather than directly answering your question, I only think you might enjoy chewing on the thoughts presented there.

Of course, hot on my mind is this question I asked about atheism. Atheists in particular (but I will emphasize not atheists in general) seem to determined that not believing in god cannot be couched as a belief. Oddly, it does seem that those who claim not to hold beliefs hold on to how their principles, or the theories they subscribe too…etc…are not beliefs in a way that is almost fundamentally religious. Like belief is a four letter word…

This is why God gave man the ability to decide the difference between right and wrong.

Then there’s this quote from David Foster Wallace:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

@kevbo

Hilarious! I didn’t even realize your link was to an article about atheism. I’m glad that guy believes we don’t need belief in belief. Faith. :-)

@kevbo: With all his wisdom, brain power, and ability to coin pithy maxims, DF Wallace committed suicide at age 46. I loved the way he wrote and of course, the way he thought. It saddened me that he chose this way out.

Belief: Putting regard in as true
Believe: Trust

If you know something is true, why would you need to believe in it? You know it to be true.

@Neutral

Where are you getting these definitions from? That’s not really accurate…unless I’ve been misinformed…

Thesaurus

A belief implies (strongly) that there is no empirical proof. A fact can be proven

The earth is round. Fact

The earth is flat. Belief

Conjecture:

There is one God.
There are many Gods.
God is a coca cola bottle.
God is in the details.

I always lie. (True or false?)

@gailcalled,

Then we’re defining belief and believe differently. That changes the perspectives.

A belief implies only empirical truth.
Believing implies trust that it’s the truth, but no evidence.

@I believe that we are. There is some wiggle room here, you note.

@Neutral Ah…Believe was listed as verb form…that’s why I was confused

If you say you know, what are you basing that on? The evidence presented you was true. How do you know that evidence was true? You believed the science presenting it.

That’s how knowledge can be based on belief.

@iamthemob,

Scientific method can be used by all. It’s not believing in the method. We all are coming to the same conclusion through it. That’s a belief, not believing.

@iamthemob,

If I throw a penny in the air, it’s going to keep coming down every time. I don’t need to believe it will happen every time, fore I know it happens every time and everyone who try’s it, also knows it will happen every time. That’s belief, not believing.

Regards to believing, well, take God for example. You don’t know he exists or doesn’t exist because you can’t put him through the scientific method. Though, religion believes(trust) in God that he does exist, rather then actually knowing(belief) through evidence.

@gailcalled

I agree with you for all practical relations of life in general. However, pretty much everything that we accept as known is based on our assumptions from how we can observe how things relate. So, the fact that light is insubstantial is how we perceive it…but light is both a wave and a particle at the same time. We know that we are not solid, but rather made up of vast amounts of empty space, because science has told us about atoms. I’ve never seen an atom separate from everything else, but I say I know about atoms rather than I believe in it. However, in essence, I’m working on trust. I’m accepting that what is told me on its face.

That indeed seems functionally the same as belief.

Belief and faith are two different things. Belief can be based upon past experiences that form a base of knowledge. I believe that the sun will come up around the same time every morning because it has every morning for the past 50+ years. I believe I will eventually die, because everyone in my family who was older than me, eventually died.

Faith is trust based. I have faith that the cat will come home in the morning, because he normally does. If he doesn’t come home for a day or two, I have faith that he will show up. I have faith my daughters will love, me and forgive me if I act like a jerk sometimes.

I have faith that that there is a supreme being, but I don’t believe that organized religion is anything more than a social club based upon people ascribing to a common party line. The Christian bible was assembled by the Catholic church and is more a dogmatic political document as it is anything else.

For the second time today, I find myself telling you that your assumptions miss the point.

What you have forgotten is the model. The model is what hangs things together. It is what makes belief in evidence irrelevant. Either the evidence supports the model or it doesn’t. You use the model to predict the behavior of your environment. The model works well or ok or poorly. No belief is required.

Belief comes in when you act as if a hypothesis is supported by evidence even when you have no good evidence. You believe you know something that you can’t “prove” —proof being sufficient scientific evidence to support this model for whatever behavior you are modeling.

Belief is a leap of faith. It is an assumption without evidence.

