What is a Belief?

I have a great distaste for the noun ‘belief’ and the verb ‘to believe’ and I attempt to eradicate their usage in my own thinking as often as possible. The dictionary (in this case Wiktionary) defines a belief as ‘a mental acceptance of a claim as truth.’ I define a Belief (and similarly a Superstition) as ‘an abstract concept that has validity in personal reality out of personal choice and not out of evidence.’

A belief tends to mean that no real proof of something exists and therefore the mind creates an abstract concept of something in order to get an understanding of it and to take it into account when going about activities. The great, great danger of beliefs comes from their very illusory nature. You effectively pretend that the imagined concept actually exists or proves true. This works fine at a lower level such as choosing whether to believe that someone you know has told you the truth or not because very often you will eventually find out if they have been honest with you. People who continually deal in falsehoods generally, eventually, give themselves away. In a small community of people where interdependent relationships have greater influence on the ability to function well, fabricating falsehoods causes difficulty in the long-term through creating a bad and untrustworthy reputation, for example, the boy who cried wolf in Aesop’s famous fable. The basic premise here lies in believing someone until or unless some form of evidence proves otherwise. In the past, the breaking of trust in highly interconnected societies with little anonymity would create such terrible results (a bad reputation, punishment and perhaps eventual exclusion from the group) so that duping someone normally had much more serious long-term consequences for the deceiver than for the trusting person. However, this mechanism tends to break down when no proof exists, or will ever likely exist, to prove if a person’s statement is true or false.

Natural Gullibility

Some anthropologists speculate that human gullibility came about as a consequence of a survival instinct. Due to the large size of our brains human babies get born very early in comparison to the development of other animals in the womb and so they end up unusually helpless and generally lack many of the primal instincts of other mammals. Consequently they have to learn the dangers of life from parents, grandparents, adults, siblings and elder peers. We trust easily because we normally make our first sincere bonds with our parents and grandparents, who normally look out for us very carefully (or as carefully as they can within their own limitations). Those children that follow good advice without question have a greater probability of surviving into adulthood and so this characteristic gets bred ever stronger into the breed. This makes us gullible to the statements, guidance and beliefs of other people, until experience and proof otherwise shows us to take care over trusting what others tell us.

Unprovable Beliefs

Powerful human imagination, deep seated survival instincts and the need to attempt to understand, control and predict the nature of our lives led humans to construct beliefs about this that and the other where proof one way or the other did not exist, especially in pre-scientific cultures. These beliefs often became superstitions and had meaning only because the individuals involved gave them meaning and chose to make decisions in accordance with those beliefs.

Somewhere along the line some people chose to hold on fast to their beliefs even against evidence to the contrary. Even worse the concept of belief became a substitute for wishing and hoping and it also became more powerful than either a wish or a hope. At least with wishes and hopes some grounding in reality exists with the recognition that fulfilment can just as easily not happen as happen and the element of giving up control to other forces out of our control or dependent upon chance remains. However, with the more common use of belief this attachment to the reality of things gets cut off and we end up with a purely abstract concept but upon which many people choose to depend and live their lives by. Such a thing can only lead to disappointment and even foolishness. I hear such people saying, ‘I believe I can do it,’ ‘It’s gonna happen for me – I just gotta believe,’ ‘You can do anything, if you just believe,’ ‘I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky,’ etc. Well, in all honestly, probably not. Feckless wishing rarely amounts to anything. Only dumb luck can fulfil such beliefs and that occurs sufficiently close to never that I would never adopt it as a tactic for doing well in life.

Get Real – Make and Test a Theory

Situations exist where, due to a lack of information, we need to decide how to deal with things and to move forward with a minimum of risk, stress and bother. How do we deal with those things? We deal with them by creating theories. A theory creates a model or supposition of how something might work, or might have worked, or might work in the future. A theory differs from a belief because we accept that we don’t know all of the information. The big difference between the two comes from the fact that we need to prove a theory wrong in order to discount it, whereas with a belief we don’t have to prove it right or wrong. A belief just exists as an abstract concept, which may or may not hinder us. It exists as a mental concept that we chose to work around or work with but of which we generally do not question the validity.

Alternatively, when we construct a theory we accept that it might prove invalid and so we seek out evidence to test the theory. That might come as experiential evidence, statistical evidence or new facts that come to light. We take a scientific approach to the issue with an attitude of; ‘the jury is out until all the evidence comes in’. The wonderful thing that I love about theories comes from the personal detachment to the result involved. A belief feels much more personal, perhaps because we feel ludicrous if the belief proves false and since so many beliefs hang on nothing then the chances of getting caught out as a holder of a ludicrous belief always remains high. A theory feels very much different because you test the theory and not yourself. Thus if the theory proves false or inadequate then you either discard it, adjust it or create a new theory and go on to test that in the same way. This detachment really proves vital in staying calm, relaxed, stress free and in control of the process of finding out what works and what doesn’t work.

