3 Where Are You?
(See the chart on the following page)
The following chart may enable you to take stock of your present situation. You hold various beliefs, some of which are more important to you than others. It is your desire to be logical and rational, so that you may claim that your beliefs are reasonable. As you think about those beliefs, rather than simply assert them, you find some difficulties. The belief you are now considering poses a real difficulty. It may be because of a contradiction with other beliefs or because when you think about your belief you face a dilemma. It may be that you simply are not clear as to what your belief means. It may be because your belief does not co-ordinate with an alternative belief. You will have your own problem!
You are now faced with a choice, the first of several. Shall I simply pass on, not even articulate it to myself in any detail, but simply ignore it, even if momentarily? You had admitted that there was a problem. If you ignore it the problem remains, even if you have repressed your expression of it and it will surface again in some form.
You decide to tackle the problem and, when you do, you find that there are considerations that you had not previously made. Perhaps someone has pointed them out. Or perhaps you have heard, or read an article, come across an argument you had not previously heard. Perhaps you encounter a few new concepts that you had not known previously that set the issues in a new light and make simple repetition impossible for you.
Now you have another choice to make, a little more advanced than the previous one. Shall you go on? Since the concepts with which you have up to now been working are, in the light of the things that have been brought to your attention, inadequate, you have the choice to examine the problem in the light of the new and promising concepts. But that will take effort and possibly call for reorientation. Shall you be ready for that? If you choose at this point to go no further, the problem has not gone away. It has simply been repressed. Maybe it will return and you will later take a different choice about what to do with the new situation.
You will then consider the new concepts and the reorientation of your thinking that employing them will require, so you find either a satisfactory solution to your problem, or you find a satisfactory restatement of that problem and that will lead you to further investigation.
Every one, I believe, will understand the moves here described. For they often occur in our everyday lives. But when it comes to our religious convictions, it is often difficult to make the choices called for at the different stages of development to maturity. Certainly some will be easy to make. Others will be difficult, so that we resist making them. For there are other than logical and rational considerations. People we know and with whom we worship will not be asking us questions about our beliefs all the time. Mostly they will take for granted that we believe what they believe, that our beliefs are similar, or even identical to theirs. That may make things harder for us when the choices are before us. For the realisation that there is not full agreement between believers often causes alienation, rather than the kind of understanding that goes by the name of tolerance. Unfortunately nothing has the power to separate believers more than the refusal to consider the reasonableness of another’s beliefs when they differ from ours, and of course when ours are the widely accepted beliefs within the community in which we find ourselves. It often requires doubt for one to be tolerant.
2 BELIEF AND BELIEVING
There are different kinds of believing. Some belief is personal. Some is not. Not everything we believe is true, nor is it knowledge. So we must have grounds for assessing our beliefs. Belief is often based on testimony. So the question concerning the trustworthiness of testimony arises. It is an aspect of the more general question, ‘On what grounds are we justified in believing a claim, even perhaps one that is false?’ Other questions arise. Are we always conscious of the beliefs we hold? What is involved in doubting and abandoning a belief? How can we move from belief to knowledge, since we do not know everything we believe?
Scriptural writings contain testimony to historical events, persons, and communities. Many passages make allusions to what happened to individuals with names, to battles at specific times and to communities in their geographical locations. They also make reference to miracles, referring to them as on a par with natural events. Believers claim that Scripture also provides testimony to the revelation of God. Shall we apply to the claims of Scripture the same criteria of judgment we normally use in assessing historical claims?
2 Belief and Believing
Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.
Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?
William Blake
1 Two Kinds of BelievingThis is a book about believing, for ‘the believer’, and a believer is one who believes. We use the term ‘belief’ of both secular and religious belief. We all believe, but not all of us in the sense which the word sometimes has, when it is used of the religious believer. All believers have something in common. Our interesting exercise is to think a little about the nature of belief, about what it means to believe and make some classifications. For there are all kinds of beliefs: in people, in ideas, in reports, in products. We believe all kinds of claims to be true and others to be false.We can thus approach this topic from two different points of view, which may turn out to be complementary. First we ask, What does the religious believer have in common with other believers?