Given that definition, how much of what we “know” is actually just “believed”? I’ve seen Newton’s three laws of motion in action, as it were, but I’d be hard-pressed to provide empirical evidence of evolution or global warming. Hell, Bohr’s atomic model is on par with the Nicene Creed, as far as my personal ability to present empirical evidence is concerned. Covalence and the crucifixion were both presented to me by a trusted authority figure, and I’ve had about equal personal experience with both.

As I was reading this, I started thinking about the meaning of “I believe” and I felt like the floor under me went from being solid to being made of quicksand. The more I thought about “belief,” the murkier it became. There have been a couple of days since, where the word has become completely meaningless to me. It might as well be gibberish. Currently, it’s one of these words that I understand (or feel like I do), as-long-as I don’t think about it too much.

I brought up the example of my arm, because to me, it gets to the heart of the paradox. Sure, I guess I believe that my arm exists, but that’s an odd way of putting it. It sounds like an active process (believe is a verb). But I’m not engaged in an active process. In my model of the world, my arm simply DOES exist. It makes more sense for me to say “I KNOW my arm exists” than “I believe it exists.”

When someone says…

I know X exists

and

I believe X exists

do they mean something different by those two statements? I have a gut reaction that know is stronger than believe. That know means something like, “I believe AND there’s no way my belief can be wrong.” But does that mean that “I believe” somehow implies “but I might be wrong.”

The thing is, I do know my arm exists, but I also know I might be wrong. Most of the time, I don’t know I might be wrong. I only know this when I’m purposefully thinking about existential ideas. (e.g. All of my perceptions might be wrong.) When I’m not forcing my mind to be overly intellectual, I simply know my arm exists.

Even “know” seems too strong. It too implies some sort of active mental process. Some sort of dialog that says, “Does my arm exist? Yes! Of course it does.” But that generally isn’t how it works. Better than saying “I know my arm exists” is “my arm EXISTS.” That’s my day-to-day, working premise.

It’s sort of like the difference between a carpenter who is holding a saw in his hand and one that is pretty sure there’s a saw in his toolchest. The latter might say, “I KNOW there’s a saw in there.” The former will simply say, “I’m going to use this saw to cut some wood.” Things that exist are things that we can confidently move around as symbols in our brain without any “is this fact or fiction?” module lighting up.

There are certain objects which are simply part of our mental models of the world. We don’t (ordinarily) question whether or not they exist.

I think this can even be true for objects we’ve never been near, like New Zealand for me. I don’t seriously (regularly) question whether or not it exists. I don’t even KNOW or BELIEVE it exists. In my mental model, New Zealand simply DOES exist. Which isn’t to say that model is set in stone. No doubt I can be convinced that New Zealand doesn’t exist. I can probably even be persuaded that my arm doesn’t exist.

It strikes me that in order for me to shift my belief about something like New Zealand, it has to get re-categorized several times in my brain.

NZ is part of the world –> I BELIEVE NZ is part of the world –> my belief about NZ is wrong…

In other words, before NZ is even open for disbelief, it has to be moved from the IS category to the I-BELIEVE category. The I-BELIEVE category is, at least in theory, falsifiable.

(Incidentally, I wonder if people have always said, “I believe in God.” Doesn’t that imply “even though I may be wrong” or at least “even though some people don’t”? It implies that non-belief is at least a tenable concept. In historical times when pretty much everyone believed in God, did people talk this way? Or did they simply talk about God the way I talk about my arm? As a done deal.)

My guess is that many religious people only say “I believe in God” when they’re discussing/arguing with non-believers. Or when they’re struggling with their own self-doubts. Surely for most of them most — the ones that are deeply religious — God simply EXISTS, the way my arm exists for me (or, at least the way New Zealand exists for me).

When someone says, “I believe in X,” I’m wondering if he means…

1) I’m trying to believe in X the way I believe in my arm. That doesn’t describe my relationship with X, but that’s a goal I aspire to.

2) Most of the time, it’s clear to me that X exists. At the moment, I’m feeling like it might not. But I’m trying to banish that feeling.

3) I would bet money that X exists, but I realize there’s a small possibility I might lose.

4) I have a strong feeling of X existing. It’s not quite the same thing as the feeling I get with my arm. I don’t FEEL like my arm exists. It simply DOES exist.

I get similarly confused by “having faith.” When people say, “I have faith that God exists,” do them mean “God DOES exist” (and, if so, why don’t they say this? No one says “I have faith that my arm exists” or “I have faith that New Zealand exists,” unless they’re being overly intellectual/philosophical).

If I say, “I didn’t look in the closet, but I have faith that there are paper towels in there,” I mean something much weaker than “there ARE paper towels in there.” I mean something like, “I seem to remember seeing paper towels in the closet, and for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that there are. Otherwise, I can’t move forward with my plan.”

To some people at least, does “I have faith that God exists” mean something similar? Something less like “God DOES exist” and more like, “I have to make certain plans with my life, and those plans hinge on God existing. I can’t debate this forever, so I’m just going to assume He exists and get on with it”?