So for example, imagine you see someone on the street that you know and with whom you have a good acquaintance with (but are not strong friends with) and for some reason this person ignores you. You might easily come up with a belief that this person doesn’t like you, that you have always felt unsure of them and this just proves it etc. If you then hold this as a belief then it becomes true to you – it becomes a fact for you and you will need a mighty amount of evidence to the contrary (which you now have a vested interest in not finding, or ignoring or discounting in order to prove your belief and yourself right) to change your mind. As a result you ignore the person the next time you see them or behave in a cold an unfriendly way and before you know it you really don’t have a good relationship with this person.

Alternatively, after the first occurrence, you could instead change that initial belief into a theory. You could say to yourself, ‘Hmm, Jane ignored me and that makes me wonder if she doesn’t like me but what else could that behaviour mean? Maybe she didn’t see me, or maybe she had so many other things to focus on so that I went unnoticed. In order to test this theory I have to gather evidence. The next time I meet Jane I will ask her about it.’ And so you ask and you find out that on that day and at that place Jane had no idea that you were there. It might occur that Jane had had a bad piece of news and felt totally absorbed by it or some other thing that would cause an appearance of aloofness and distance. Creating the theory helps keep some detachment from the emotions that can build up in this situation, which could otherwise prove destructive. Testing the theory proves the ideas about the other person’s behaviour. In the example given it can mean that the relationship goes along unharmed. Sometimes we need to gather more evidence. The person might say that they have no issue but perhaps their body language or some other clue leaves you in doubt. To test the theory further you create a circumstance i.e. experiment, to give an opportunity to gather more data. Eventually you gather enough information and evidence to draw a conclusion (but preferably not a belief!).

Whereas the belief causes you to conjure up an unproven and abstract ‘fact’ the theory causes you to investigate and research and to prove, as far as possible, the validity of the idea. We test ideas rather than ourselves and so we remain detached. All good scientists should follow this method of creating and proving and disproving theories. Things go wrong when a scientist becomes too emotionally attached to a theory and begins to hold it as a personal belief, this becomes especially true if the scientist also has an ego that finds it difficult to accept external proof of mistakes or misapprehensions, sadly, a very common attribute of most humans.

Take Care about What You Believe

So altogether I avoid holding beliefs and the process of believing. Whilst sometimes I find it necessary to go ahead and take decisions and action on the basis of incomplete knowledge I reserve reliance upon believing someone else to minor things that I can probably prove true or false if necessary or else where an actual falsehood has a very low impact upon me. I don’t rely upon unprovable beliefs for depending on how to live as they tend to make me mentally sick, especially when those beliefs clearly do not align with or predict situations in reality. I eliminate beliefs from my own thinking and language whenever I can and when other people talk of beliefs I tend to hold the validity of their conclusions in great doubt. I might see if a testable theory can derive from what they say, which, if I have sufficient interest, I can go about proving or disproving. Often I feel sympathy for the trouble they will likely cause themselves in attempting to make reality fit their beliefs. Generally speaking, the more highly abstract our thinking, the more detached from reality we become and the more detached from reality we become the easier it becomes to feel the negative emotions that spring up when reality doesn’t meet our expectations and desires.

I know that controversy often accompanies deeply held beliefs and criticism of them. You are welcome to hold any belief that you like, I just advise that for making solid progress in life that you depend, wherever possible, upon the controllable, repeatable, predictable, and robust methods that exist. You do this anyway most of the time without even thinking about it. I advise you to expand that capacity as much as you can.

For example, when you take a trip in one of the most amazing inventions ever created – the aeroplane – then you put your dependency for getting to your destination into technology, derived from scientific research and made practical by engineers, with exceedingly high levels of control, repeatability, predictability and reliability and upon operational procedures and safeguards proven to lower the risk of danger and to increase the probability of success to outstandingly high levels. Chance still plays its part but a very minor part and you can ascribe to that element your own personal beliefs. I suggest that in your life you base your well-being in life upon as many dependable and predictable technologies, methods and procedures as you can and that you reduce as far as reasonably possible the need to depend upon unknowable and uncontrollable elements.

We can change beliefs into theories quite easily simply by instead of saying, “I believe in x.” to, “I theorise that x holds true in reality.” Next you have to devise tests to prove the theory and that requires some intelligent thinking and a certain methodology that gets detailed in the follow up article “The Scientific Method.”