Types of belief
April 21st 2009 23:20
I've written about this in the past, but here it is again.
Catholics have a verbal formula called the Apostles' Creed. It's used at baptisms, and, depending on your church, sometimes as part of masses and other ceremonies.
One version on the Vatican website goes:
A verbal commitment has many possible consequences. You could be burned or thrown to the lions for your declaration. You could be held to have entered a contract in a court of law.
But it's always seemed to me, and I think it must seem to Catholic faithful, that there is more to belief than saying the words, just as there's a difference between an actor reciting lines and understanding or feeling them. In fact, part of the reason you declare "I believe" is to encourage yourself (and others) to believe, to inculcate this tendency, and to make the words second nature, somewhat like the affirmation slogans of self-help gurus and Amway meetings. (Cf John Cottingham's remarks about Blaise Pascal -- the praxis, the doing, comes first, not the belief.)
So I've for a long time thought that there's different dimensions to belief, or different meanings.
-- Firstly, there is the belief to do with words, what you're prepared to assert in a community, what you're willing to raise your hand and be counted for. And it can be a very abstract, intellectual sort of thing. This type of belief lends itself to talk of justification and probability, and language might be essential for it.
Do I believe that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066? Well, it makes very little difference to me, and of course it could be false, but yes I do believe that, I'm prepared to trust mainstream statements and commit myself.
-- Secondly, there is belief to do with behaviour and action. In the dark of the morning I can rise from my bed, walk to the door, and turn on the light-switch -- my hand believes the switch is at a particular location -- but my mouth couldn't tell you. Or your mind might say that you're perfectly safe as you lean against a glass window in Centre Point Tower and stare down -- but your body breaks out in a sweat.
This type lends itself to talk of "function" and the "ascription" of belief based on inputs and outputs. And perhaps this type can be applied to creatures without language -- perhaps you can say that a fish believes a predator's nearby.
-- Thirdly, and more controversially, there may be belief to do with conscious experience.
On the one hand, there are perspectival "beliefs". For example, we view the view as tinged by our emotions -- if we're happy, the world becomes a happy place; if we're depressed, we're more alive to the sadness.
On the other hand, there are the sorts of things that phenomenologists claim. For example, Edith Stein (On the problem of empathy, 1917), if I'm understanding her properly, might say that every act of perception presupposes a self -- if I look at an object, I also judge it in relation to me; in this sense the self is "given" to us in perception.
If this is a fair way to categorize, where do you place belief in God?
Clearly it can fit into the first category -- religious people profess belief all the time.
But there is also bodily belief. The avowed atheist who prays to God in times of distress. Or the avowed churchgoer who treats religion as a formality.
And there may be phenomenological belief. For instance, the sense that God's watching. The argument from design might be less to do with deduction and reasoning than with simply appealing to people's experience. "Look at the world, and don't you feel that there's a God."
So Mary Warnock finds in Sartre's Being and Time "a genuinely existential method of argument" -- "we are asked not to agree to a proposition, but to experience, in imagination, a familiar emotion. And while we are under the impact of it, we are asked whether we do not therefore necesssarily believe".
Notes
-- For God without phenomenological belief, compare St John Rivers in Jane Eyre, who acts in cold duty, or the cleric in Bergman's "Winter Light", who stubbornly persists going through the motions, although he tastes the dust of it.
Catholics have a verbal formula called the Apostles' Creed. It's used at baptisms, and, depending on your church, sometimes as part of masses and other ceremonies.
One version on the Vatican website goes:
| I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen. |
What I find interesting is that you're asked to declare. You verbally commit yourself.
In contrast, many other ceremonies involve not a statement of belief, but a promise to do this or that. -- "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." -- "On my honour I promise that I will do my duty to do my best to God and the Queen, to help other people, and to keep the Scout Law."
***
A verbal commitment has many possible consequences. You could be burned or thrown to the lions for your declaration. You could be held to have entered a contract in a court of law.
But it's always seemed to me, and I think it must seem to Catholic faithful, that there is more to belief than saying the words, just as there's a difference between an actor reciting lines and understanding or feeling them. In fact, part of the reason you declare "I believe" is to encourage yourself (and others) to believe, to inculcate this tendency, and to make the words second nature, somewhat like the affirmation slogans of self-help gurus and Amway meetings. (Cf John Cottingham's remarks about Blaise Pascal -- the praxis, the doing, comes first, not the belief.)
So I've for a long time thought that there's different dimensions to belief, or different meanings.
-- Firstly, there is the belief to do with words, what you're prepared to assert in a community, what you're willing to raise your hand and be counted for. And it can be a very abstract, intellectual sort of thing. This type of belief lends itself to talk of justification and probability, and language might be essential for it.
Do I believe that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066? Well, it makes very little difference to me, and of course it could be false, but yes I do believe that, I'm prepared to trust mainstream statements and commit myself.
-- Secondly, there is belief to do with behaviour and action. In the dark of the morning I can rise from my bed, walk to the door, and turn on the light-switch -- my hand believes the switch is at a particular location -- but my mouth couldn't tell you. Or your mind might say that you're perfectly safe as you lean against a glass window in Centre Point Tower and stare down -- but your body breaks out in a sweat.
This type lends itself to talk of "function" and the "ascription" of belief based on inputs and outputs. And perhaps this type can be applied to creatures without language -- perhaps you can say that a fish believes a predator's nearby.
-- Thirdly, and more controversially, there may be belief to do with conscious experience.
On the one hand, there are perspectival "beliefs". For example, we view the view as tinged by our emotions -- if we're happy, the world becomes a happy place; if we're depressed, we're more alive to the sadness.
On the other hand, there are the sorts of things that phenomenologists claim. For example, Edith Stein (On the problem of empathy, 1917), if I'm understanding her properly, might say that every act of perception presupposes a self -- if I look at an object, I also judge it in relation to me; in this sense the self is "given" to us in perception.
***
If this is a fair way to categorize, where do you place belief in God?
Clearly it can fit into the first category -- religious people profess belief all the time.
But there is also bodily belief. The avowed atheist who prays to God in times of distress. Or the avowed churchgoer who treats religion as a formality.
And there may be phenomenological belief. For instance, the sense that God's watching. The argument from design might be less to do with deduction and reasoning than with simply appealing to people's experience. "Look at the world, and don't you feel that there's a God."
So Mary Warnock finds in Sartre's Being and Time "a genuinely existential method of argument" -- "we are asked not to agree to a proposition, but to experience, in imagination, a familiar emotion. And while we are under the impact of it, we are asked whether we do not therefore necesssarily believe".
Notes
-- For God without phenomenological belief, compare St John Rivers in Jane Eyre, who acts in cold duty, or the cleric in Bergman's "Winter Light", who stubbornly persists going through the motions, although he tastes the dust of it.
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