What is Belief?

By: Ira Allen

The Free Online Dictionary, which collects definitions from a wide variety of other dictionaries on the Web, describes a belief as "something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons."

Okay, that’s fine, but what does it mean to accept something as true? We may all feel we know what accepting something as true means, but do we really? Can you explain it in a way that makes sense? Without running endlessly through a series of dictionary definitions (a search from which you eventually learn only that everything points to something else, that the only thing that can stop you from cycling endlessly through an increasingly meaningless list of words is onomatopoeia), I would like to suggest that "accepting something as true" has a lot to do with action.

Suppose you tell me that it is pouring outside, raining cats and dogs. When I accept your statement as true, I may put on a raincoat or grab an umbrella before leaving the house. Or suppose I read in a book that my dog has feelings and accept this as true. I will probably not shout at him or pull his ears or do other mean things to him. These are, of course, simple examples, but they point to an important principle: belief implies action. Even if I do not put on a raincoat or treat my dog with kindness, if I believe what I have heard or read—if I accept those words as true—my actions will reflect this in some way. In the first example, I’ll walk outside with a happy sense of expectation, if I like rain. In the second example, I’ll take satisfaction from shouting at my dog, knowing that I’ve made someone else feel miserable, if that’s the kind of person I am.

In both cases, without action of some sort, even just the mental action of adjusting my attitude, I haven’t really accepted a new piece of information as true. This might be a less Christian version of the famous Bible verse stating that "faith without works is dead." As in the Christian version, the idea here is that belief is, ultimately, not something that simply happens to us. It is something that we do.

It may seem weird to think of mental action as "doing," but if you’ve ever worried real hard about something—how to make rent or pay off a credit card bill, for example—and felt tired afterwards, you know how strenuous mental activity actually can be. And believing may be one of the most strenuous mental activities out there.

But now I’m just sounding ridiculous, right? I mean, what would make belief so difficult? The answer to that question starts to get at two of the most common and hotly contested topics in the Western philosophical tradition: ontology, the study of existence or being, and epistemology, the attempt to answer the question of how we know what we know.

The thing that makes belief difficult is precisely the fact that we do not know anything. At first glance, that statement may seem a bit silly, too, but give it a minute. Then ask yourself what it is that you absolutely, solidly know. Another buzzle.com columnist has suggested that he "knows" his name. Do you know your name?

I won’t try to convince you that you don’t know your name, but I would ask you to keep this knowledge in mind as you consider what it means to know something. What is knowledge? Turning again to the Free Online Dictionary, we see that to know means to "perceive directly; grasp in the mind with clarity or certainty." Alternately, it can also mean to "discern the character or nature of." Now, think of your name, which you know. Can you perceive it directly? Can you grasp it in your mind with certainty? Even if you can picture the letters in your mind, what is it that makes those letters not simple a jumble of alphabet chunks? What makes them your name? Can you discern the entire character of your name?

If you are anything like me and pretty much most other humans, your answer will probably be "of course not." After all, what makes your name your name is the fact that it has meaning. That pile of letters stops being a pile of letters once they have significance for you and for other people. In a sense, a network of social relations is what makes your name what it is. Can you picture that network?

Now, go one step further. Even if you can picture that network—all your cousins and aunts and friends and so forth—with clarity, can you picture the associations each of them has when he or she says your name? Can you discern the nature of the feelings your sister has when she uses your name? How about your grandfather? All those feelings are part of what you lay claim to knowing when you say you know your name is Alex or Fred or Glenda or Momo!

As you can see, it’s pretty easy to keep expanding this picture. We could keep going out until we get to a point where even thinking becomes painful, but we won’t. At this point, the role of belief should start to become more clear. We never know anything all the way, so to speak, and belief stands in for our lack of knowledge. Even where our actual knowledge of a concept or thing stops, we can accept it as true—whatever it is. This ability to consciously accept as true, to believe, might be termed the human condition.