Well good evening everyone and welcome to my fifty fifth episode. Tonight, I want to talk to you about the power of belief. Specifically, I want to make the case that your beliefs make up the bedrock of who you are. They determine the way that you see the world – literally. And they also determine the way that you act. Your beliefs will author the story of your life and determine to a significant degree whether or not you live a good life or a tragic one.
So the first piece we need to unpack is the nature of what beliefs are. One kind of belief emerges as the consequence of being exposed to sufficient evidence. Gravity is a good example. Because you have experienced gravity every moment of your life and because you can demonstrate the reliability of believing that gravity is true – you know not to jump off a building. It’s not reasonable to say that maybe 1 out of a 100 jumps will result in you floating away instead of plummeting to the ground. These kinds of beliefs are objective, rational, and testable. That means they can easily be communicated from person to person. It doesn’t matter what your worldview is, gravity still works the same for you as it does for everyone else. Since these types of beliefs have proven to be so dependably true, many people have made the assumption that all of experience can be reduced to brute facts like gravity. There is good evidence to suggest that this is true for the objective world – but the objective world is not all there is to experience.
Experience also contains the subjective world – these are things like your opinions, interests, relationships, sense of meaning, and artistic expression. These are based on values, and values are based on beliefs. One could argue, successfully, that these subjective domains make up much more of your experience than do the brute facts of the objective world. This is why you’re more interested in your love relationships than you are in using the anisotropic synchrony convention to determine the one-way speed of light. Additionally, you actually don’t use the objective world to inform your subjective experience. For example, you don’t get to know a person by viewing their atomic structure under a microscope. You get to know a person by talking to them, learning their story, and forming beliefs about them.
Since these areas of experience cannot be derived from the brute facts of reality, many people have come to the conclusion that truth itself is only a matter of opinion. The issue with that proposition is that it is not sustainable across time. It’s like continually jumping off the building in the hopes that one time you will float away instead of falling. To declare that there is no truth is a logically inconsistent statement because it refutes itself. It claims to be absolutely true while declaring that nothing can be absolutely true.
You can’t sustain a good life while believing there is no absolute truth. Why doesn’t this perspective work in real life? Because it tries to tell you that there are a near infinite number of valid ways that you can live your life. But if you care at all about your own well being, the idea begins to fall apart. It falls apart because the path to a good life must promote your own well being, the well being of your family, community, and nation. And it must do all of this simultaneously across time. Meaning it has to promote the well being of all of those people – and yourself – today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and five years from now. Those parameters place an incredible amount of restrictions on what should be considered right and what should be considered wrong in your subjective experience of the world. The path to a good life becomes very tightly defined.
Since some behaviors will promote this goal and some behaviors will undermine it, the implication is that some behaviors are true to reality and some behaviors are false. Even if you believe in evolution, the Darwinian model requires that your value system is sustainable across time. If your value system does not meet these requirements of well being, then it must be false according to Darwinian standards – because your species would not be able to propagate its genes to the next generation. So, you need the correct set of values. Since you can’t arrive at these values by way of measuring the objective, brute facts like gravity – the implication is that there is more to total sum of what’s real than what science can tell us. There must be something that is true about reality which cannot be picked up by our equipment or our senses. Something that is the source of these values which requires faith to be seen.
But it gets even more interesting than that. It turns out, you can’t even engage the world of facts without first consulting your values. There are too many facts in any given environment, so you have to use your structure of values to decide which facts to look at. Your structure of values is predicated on your beliefs. Therefore, your beliefs will determine what you see in the world of facts – literally. You can test this yourself by asking a group of people to tell you the color of their shirt and the color of the flooring in the last public restroom they used. It’s far easier for them to know the color of their shirt because their shirt is more important to them than the flooring in the public restroom. It ranks higher on their system of values.
So, if it’s true that what we value determines what we notice, and what we value is built on what we believe, then we can begin to understand just exactly how powerful our belief systems are in determining the experience of our lives. But it goes even deeper than that. There is also the issue of framing which is determined by your beliefs. Consider this example: You are at the gym lifting weights. Your heart is pounding and your muscles are burning. Nothing unusual about that. But what if you woke up one morning in your bed and your heart was pounding and your muscles were burning? You would call 911. These are the same exact sensations, but the contextual framework has changed. This principle applies to every aspect of your life – even if you aren’t aware of it. If you have a false contextual framework for your life and why you are here, then you are going to react and respond to everything that happens to you in a way that is inconsistent with reality. If your understanding of the world is built on bad information, how can you expect to navigate it effectively?
You can’t, and you won’t be able to. Consider a person who has PTSD. Imagine a person who got attacked by a group of people driving in a red car. The psychological trauma associated with the attack can cause them to adopt a belief about red cars that is inconsistent with reality. If the belief is strong enough, it can actually modify the neurophysiology of their brain. And so any time this person is out walking around and sees a red car, they experience an onset of debilitating anxiety. In order to recover, the person needs to re-learn a healthy association with red cars. And unlearn the pathological association with red cars.
So, what if you don’t pay much attention to belief systems in general and you regard yourself as not having any beliefs about the world? What will happen is you will become very susceptible to ideology. An ideology is simply a low resolution set of beliefs about a high resolution situation. So if I say, capitalism is evil and we should redistribute wealth – then I’m making a blanket statement about complex issues and providing an incomplete solution. If I pursue my incomplete solution as if it is perfect, I will become a totalitarian similar to the Marxist dictators of the 20th century. Problems like group identity and tribalism are manifestations of people falling into the trap of ideology. Freedom of speech is the mechanism by which you can point out the shortcomings of ideology, which is why people who adhere to ideology tend toward censorship.
Okay, so we know that beliefs are so powerful that they will author the story of your life. It’s a good idea to pay attention to what you believe because those beliefs could be writing a tragedy. The question becomes, which system of belief is the correct one? I, myself, take the faith-based position that Jesus Christ is the example of the mode of being that matches the truth of reality. I have very good reasons to take that position but that’s content for another episode. I want to leave you with an understanding that belief systems still matter. Science cannot provide us with a complete worldview because it is interested in facts and not values. Values subsume your engagement with the facts because you have to make a decision which facts to prioritize – and that’s a value judgment.
You should pay attention to how you act in the world and analyze what beliefs motivate you to act that way. Then you should ask if those beliefs have stood the test of time or if they are ones that you’ve just always assumed. You should ask yourself if your actions promote your own well being and that of those around you across time. If they don’t, they are likely a manifestation of a false belief about reality. You should use critical thinking to seek the truth and see where it takes you – I suspect it will take you to a place of peace, joy, stability, and meaning.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at http://www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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