Belief
The Difference Between Belief and Fact
To believe in something is not the same as knowing something.
The concept of belief implies that there is an opposite to belief, disbelief. Not everyone will believe something is true, but all sane and rational people will acknowledge an observable fact. The problem is that life forces us to operate with both beliefs and facts, and we tend to lose the discipline to distinguish between them. We learn to operate on probabilities. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow, and barring some catastrophe in the cosmos, it will. The mechanism of the solar system will cause us to perceive the sun rising tomorrow, so long as it keeps functioning as it has in the recent past. The mechanism is fact. The belief part is that it will keep functioning. The probability in this case is so high that we blur the belief and the fact into one.
While facts are always facts (unless we have mistaken a belief for a fact, or you're talking with certain philosophers), beliefs always carry with them some probability of being or becoming facts, ranging from very low to very high.
My example was deliberately simple, a case where we can actually observe an event to confirm whether it is a fact or not. but many of the things we deal with in our lives every day aren't. Many of our most important decisions are based on beliefs that are not likely to be proven or disproven.
It's a common error of human beings to allow belief, to allow a mental construct accepted on faith, to become so important, so obsessive, that it is taken as the same thing as fact. There are many emotional reasons why a person might be driven to do this, but it still remains that any belief is purely mental, whatever it's origin, and the mind can be mistaken.
This means that all beliefs have as part of them an implied doubt. Facts, on the other hand, cannot be doubted, they are observably real. A corollary that follows is that facts never apply to the future, only to the past. Once we have observed something to happen, it is a fact, immutable, but we must always allow at least the tiniest possibility that the future may not be the same as the past.
When belief is assumed to be fact, when this mistake is made by a mind clouded by a motivation to assume belief as fact, that belief is considered beyond doubt, just as is a fact.
Beliefs can be, and often are, wrong.
The Need to be Correct
Over time, as beliefs become accepted as facts, we begin to operate from them with emotion. If we want to believe something, the less provable it is, the more emotional energy we will put into convincing others to share our belief. The human psyche constantly works to validate itself, to confirm its sanity. When we have lost the difference between belief and fact, this need becomes acute, since our minds do not tolerate inconsistency of facts very well.
If I have accepted a literal interpretation of the Genesis story as a fact, I can't simultaneously accept the scientific evidence of the origin of the universe. I must choose between the two, or experience a schizophrenic reality. What puzzles me is that the simple solution to the dilemma, to keep the facts and apply doubt to the rest, adjusting the probability along the way, eludes so many people. They cling to the belief as fact until the evidence is overwhelming that it is mistaken.
The Danger of Belief
Beliefs beyond doubt are inherently dangerous. They can be dangerous because they are often acted upon as though they were facts.
Many of us laughed when a few years back, the story first appeared of a group in California who claimed to be waiting on the passing comet Hale-Bop to whisk them away to a better place. These people, intelligent and apparently rational in every other way, accepted as fact that a "companion" spacecraft was travelling alongside the comet. Then, when the comet reached its nadir with Earth, we were horrified when the Heaven's Gate group committed mass suicide. I'm hard headed enough about the uncertainty of belief to admit the slightest possibility that their spirits really did travel to a spaceship, yet I am sufficiently uncertain to be unwilling to end my life to take that chance.
So long as the people who do bizarre things based on belief don't harm others, I don't see that I should deny them the freedom to express themselves, even in death. I might talk to them about the nature of belief and try to help them distinguish belief from fact, but in the end, if they refuse to make the distinction, they'll act as they feel they must.
The bigger problem arises when beliefs accepted as facts are the basis for individuals and groups harming others. When individuals harbor beliefs, accepted as facts, which cause them to do violent acts to others, they are often labeled insane, and as such are separated away from those they would harm, in institutions or jails.
But even the most unlikely beliefs have a tendency to spread from person to person over time. The more people who claim a belief as a fact, the more new people are persuaded to accept it as a fact. This is especially true of beliefs that seek to explain the unexplainable, or which fill a gap in a person's knowledge and understanding. Thus if I don't know why there is night and day, and someone tells me the sun revolves around the earth, I might accept it as a very likely possibility. Over time, I might come to accept this belief as a fact.