I suppose you could have a different standard for evidence than the standard science uses. Science requires evidence to be observable by all and to be reproducible. You could accept a standard where a single person need only say they felt something, or that multiple people say they feel something.

If that was your standard, then you could say that anything you wanted was supported by the evidence. For models of things that are notoriously difficult to model, this would work, since it would be hard to find evidence for anything else. However, for models that are easily supported by evidence, this would be harder to carry off.

People do, however, manage to carry it off, usually by force of personality, or appeals to other authorities. In doing so, they offer a way for people to believe in something rather than to demand scientific evidence that the model really explains anything.

Thus people can aver that “God” miraculously cured someone, and have it be accepted by the congregation without anyone needing further evidence other than the sight of the crippled person rising from the wheelchair. People can say that a “God” exists because they, personally, experienced it, and this can count as sufficient evidence for others to say that they not only believe there is a “God,” but they know it.

Sooner or later all these beliefs will fall by the wayside as better evidence suggests there are better models to explain the world than the “God” hypothesis. Until that evidence comes along, people can say they believe in God because there are no models supported by better evidence.

However, there will always be some things that people can’t find any evidence supporting a model that explains those things. So there will always be room for those who are so inclined to hypothesize a God. Those who require the comfort of the feeling of “knowing” will probably resort to a God hypothesis. Or, at least, that’s my theory.

I believe even an atheist will call out for god. If I were to dissect their fingers with a bolt cutter.

@wundayatta

There has been no evidence that supports a better model than that of the “God” hypothesis, as you put it. No evidence has supplanted the areas where there are true questions about existence. So I don’t know why you would claim that eventually belief in god will fall by the wayside as we learn more about the world. The evidence has not done that so far.

Also, regardless of the predictability of any model, there is always some element of belief. Unless I understand every aspect of everything told me, and I see it happen in the same way it’s supposed to most of the time it’s happening, I can’t say I know something to be true. And as I said before, the things that I can’t observe I accept as true because I believe in the scientific method generally. Even further, you have to believe that there is such a thing as true proof, facts, evidence. Considering that nothing can be proven with absolute certainty (e.g., everyone will die. personally, if I die and there are people are still alive? probably. but everyone will die isn’t an absolute true until everyone is dead).

The belief level is so small, essentially, as to be discounted at some point. But unless we recognize that belief is there, we get stuck in dogma. Like the fact that the scientific always works (in social science, the method model becomes problematic…but they’re stuck on that form of evidence).

@ChazMaz ;) :) :)

Personally, I like the belief system that posits that the earth sits on many turtles, the last of which is standing on an elephant.

@gailcalled

Uhm…why do you need a belief system? That’s a fact.

Epistemology addresses these questions
What do people know?
How do we know what we know?

If we are going to know anything, we have to assume that there is in fact something to know (reality), and that we in fact can know it (that we possess consciousness). If you choose not to believe either or both of those things, then there really is nothing to talk about. But people who believe neither should remember that if they are debating the issue at all, they must be there to debate it, which means that existence does exist, and that they are aware of the debate, so consciousness also exists.

The human brain is capable of all sorts of mental activities such as dreaming, hallucinating, imagining, wishing etc. and “believing”. Obviously, believing exists.

Knowing is also one of those activities. Knowing in this question’s context is not the same as believing.

What we call knowledge can be objective or subjective. Objective means that the knowledge can be validated or supported by evidence of the senses or by a credible secondary source. Subjective means that it is not validated by evidence of the senses or a credible secondary source.

Subjective thought or ideas is what many people call “beliefs”.

Beliefs are like opinions. Everybody has them, but that does not make them valid (or valuable).

In order to be objective, an idea must be true. In order to be true, and idea must correspond to a fact in reality. In order to be a fact, something must actually exist in reality.

Regarding the existence of God. If there is a thing in reality that is God, and if we can know that it is a fact, it must leave evidence of itself and we must be able to discover that evidence. If no such evidence exists, then there is no God. If evidence might exist, but we do not have the sensory or technical means to discover it, then we can not speculate that God exists until we discover some of that evidence. In order to have a theory, or hypothesis of God, we must first at least have a scrap of evidence. The only evidence of God is the left over stories (retold in many ways in different places) of the Ancients, long before there was writing or even complex conventions of language, before they had even discovered epistemology. It was their way of explaining their sense of mystery about reality before there was science to explain reality. By my epistemological standards, that is not credible evidence.

