“BELIEF IS NOT what you think. In either sense.”
“Nowadays belief is often viewed as simply a feeble form of knowing, as in I believe (but am not certain) that the train leaves at 6:13. But this has not always been the case. The word belief has nowhere buried in it the idea of signing up to a proposition, certain or uncertain. It is not a matter of cognition, but of recognition. It comes from the same root as the word love, a sense preserved in the now archaic word lief, familiar to us from Shakespeare, with which one once described ones friend, sweetheart, or lord someone in whom one believed.”
“Similar considerations apply to the German glauben (related to lieben, to love), and to the French croire and other derivatives of Latin credere, a word which meant originally to entrust to the care of (the sense lingers, in reduced fashion, in the idea of credit). Belief is about a relationship, in which by definition, more than one party is involved. The believer needs to be disposed to love, but the believed-in needs to inspire anothers belief. Whether this amounts to being worthy of that belief cannot be fully determined in advance. It emerges through commitment and experience.”
“Does belief historically, then, have nothing to do with truth? Indeed it does, but the word true brings us straight back, not to a thing, but to a relationship. True (cf. German treu, faithful) is related to trust, and is fundamentally a matter of what one trusts or believes. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: like ones loved one, the one in whom one chooses to believe and place ones trust, to whom one is true. We still speak of two surfaces that marry well as being true. It is about fit and fidelity.”
“Etymology maps the slippage of thought. What it shows in this case is three revealing shifts.”
“First, the words truth and belief used to describe a reverberative or two-directional relationship, in which each party is re-sponsible for the fit. Truth and belief are no longer relational, but have become propositional. The causation is no longer distributed, but linear.”
“Second, it suggests that truth and belief used to be embodied actions or processes, involving commitment, not (as they are now conceived) detached, disembodied things. Yet an understanding that enables evaluation of truth or belief cannot be achieved by simply sitting back and waiting passively for information to accumulate, since some truths become understandable only when we have made a move to meet them. They are incremental and come with experience.”
“Third, as processes, truth and belief derived their value from the context, could never be absolute, and were never single or static. The idea of truth as independent of us, immutable and certain, is a recent invention.”
“As Graham Ward argues in his subtle and wide-ranging examination, Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Dont, belief is not the antithesis, but the complement of reason; not the opposite of knowledge, but its inevitable basis. Our reasoning is bound up with the beliefs we bring to it as much as belief is bound up with reasoning, in ways that cannot, in principle, be disentangled.”
“Logic is no help, either, not because belief in the divine is illogical, but because it is a-logical: logic is an inappropriate tool for the job. Its like using a sound detector to tell if the sun is shining. It is illogical to use logic to address certain kinds of question. Logic, logically, cannot tell us whether this or that, ultimately, is the case: it can only tell us whether a certain proposition contradicts other propositions we hold to be true. Non-contradiction is usually important in daily life, and, as a consistency tool, logic is therefore invaluable. Its just that it has its limitations limitations, like those of Newtonian mechanics, that can be ignored for many everyday purposes (catching trains), but become more significant the further we move from the realm of the banal. By definition, it cannot tell us whether our first, grounding assumptions are true, or how to interpret our final conclusions. Its value, great as it is, comes only at an intermediate stage.”
“Giving grounds, said Wittgenstein, must come to an end some time. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting. Propositions, in other words, must eventually give way to dispositions, the stance we choose to adopt toward the world. Believing that must at some point give way to believing in: knowledge about (wissen, savoir) to knowledge of (kennen, connatre), which is essentially an encounter, not a bunch of facts. We come down to an embodied apprehension of what kind of thing the world might be and, most importantly, the nature of our relationship with it. In this, religious belief is ultimately no different from any other (for example, materialist) belief we might have about the nature of things.”