Cultures, societies, and organizations adopt beliefs when a majority of the members, or those in power want to achieve a uniformity of understanding. This need for homogeneity and validation of beliefs is a key part of our self-esteem. The need to validate our own beliefs often becomes so strong that we fear those who do not believe the same way. And fear can all too easily become hatred.
If I lived in the 16th century and believed that the sun revolved around the earth, I would have been in the mainstream, and nobody would have questioned my thinking. If I were Copernicus, and proposed that in fact the earth revolves around the sun, I would be a non-believer. Until a way could be developed to prove scientifically that my belief was actually a fact, it would still be merely a competing belief, and even a heresy.
People and organizations are notoriously reluctant to give up beliefs, even when proven to be wrong. The Catholic Church recently forgave Galileo for supporting Copernicus' astronomical theories with his experiments and observations, hundreds of years after the once radical belief had become a proven, observable fact. Better late than never, I suppose, but many others weren't as lucky as Galileo, who escaped torture and death by being well known, having powerful allies, and finally recanting his assertion. Who knows what modern day beliefs will be completely disproven in years to come?
Religious groups, since they exist to explain the unexplainable, are necessarily based almost entirely on beliefs rather than on facts. As such, they have high potential to focus and crystallize the conflicts of their beliefs with the beliefs of rival individuals and groups into fear, and ultimately hatred. In order to validate the correctness of their way of thinking and living, such groups instinctively declare all other ways to be wrong and immoral. Feeling they have the moral sanction of the group, the more fanatical members will often be driven to violence.
The deliberate harm that humans do to one another is often driven by acceptance of belief as fact. If I believe that my ethnic group is superior to all others fervently enough, it becomes fact for me, and it allows me to treat the other groups as inferior. Such misguided belief has caused much misery in the world. The institution of slavery and the Holocaust are both examples of the result of otherwise rational people accepting a belief as fact, then acting upon it. These acts were sanctioned by the moral authorities of their day, both religious and secular.
We look back upon such things with horror, but such mistreatment of people is alive and well in the world today. We hear every year of another attempt at genocide somewhere in the world. The Serbian rampage through Kosovo is merely the most recent, and certainly not the last.
Closer to home, we hear of individual acts that we cannot understand at first. When Matthew Shephard, the young gay man, was tortured to death in Wyoming, the same mechanism was at work. The killers had come to believe that gay people are inherently evil, and the belief had become fact. Since they had the moral sanction of such belief from large numbers of other people, particularly those in fundamentalist religious groups, the fact became fear, and the fear became hatred. And an innocent person died.
Another case occurred over the July 4th weekend, when a man named Benjamin Smith went on a murder spree, killing people simply because they were of different races than himself.
What Can We Do?
What can we do as individuals, other than lament the tragedies in the world?
First, we can take responsibility for our own minds, and develop the discipline to distinguish fact from belief. We can learn to feel comfortable with doubt. When we are comfortable with doubt, our need to convince others of the rightness of our beliefs is greatly diminished. What was once a need to be correct becomes instead a thirst for ideas. We are no longer thrown into the cognitive dissonance that forces us to choose between alternatives.
When we have mastered our own minds, we can influence those around us to do likewise. If we care about making this a better world, we must challenge people to consider the basis of the beliefs they accept as facts. Whether it be our children, our coworkers, our friends, or our relatives, when we recognize the pattern of belief, accepted as fact, turned to fear, become hatred, we have an opportunity to do some good in the world. We can help them to become comfortable with doubt, so that they can lose their need to fear other beliefs. We can help them to develop tolerance, and nip hatred in the bud. Their lives and ours will be better as a result.
A closed mind is a dead mind. Dead minds make people into zombies. And zombies lead meaningless lives.
I'm fond of reggae music. One of my favorite reggae musicians, the late Bob Marley, wrote a line in "Redemption Song" that captures it more poetically:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.
dm 7/11/99