Regarding Faith. Put on a blindfold and cross the freeway at rush hour and have faith that you will not be killed. Until then, it is not really faith that you are talking about. Faith for many people that I know who use it in the God context, is merely a way of forgiving one’s self for “just this once” believing something without evidence, much less proof.

Just so you all know. I do not care what you “believe” until or unless it somehow interferes with my private little existence. If you pray, go to church, take communion etc. those are all OK with me. It is only when some folks take their “beliefs” and turn them into public policy that I get a little irritated.

@josie

AWESOME. Thanks for being so thorough.

Although you stated that If we are going to know anything, we have to assume that there is in fact something to know (reality), and that we in fact can know it (that we possess consciousness). If you choose not to believe either or both of those things, then there really is nothing to talk about. I want to make a couple points. First, “we have to assume” means just that…we’re assuming that it’s so. And also, yes as you point out, the counter is that there’s nothing to know.

At that point, there is no argument if you are approaching an issue from an epistemological standpoint. The fact that we have a method for determining how we know things doesn’t speak to whether we know them. I’m fine with considering things using various models. My concern is much like the question – stating that you don’t believe that something is a belief, and yet the way you approach it doesn’t really provide a way for you to claim you know it…there’s something off about the model, and you’re using assumptions that need to be recognized. That’s the danger of a lot of religion, of dogma, of politics…of a lot of stuff.

In an old *Broadway musical, Robert Morse sings a song to his mirror; I Believe in You.

*How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

I believe that belief exists, and that people hold certain beliefs strongly.

What many people forget is that “facts” are malleable things. A few years ago we KNEW that there were nine planets, now we’re uncertain just how many there are. A few years ago we KNEW that Netonian physics had all the answers, now even laws of physics have the word “uncertainty” as part of their name. A few years ago we KNEW that the smallest division of matter was an atom, now we don’t even know if there IS a “smallest division of matter.”

People seek certainty, which is the genesis of a lot of what we know, but we will never find certainty outside of belief.

@CaptainHarley

True…but again, as josie laid out…if we’re approaching the issue from an epistemological perspective, we assume there is such a thing as knowing. If we agree on that assumption then we move forward. If it’s something that is problematized by that assumption, then we have to readdress if we’re using the right tool.

It depends what you mean by ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. Some people may describe faith in terms of everyday assumptions, like I may have a form of faith that my house will last the day without collapsing, and in that sense it is impossible to live without faith. Faith in a religious sense more often refers to belief in concepts that would be beyond our grasp if we were to use a strictly rational approach. That type of faith is unnecessary, because if a concept cannot be tested there is no requirement to make a judgement regarding it, and no faith required to believe in that judgement.

@ChazMaz Is that your version of the “no atheists in foxholes” argument? Which god(s) do you think they may call out to?

@iamthemob ”There has been no evidence that supports a better model than that of the “God” hypothesis.”

How can I talk about this? You make a huge assertion while offering no evidence for a god hypothesis. Thus we can’t compare it to any other phenomenological model. In any case, the god hypothesis is not very well defined and thus hard to test. It pretty much means what anyone wants it to mean at the time. Hardly reproducible.

”Also, regardless of the predictability of any model, there is always some element of belief. Unless I understand every aspect of everything told me, and I see it happen in the same way it’s supposed to most of the time it’s happening, I can’t say I know something to be true. And as I said before, the things that I can’t observe I accept as true because I believe in the scientific method generally”

Truth really doesn’t matter to a scientist, at least, as most people think of truth. For a scientist, it’s all about theories, hyptheses and evidence. If the model predicts the evidence, you have a decent; maybe even good model. But you can’t say whether it is truth. Truth is a kind of absolute thing. As we have learned from quantum physics, there are no absolutes. Everything is always up for question; up for a better explanation that fits the evidence. We can’t even be sure that the evidence is reliable. Because of all this, the idea that there is truth seems pretty feeble.

