What do we believe and why do we believe? What is meant by “belief”? Plain citizens and philosophers have agonized over these questions for millennia. But in a common sense way, let us try again.

Let us begin with a partial distinction. Belief and faith certainly overlap considerably. However, the rational presumption that often lies behind belief that is wholly lacking in faith. One cannot argue with a faith; it simply is. Often a belief is more than this.

For our purposes here, we are concerned primarily with "belief", the more interesting and promising concept.

We begin with reality. Except in our dreams, we live in, or believe we live in a “real world”. What does this mean? It means a world of cause and effect. You drop a plate and it breaks. You slam the door and it makes a loud noise. It also means a world of before and after. What happened yesterday, belongs in yesterday. It cannot be undone. What we think will happen tomorrow, belongs in the future – it has not yet happened.

When we say we believe something, we say that we think of it as belonging in the real world.

This leads us to the question of what sorts of proof we need to believe something. Luckily, for most propositions, we can rely on observations of cause and effect that have come down to us through the ages. We do not need to test ourselves whether we will get a burn if we put our hands on a hot or that it will help if we immediately put a piece of ice on the burn. We may have occasion to test these propositions, but in many instances we simply “believe” without personal proof. The “proof” in these cases is then the source of the information. Perhaps our parents told us or we read it in a book or a newspaper or a teacher told us.

“Proof” then for most of our beliefs is indirect. It is mediated through the sources of information that we accept. We assume that they have proven the propositions they hand on to us, or that the chain of proof that reaches us through them is reliable. Our belief, then, is primarily in the communicators of propositions, and only secondarily in the propositions themselves.

Unfortunately, we often find that the chains on which we rely are faulty. We discover that commonly believed home remedies do not work, or that the computer that we wanted so badly to buy is not what it was cracked up to be. Enough personal discoveries of this kind may lead us to doubt a class of communicators on which we had relied for information. In anthropology, the phenomenon of “deculturation” occurs when the younger people of a tribal group no longer believe in the wisdom of their elders, in the chains of communication that have been identified with their group.

Why in these cases, do they no longer believe in many aspects of their “culture”? It may be because they have had personal experiences in a new context that have demonstrated the fallacy in what they had been taught. Perhaps they spoke out loud the name of a recently deceased person and nothing untoward happened to them or to their group. They try it again, and again there are no consequences. The cultural belief will simply wither away. But more likely the young of the tribe lose their cultural beliefs because they have switched allegiance from the old “authorities”, the old chains of belief, to new ones. The reasons for such a switch may be rational or irrational; there are many causes. But this suggests that our inquiry has been deficient in looking at individual propositions. We should group propositions and consider why a whole group of propositions might be believed or not believed on the basis of a change of belief in the adequacy of alternative transmission chains.

To step back a moment, let us look briefly at science. Science is the process and codification of beliefs based ostensibly on experience. Its proofs are of two kinds. First are beliefs based on experiment. A cause and effect relationship is posited. The relationship is tested. If the test succeeds, a belief in the relationship begins to form. Over time, and after many tests, this relationship becomes part of the scientific “culture” that will be handed down to generations of future scientists. Second are proofs based on experience. These do not test the individual proposition; perhaps it is untestable as it stands. But they test the predictions of a whole category of accepted facts. The trip of human beings to the moon and back was made possible by countless bits of scientific and engineering lore that was “proved” by the success of the mission. Similarly, evolutionary theory is based on countless observations and theories based on assumptions about the relationships of these observations. Evolutionary biologists can then predict what we should expect to find in searching the record of the past, and often enough what they expect is found. Whole new lines of research, such as modern genetics, can then expand the predictive quality of evolutionary theory at the same time as they can be fitted into it.

In everyday life, most people must do without the help of a scientific body of proven or even testable information. They simplify their lives in two ways. First, they focus nearly all their attention on direct experience. They tried out the fly that Jones suggested, and on this day it worked or it did not. They will try it out in the right river conditions on their next fishing expedition. On this basis, it will be added to their “favorites” or tossed aside and forgotten. Second, in most of their lives they rely on the information sources that are readily available to them (newspapers, television, ministers, teachers, friends and relatives). They have little possibility of directly checking the veracity of the chains of information that they thus rely on. Most of the time, it makes little difference to them personally, and listening to it becomes a kind of entertainment, as does passing it on to others around the family dinner table or in the neighborhood bar.