Getting back to that agnostic book (”Who Knows?” by Raymond Smullyan), I’m trying to understand what goes on in the author’s brain. He’s a logician/philosopher, so he spends much more time thinking existentially than most of us do. So what does it mean when he says, “I know I have no grounds, but I believe in The Afterlife, anyway”? I have a really hard time parsing that. It sounds like — due to his work — he faces the fact that there’s no evidence for his belief on a daily (hourly) basis. Yet he still “believes.” What does he mean by “believes”? Does he mean “I have a strong feeling?”

I have a strong feeling that Hamlet and Jay Gatsby exist. But I don’t BELIEVE they exist.

So my point for asking this question was to try to figure out what sort of mental state or process “I believe” describes. My guess is it describes different things for different people. But how different? Are the differences negligible? Or are they so profound that it’s meaningless to discuss, say, whether it’s rational to believe in God without first getting all parties to clarify what they mean by belief?

Grumblebee, I feel precisely the same way about belief in God, and for me personally I’ve come to see this as a faith-based position, since if God is really supernatural one can’t disprove him anyways. So I have faith that there is no God, which of course I can buttress to some degree with various skeptical arguments, but fundamentally it does come down to a feeling I have — as you put it, a gut feeling.

(This is also why the recent spate of shrill, evangelical atheists bug the crap out of me, if you’ll allow me a second to rant. If belief in God really is a feeling, emotional response, and I do happen to feel that sense of belief, what right does anyone else have to tell me how to feel?)

So for me it’s a feeling, which is maybe something of a conversational dead end until you tack on top of that an examination of how one’s beliefs can be changed. If I don’t believe in New Zealand, there’s a good chance that Marie Mon Dieu can do something to convince of its existence, in which case my feeling of belief will change. If I learned enough math and physics I might believe more strongly in string theory. And while I don’t think it’s at all likely, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some personal religious experience could change my mind about God.

I certainly do think there’s a difference between physical observation and imaginative supposition. I can prove to you that New Zealand exists. I’m not sure about black holes, it’s been a long time since I read my Asimov, et al.

On the other hand, say you have an apple in your hand. You can feel it and smell it, and even taste it. Entirely believable by physical observation. We both agree the apple is real or a reasonable fascimile thereof.

I think many very religious people do believe that God exists as certainly as you believe that apple exists. They accept it as fact. He’s like your fictitious person in a movie only they believe he’s real. I’ve talked to many people who state clearly that God is here among us and his love will be revealed if only I open my heart to him. This makes no sense because if God is all powerful than he could be here regardless of whether I “open my heart.” Apparently the only way this can be accomplished is if I attend their church and submit to a mass hypnosis (along with opening my wallet).

I hope we can agree that apples exist and we should take bites out of them.

This isn’t always true. It’s not true with me. I don’t believe in God, but my disbelief has nothing to do with logic. I disbelieve because I’ve always disbelieved. God has simply always seemed “made up” to me. That feeling is not based on (or caused by) logic. It’s a feeling I had before I even understood how to reason clearly.

Since then, I have read all the skeptical arguments about God, and I agree with them. I think they make total sense. But they didn’t cause my disbelief. My disbelief came from my gut.

In the end, the key thing with me is that the idea of God leaves me cold. I can imagine believing in Him. I can imagine someone showing me some sort of proof that would sway me. But I can’t see how that would change me. It would be as if there was a novel that I read and was bored by — and then someone convinced me that the novel was actually non-fiction. Okay, I’d think, but it’s still boring.

I think you’ll find a more correct path here, which I alluded to in my first post but was not clear about. Those who don’t understand belief/faith in God base this on their use of logic. By the very nature of that argument, those people do not believe that those who DO have belief/faith in God are using logic.

My question is what people mean when they say “I believe X exists.” You’re making a distinction between religious belief and other sorts of belief, right? You’re saying that somehow “I believe in God” is different from “I believe in that cup on the table.”

I’m uneasy about the difference being that one is “based on faith” and the other is based on observation. To me, that’s like saying that anger is different if someone makes you angry as opposed to when you think about something that makes you angry. Those two angers might be different but they also might not be. I’m not sure that a feelings cause matters to the experience of having that feeling. Even if two different things lead up to the two beliefs, the end feeling may be the same.

But I’m not sure if “feeling” is the right word for belief. It certainly seems different to me than anger, happiness or love, though I’m not sure I can quantify how it’s different.

You likened religious belief to love, but I’m wondering if you’re confusing two things. I love my wife, but if I stopped loving her, I’d still believe that she exists. Similarly, if you could flip a switch and turn off a religious person’s love of God, mightn’t he still believe God exists?

If — by belief — religious people mean “love,” then I think they’re using the word “belief” in a confusing way. You can love a fictional character. Belief implies that — beyond loving the character — you think he exists “in the real world.” But I doubt most theists are abusing “belief’ this way. I suspect that they actually do thin God exists. Or they hope he does.

I can’t really parse faith, other than as a useful force for people who don’t quite believe (or don’t always believe) but want to. It doesn’t make sense to me to say that “my belief is based on faith” (or evidence). The belief might die in the future, but for now it’s a done deal. MAYBE faith caused it. Maybe not. If the belief goes — and you want it back — maybe faith will help you get it back. I would totally understand if someone said, “I’m having trouble believing in God right now, but I’m going to try to have faith that my belief will return.”