No belief is required. Really. You can remain agnostic about everything at all times. Every model is provisional—open to revision at any time. The idea of truth, it seems to me, is designed to assuage people’s sense of anxiety about the future. If they believe something is true, it comforts them, even though that belief is a chimera.

I’m not sure what you meant with your crack about social science. Perhaps you have the hard scientists’ bias that social science really isn’t science because you have to state everything in terms of probabilities. If that is the case, then I would point out to you that the fundamental nature of the universe seems to be probabilistic.

I think that looking at things in terms of probabilities is probably a good idea. It reminds us about the unreliability of our models and about how distant we are from any certainty that we can find any truth at all. I think hard scientists can be lulled into false certainty—indeed, belief because of the high probability that the predictions of their models will be accurate.

I think that skepticism is more useful to us than belief. At least, that’s my current hypothesis. So far, it has worked well for me. But perhaps someone will show me that truth is excavatable, and I will be able to use belief. Until then, I prefer skepticism.

@kevbo Thanks for the link. I thoroughly enjoyed the article. So you can’t call moon-landing deniers loonies due to the Guardian’s style standards, hey? What loony decided on that rule? Also thanks for the David Foster Wallace quote, which backs up what @iamthemob was getting at in the link in my comment below

@iamthemob I should have given credit where credit is due. It was the discussion in your question on Atheist beliefs that brought this question to mind.

@Neutral What can you know to be true? A lunatic in an insane asylum “knows” that space aliens are patrolling outside the asylum doors constantly seeking a way to slip in and suck his brains out. But everyone else observing him knows something quite different from the lunatic’s reality. Which consciousness is right and which one is really just in an asylum? Could we all be in asylums, seeing what we think is reality, but is all The Matrix?

But great answer anyway for “God is a coca cola bottle.” I loved The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Like you, I put great faith (oops) in the scientific method. But using it, we once believed that the atom was the smallest indivisible particle of matter. Then we found it was actually a system of proton/s neutron/s and electron/s and thought they were the outer limit of matter. Then we discovered that they can be further divided as well. We once believed that Newtonian physics provides an accurate description of the motion of all objects in the Universe. Then we discovered that Newtonian physics works fine in our neck of the woods, but runs amok near incredibly massive objects or at speeds approaching that of light. And then we discovered that while Newtonian physics coupled with Special and General Relativity work fine at the macro level we routinely observe, even they are meaningless at the microscopic level where quantum mechanics takes over. History is littered with things we once knew but now recognize as either completely wrong or incompletely right. And who knows what “truth” will be the next casualty, say of the Grand Unification Theory.

@wundayatta

_You make a huge assertion while offering no evidence for a god hypothesis. _

That’s because you did the same thing. You claim that as evidence grows, the god model will be displaced. This is without showing any evidence of how that has happened so far…

I agree that I made an assertion without the evidence. But that’s because you did the same when you stated the contrary.

@wundayatta I hear what you are saying here, but that doesn’t appear to be consistent with the broad dictionary definition of believe. It seems closer to faith than belief. And I can make up multiple models that agree with observed evidence every bit as well as the God model does. A few even stray closer to falsifiability, by predicting other observations whereas the God model is unfalsifiable and predicts no new observations.

@ChazMaz I don’t believe that I would. But I do believe if I see you coming at me with a pair of bolt cutters I will blow your kneecap off if my 44 magnum is at hand. :-)

@josie Great answer. Thanks.

@Rarebear Very succinctly and elegantly said.

@CaptainHarley I wish I had read that before using the same “facts” above.

@FireMadeFlesh I like your distinction in types of faith. I wouldn’t stay in my house if I didn’t have faith it would keep standing. I live in a ground floor condo in a 4-story building.

@wundayatta wrote: “No belief is required. Really. You can remain agnostic about everything at all times. Every model is provisional—open to revision at any time.”. I maintain that you not only can but should. That doesn’t preclude operating on assumptions drawn from probabilistic consideration. In @Neutral‘s example of tossing a coin in the air from the Earth’s surface, the probality it will fall back to Earth is very high.

