Do you believe what you believe?

Belief

I've often wondered why people believe the things they believe. Did they decide to believe a claim and later stay with that belief without necessarily having to find out whether it is true, or do they simply hold on to the belief till it is disproved? Maybe for some, they believe a proposition to be true and adds 'logic' and 'supporting evidence' and disregards 'unsupporting evidence' in order to substantiate that belief?

People used to believe that the world is flat and that belief stayed for a long time before it was found to be untrue. However there are certain claims that would be hard to prove or disprove. Examples of these are the existence of God, gods, dieties, ghosts, afterlife, rebirth or even ultimate reality. The agnostics believe that those claims will not be able to prove or disprove and so they do not believe. This view is not to be confused with the atheist who simply do not believe in the existence of god.

Then there is another group who believe that there is no purpose in existence and that it is without intrinsic value. They assert that there is no objective morality in existence and thus claim that it has also no intrinsic higher meaning. They therefore claim that there is no reasonable proof that there is a higher ruler or creator. These nihilist view is opposite to the Christian faith.

The Christians are monotheist. To them the scriptures in the Bible is authoritative as they believe them to be God's words. The death and resurrection of Jesus are considered to represent the possibility of eternal life after death in this human life, Some say that there is no God as you cannot see one, but others will tell you that since you cannot see your brain therefore you don't have one. The believers will tell you that they know, the way that believers know. However a sincere believer in the flat world theory does not know that the world is flat.

We have been told not to listen to rumour, but sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between rumour and truth. When a statement is repeated once too often, people starts seeing some truth in it - no smoke without fire. Traditions are also easily believed, and so are scriptures of the ancient. We tend to believe certain things based on our logical thinking and especially if it is biased towards our accepted consideration.

So what do we believe? How to believe? Belief is afterall a psychological statement for a proposition to be true. Belief is knowledge only if the belief is true. As we all know, our understanding of the world around us, and more importantly within us, comes through our six senses; the eyes (sight), the ears (sound), the nose (smell), the skin (touch), the tongue (taste) and the mind (thinking). However we know there is this optical illusion and the limitation of the eyes being able only to see within the colour spectrum and not beyond, like the infrared or the ultraviolet. The working ears can hear a frequency of between 20 to 20000 hertz. Can we say there is no sound beyond these frequencies? Our ability to understand the things around us is limited to what we have learned so far and we can thus be biased towards things we have no inkling about. So how convinced are we about what we believe?

To illustrate this, let me quote from a book called 'The Black Swan'. Before the discovery of Australia, people of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists, but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single black bird.

Now, what do you believe? Do you still believe what you believe? Or are you waiting for the Black Swan?

Seah YK