Yet sometimes it does make a difference, and for some people in some contexts it makes a great deal of difference. For people who care about the outcome of elections and think their votes are important, it does make a difference. For people who want to know what they should tell their children about God, or for a person whose intended has asked them to change their religious affiliation, these broader issues of belief, reality, or fact do make a difference.

We are led by the argument into the issue of religious belief. But before we go there, let us review what we have learned. We have learned that we believe something either because of personal experience (largely restricted to the immediacies of life) or because it has come down to us through a cultural tradition (transmitted through parents, teachers, books, or the more modern media).

To these reasons for belief, we should now add “rationality”. Taking the negative first, we do not believe in anything that cannot meet certain perhaps inborn intellectual standards. One of these is appropriateness in the context. For example, were we to be told that the first men on the moon found frogs hopping about, we would simply not believe. It would contradict too much else that we know, or believe, about the moon.

Religious belief comes down to us through multiple transmission chains. (For a dictionary definition of "religion" go to the "identity" area in the general words menu.) As such, it exists for most people as a background to their lives, unquestioningly accepted, and not tested against competing beliefs or traditions, such as science. But when it does come alive for ourselves or those around us, then for we to believe what they appear to believe, we do ask it to meet the tests of belief, particularly rational tests.

Think for a moment of the high school football teams in football-mad Texas. Before each game, both teams are expected to pray for success. We also notice the common practice, at all levels of football, of players pausing a minute after scoring a touchdown to thank God for their success. What rational chain of evidence could possibly support such practices? First, the prayer of both sides for success fails to meet the first test of belief (personal experience). For in every game, there is a winner and a loser. Those who pray have the experience of learning that God fails them 50% of the time. Secondly, prayer fails to meet obvious rational tests. If there were a God, why would such a God concern itself with which side won a football game? It could conceivably like the idea of young people playing games or getting exercise, but the outcome would be of no consequence. God intervening on one side or another on a playing field is as incongruous as finding frogs on the moon.

This brings us to the action test of belief. This has two aspects. The first is to ask the question “What difference does it make if this belief is true or false?” The best example is to consider beliefs in God. There are many flavors. The most basic belief, and the most widely believed among many peoples, Christian and non-Christian, is that everything was created initially by God. This is essentially a belief without consequences. For scientists, whether they believe in the “Big Bang” at the beginning of our universe or not, remain at a loss when they try to explain what came before that. This doesn’t mean that there is a God who preset the conditions or there is not. It simply does not make much difference.

The second aspect is to ask what difference the belief in question makes in the lives of those who believe it. For example, an integral part of the funerals of most Christians is a recitation of the belief that the deceased “has gone to a better place” and that we will meet him or her “in the great hereafter”. Participants or attendees at the funerals explicitly or implicitly agree express this belief (at least for the moment). But one wonders. If they really believed it, why would they then go home strengthened in their determination to reduce their cholesterol, get more exercise, or schedule a colonoscopy? Why when they next enter the hospital would they demand all the tests that might be possible? Evidently, they remain more than a little doubtful about “going to a better place”.

Many similar questions could be asked of believers in other religions. Even with the explosions of martyrdom in Palestine among Muslims, we still have to ask the question: “If most Muslim men believed that their death in fighting the infidel would be followed by immediate transport to heaven and an infinity of pleasures, why would not Muslims have prevailed in every battle over the centuries? Why have Muslim armies often broken and fled from their opponents? There is the belief, often fervently expressed before battle, and there are their very human actions when put to the test. This is not to say that at the margin, their beliefs have made some Muslims surprisingly fearless (but perhaps not more so than other fervent believers in much less specific heavenly rewards.)

Enlightenment has several senses; some appear to mean the opposite of others. In a religious and spiritual sense, "enlightenment" refers to a moment of awakening to a spiritual truth previously unknown by the individual concerned. Although the term has frequently been used in discussions of oriental religious movements, such as Sufism or Zen, it could be used to describe the "born again" experience now so popular among Christian fundamentalists. Many in recent generations are familiar with it in a modern or "new age" context. Here it means a very personal spiritual awakening, sometimes with the aid of drugs (recent research suggests that the Delphic Oracle delivered her prophecies while high on intoxicating gases emanating from beneath her temple). However, when used in the term "Eighteenth Century Enlightenment", enlightenment means what many philosophers of the time considered to be a long overdue emancipation from superstitions and myths associated with the traditional Christian churches.