@ETpro Thanks. My house is built rather precariously on the side of a steep hill, which is why I chose that as my example.

@FireMadeFlesh I understand that challenge to faith. :-)

@iamthemob I apologize for not explaining my thinking in making that assertion. It is more of the nature of a hypothesis, but one that is based on existing knowledge and logic. I have not looked for evidence to test the hypothesis, but below, I propose a way that one could test it fairly simply.

If two models describe the same thing, then, to the extent that there is more evidence for one model, the other model will become less useful (assuming there is no more evidence for that other model).

People can (and do) ignore evidence, but I think that most people do pay attention to evidence. As more evidence is produced to support various models of the universe, except for the God model, it does not seem like an unreasonable inference to say that the God model will be employed less often. It seems likely that the scientific method will continue to add to our (provisional) knowledge, and therefore the God model will constantly lose more of its utility.

As evidence, I think you might look at the change in number of people who believe in religions with Gods. I’m pretty sure they have been decreasing in favor of both atheism and religions without Gods. I am speculating that this is correlated with the increase in scientific “knowledge.” I put “knowledge” in quotes to indicate its provisionality.

@wundayatta

As more evidence is produced to support various models of the universe, except for the God model, it does not seem like an unreasonable inference to say that the God model will be employed less often

But this is the inherent flaw in your argument. You say that more evidence that supports models other than the god model.

The statistical decline in the number of people who believe in religions with gods speaks to something more like a RELIGION model than a god model. Also, I don’t know where you get these statistics (unfortunately, you are asserting that there has been evidence that the god model is being replaced by a better model…in this case then, the onus is on you to point to specific evidence that it is so, and that requires facts not assertions, and inclusion of the source of these facts).

Unfortunately, speculation about correlation is also far from a demonstration of causality. Evidence needs to link one thing in a causal way to another. In this case, the increase in scientific knowledge about the universe with a decline in the percentage of people who believe that there is some form of god (indeed, I think you’d have to show the link between the new knowledge and the increase in percentage of people who USED to believe in god and don’t any more – this would control for people who don’t believe because of something terrible that happened that they blame god for, and therefore abandoned him. Such people also may be more willing to accept science as a replacement than a baseline of people, which calls into question the validity of the acceptance of knowledge as proof because they accept it based on irrelevant emotional reasons.).

How also do you factor in atheists who believe that there might be a god but are waiting for proof? I don’t think we can take these people into account either way (not that they DON’T count, of course) because they are not on either side…and arguably are waiting for science to prove something it’s tools can’t do at this point or potentially any…

Therefore, you have to show that (1) the model is better than the god model for providing evidence demonstrating a causal link between the nature of the universe and the reasons or causes for that nature; (2) the people understand the evidence as showing such a causal link; (3) that they are taking into account only those factors, and you’ve controlled for other causes for shifts in perspective; (4) that the model being replaced is the god model and not any other; and (5) that it is actually being replaced, and is not simply offering an equally likely explanation. If not, science is as a wildly unlikely explanation for the big “why” of existence as a god is.

“For is it not possible that science as we know it today, or a “search for the truth” in the style of traditional philosophy, will create a monster? Is it not possible that an objective approach that frowns upon personal connections between the entities examined will harm people, turn them into miserable, unfriendly, self-righteous mechanisms without charm or humour? “Is it not possible,” asks Kierkegaard, “that my activity as an objective [or critico-rational] observer of nature will weaken my strength as a human being?” I suspect the answer to many of these questions is affirmative and I believe that a reform of the sciences that makes them more anarchic and more subjective (in Kierkegaard’s sense) is urgently needed.”
—- Paul Feyerabend

Uncomfortable Science

SSK

@Neutral

Interesting…what point are you trying to make with that?

The only thing that is certain, is uncertainty. All models are wrong. Some maybe useful, but nonetheless.

To answer the question of the thread, basically, there is no such thing as truth(belief). There is only believing(trust), in the truth(belief). Since all that is certain, is uncertainty, then believing(trust) in the truth(belief), is based on uncertainty, and thus, irrelevant.

