Philosophy for Believers. Edward W. H. Vick
we do not achieve understanding because there is just no-one able or willing to help us with the needful explanations that would enable us to understand. So we rest content and live our practical lives with what understanding we have.Another context for our not coming to understand as we might is that we are quite content with the understanding we have. We believe and we confess our beliefs and do not have any desire to ask any questions about them, to ‘go into them’ (as we say). We are often encouraged in this attitude by being members of a like-minded group with its traditions of belief and understanding. Unfortunately that sometimes breeds an attitude of rejection and even contempt for those who seek further understanding. Christian communities have ways of setting boundaries. Heresy is the name for the understandings that go beyond those boundaries, understandings that do not have the imprimatur of the group. Excommunication is the penalty for non-conformity.You can make claims without understanding them. So, we shall make a distinction between believing and understanding what we believe, between confessing and confessing intelligently, between simply stating the doctrine and understanding the statement of the doctrine, between making a claim and being able to explain the claim, between expressing a belief and grasping the meaning of that belief.Understanding always involves grasping concepts. Concepts are expressed in words, ‘terms’, and are used to construct sentences. We understand sentences only as we understand the concepts used in them. Take examples. What does it take to understand the following statements?The earth is rotating.The sun, our nearest star, is 93 million miles away from the earth.Or take just the first part of this one:The universe ‘is 45 billion light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies –– each containing hundreds of billions of stars. . . .’Let’s list some of the concepts without which we could not even begin to come to an understanding of the above statements:star, mile, speed, light, million, 93, near, away from, sun, earth, rotate universe, year, light year, 100, billion, across, filled with, galaxy.Even when you understand the meaning of these concepts, it takes something more before you can really be said to understand the statements that contain them. Do you really understand what ‘45 billion light years’ means? Can one grasp what ‘hundreds of billions’ means especially if you follow it with ‘light years’, a light year being 5,874,601,673,407.3 miles. So multiply the big figure with 45 and then add the required number of noughts! Now do you understand? But that is only the beginning!Now make an application of this principle: Without understanding the concepts used or implied in statements, you can’t begin to understand believers’ claims. Then take some examples:God brings about events in the world in answer to prayer.Jesus ascended into heaven.I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.Consider some of the concepts in the statement of these beliefs:Jesus, ascend, heaven, into, resurrection, life, dead, everlasting, event, bring about an event, prayer, answer, world.
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?