I also wonder if I’m taking the whole thing too literally. Maybe when theists — the rank and file of them — say “I believe in God,” they don’t have an exact meaning in mind. Maybe they mean something fuzzy, along the lines of “God is very important to me.”

Obviously you can look up the definition of belief and everyone has beliefs inherent from the way they were raised.

So I’m really confused as to what the question is and what the obvious answer should be. All I know is belief is your perceptions, and religious belief is your perception of some greater force that is not visible.

I can choose to entertain the idea that my arm might not exist, and maybe if I did so long enough, I would stop believing in my arm. But that disbelief would be the RESULT of processes put into effect by earlier choices.

I would think religious belief is more like love, and love can make people act better or it can make people act crazy.

If you’re right. I think this leads to a huge confusion in most debates between theists and atheists. Atheists tend to assume that when the theist says he believes in God, he believes in the “my arm is real” sense. It may or may not make me feel good that my arm exists, but such feelings (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with my BELIEF that my arm exists.

I have strong intuitive ideas (that I can’t quite put into words) about what love and belief are, but it seems odd to connect them. There are fictional characters that I love, but I don’t believe the are real. I love my wife, and she happens to exist, but if you somehow proved to me that she was a figment of my imagination, I’d still love her.

There is another meaning of the word “believe.” It can mean something akin to trust or respect, as in “I know you will win the race, because I believe in you.” If a theist means belief in this sense (”I believe God will help me with my alcoholism”) then he is talking at cross purposes with the atheist who is using belief to connote existence.

They way you’re describing it sounds like you’re asking someone to describe an emotion. I think they’ve proved that certain parts of the brain light up more when someone is in a religious fervor. People say they’ve experienced heightened emotion when they get a vision from God.

I don’t think it’s the same feeling as believing your arm is real. Do you have any real emotion going on when you think about your arm? I don’t.

I would think religious belief is more like love, and love can make people act better or it can make people act crazy.

It’s also a feeling of conviction, perhaps like a gut instinct you’ve had about certain issues. It can bring up feelings of warmth and being protected, feelings of being connected with something bigger than you, or feelings of guilt if you do something “wrong” according to the rules of your religion. It’s when people start equating religious beliefs with moral superiority that it gets whacked (obsessive stalker love or people knocking on your door with a pamphlet in their hand).

Belief — in my context — is faith, you say. Okay, but now you’ve just renamed it. What is faith?

Faith, as you define it, is “accepting something as complete truth without requiring proof…” Okay, but what does “accepting something” mean? I’m wondering if there’s any way to define it without circling around the terms we’ve already used. So it’s unfair to say, “accepting something is BELIEVING it’s true.”

I think proof and evidence are beside the point. I know they’re THE point when atheists and theists argue, but I’m talking about something else:

A believes in God because the Bible tells him God exists.

B believes in gravity due to observation and the results of experiments X, Y and Z.

For the sake of my question, A and B are the same. Yes, as an atheist/skeptic, I could argue with A about the grounds for his belief, but the belief is already done. So from an experiential point-of-view, A and B are feeling the same thing. What IS that thing?

I believe I have an arm. Based on this belief, I would…

(a) bet all my money against you if you claimed that I didn’t have an arm (and if there was some way of verifying who was right). I wouldn’t have a moment’s hesitation about making this bet.

(b) unless I’m purposefully entertaining existential questions, I don’t question — or think to question — whether or not my arm exists. I unconsciously assume it does. In this sense, “belief” is not an active process. It’s a done deal. My arm is simply in a category of “things that exist.”

(c) I make plans based on my arm existing.

When someone, say, believes in an afterlife, are they talking about the same thing? If they’re old and about to die, do they think, “… who was that actor who was in ‘Gone With The Wind’? I’ll ask Martha, she’ll know. Oh wait, I can’t. She’s dead. Well, I’ll be dead in a few days, so I’ll ask her then.”

When theists say they believe because they have faith, it often sounds to me like they’re talking about a different process than my belief in my arm. Having faith sounds like an active process. I don’t need an active process to believe in my arm. I already fully believe in it. It’s in the “it exists” category.

Therefore I believe you need to define ‘faith’, and as far as I have been able to determine, in the religious context, ‘faith’ is defined as “accepting something as complete truth without requiring proof (or additional proof other than available evidence)”.

I believe (there’s that word again) that in order to have that sort of faith, logic must fly out the window and ‘faith’ must be created by the simple and direct reasoning of “because a certain person/persons/book tells you so”.

That is impossible for me. While I would wholly be able to put my heart into accepting God if incontrovertible proof presented itself to me, showing that God existed…that specific requirement for my version of ‘faith’ is entirely at odds with the concept of faith itself.

Therefore, barring the Second Coming or Armageddon, I will never believe in God or that Jesus was anything but a wise man with a few magic tricks. I strongly suspect my reasoning above holds true for the far majority of thinking, non-believing, atheists/agnostics.