The problem with the scientific method is the problem of knowledge (epistemology). The limits of language; the complex nature of the reception of knowledge; the social constructedness of knowledge and the political and ideological nature of research.

@Neutral

I don’t think it discredits the scientific method. I think that it just shows that it’s most useful for certain things, and is based on it’s own assumptions.

Well, that’s what I wrote before, “All models are wrong. Some maybe useful, but nonetheless.” Still no certainties accept that it’s uncertain.

If you check out all the problems presented, you might not even think it’s useful at all.

“In its widest definition, reality includes everything that is and has being, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible.”

So, anything goes. :)

@iamthemob I’m sorry, but the “god model” is not the null hypothesis.

@wundayatta

I never said it was.

@iamthemob A hypothesis is always compared against a null hypothesis. When you write, “you have to show that (1) the model is better than the god model for providing evidence demonstrating…” you are demonstrating a misunderstanding of how science works. I am not comparing my hypothetical model to the God model. I am comparing my model to no model at all.

If my model has value, it will make better predictions than some model that randomly pulls predictions out of a hat. The God model must also be tested against the null hypothesis. If there is any value to either model, then the predictions of the model will be more accurate than the random prediction scenario by a statistically significant amount.

The burden is not on me to show my model is better than yours. Nor is the burden on you to show that your model is better than mine. The burden is on both of us to show our models are better than no model at all. The default model is no model, not the God model. It is the no model to which any model must be compared.

Do you understand? When you said my model needed to be compared to the God model and I had to provide proof that my model was better, you were turning the God model into the null hypothesis. That’s not science.

I understand. Again, the problem is that there’s no way to test any of the models against each other.

It would be clearer if you could state what a null hypothesis is in this case, and how it is different from any model which might be considered a no-God model.

When you test a hypothesis, you test it against doing nothing. That why it’s called the null hypothesis. So if I have an idea that this pill will help you with your cough, I have to test it against the null hypothesis, which is that the pill will do nothing different than if you had not given it at all.

A theory is an idea about how something works. From the theory, you generate ideas so you can test some of the different aspects of the theory. These ideas are called hypotheses. If the theory is correct, we would expect a certain result from the hypothesis. To test the hypothesis, we compare it to doing nothing at all, and see if the result is different from doing nothing.

God is probably best considered a theory. To test the theory, we need to look at something that we would expect to happen if the theory works. You can pick your own example since you know better than I what to expect. But the obvious one for me, is to see what happens after we die. So I hypothesize that there is life after death.

The null hypothesis is not that there is nothing after death. It is that saying that there is life after death is no different from saying nothing at all. Well, sort of. We can get into psychological effects and much more, but this is just to give you the idea.

Ok, how do we test the hypothesis. Well, you could measure the amount of life in a dead person by the usual measures of life. We’d no doubt find there is no life after death.

So we go back to theory, and theory says that corporeal life ends, but another, incorporeal life begins. Ok, let’s test that. How do we measure incorporeal life? So people come up with all kinds of weird instruments which are probably besides the point. So hang with me here. In the end, we say we can’t measure life after death. That means we can’t test the hypothesis which means we can not find any evidence to suggest the hypothesis is anything different from the null hypothesis.

You go through all the things people say about God, and what you will find is that none of them can be tested because none of them can be measured. So far, then, the God theory does not offer us any thing useful.

Unless, of course, you measure psychological effects, which are possible to measure. Then you might try to test the idea that people who believe in God do better at something. Say mental health. Well, we can’t measure belief, so we look for a proxy measure. Usually people will say that church attendance is the best proxy measure for belief we can find.

So our hypothesis is that people who attend church do better psychologically. The null hypothesis is that attending church has no effect on psychological health. Then you measure psychological health of the two groups and compare them to see if there is a statistically significant difference between them, based on the psychological measure we used.

Gotta go now, but ask questions or whatever if you need clarification or have some objections.

@wundayatta Okay – that’s pretty much what I was saying all along. So…yeah, I agree.

My only objection is that, much of the time, it’s this sort of reasoning (this last post was very clear) that can prevent people on different ends of the “God” spectrum from having a productive discussion about belief – as much as dogmatic adherence to “My God says so”-style arguments can.