Three Ways People Come to Their Beliefs

This piece ran in the newspapers as an op/ed on January 3, 2025.

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Most people, I expect, come to their beliefs in all three of these ways. But the proportions certainly differ, and the differences certainly matter.

Believing what one wants to believe.

The “truth” doesn’t always set one free. There’s a reason our language has expressions like “the truth hurts.” People, not liking pain, will adopt comforting falsehoods to avoid hurtful truths.

Another phrase in contemporary culture is “Denial is not just a river in Egypt,” calling attention to one of the “defense mechanisms” identified in depth psychology to avoid acknowledging what a person – at some level – knows to be true. With those levels – “conscious” and “unconscious” – we discover that a person can both know and not know some unpleasant truth: the person tries to escape from the pain by choosing to keep the truth from entering conscious awareness.

Humankind has been defined in many ways, and one of those definitions is “the animal that knows it’s going to die.” That knowledge is not altogether a gift.

A famous book titled The Denial of Death, published back in the 1970s, argued that some of the most prominent ways humankind has built its cultures, over the millennia, has been motivated by the emotional need to escape from the fear and pain that come with the knowledge that one is going to die. Denial.

Not just a river in Egypt.

Along with the refusal to believe what one does not want to believe goes the formulation of beliefs that are comforting, that give rise to pleasurable feelings, that make life feel more meaningful.

Most people rate themselves as better than average drivers. And that’s probably indicative of a general tendency to see oneself as better than we are.

Some of those distortions are probably harmless. But it can hardly be good for the world for people to over-estimate their own virtues and to under-estimate the worth of others.

(Groups seem regularly to find ways of seeing themselves as better than other people:

• Aristocrats have tended to define “better” in terms of “breeding” and “ancestry” and “noble blood”;
• Intellectuals define “better” in terms of intelligence and education;
• The pious in terms of their adherence to the “true faith”; and
• Almost every nation seeing in itself some special virtues.)

The more broken people are – as groups, or as individuals – the more likely they are to want to believe things that are destructive. If people feel a need for enemies – someone to hate and fight – they’ll have a motive to believe a false picture of others that justifies their own destructiveness.

Too often, in our broken world, people’s healthy desire to see themselves as “Good” too often gets perverted by the need to believe lies demonizing lies that gives others the role of “Evil.”

The way falsehoods serve as a major tool of the destructive force at work in our world would be reason enough for me to hold with the idea instilled in me in my upbringing: believing something because you want to believe it is not OK.

Believing what trusted Authorities say to believe.

There’s so much in our world that it behooves us to know and to understand that inevitably we all will depend to some degree on what others tell us to believe.

For one thing, we’re all required to become members of our cultures, and that involves the culture teaching things about what’s true, valuable, right, etc. We absorb a cultural worldview.

For another, no one can study everything, so our best strategy for having good reliable bodies of knowledge is to learn from the people who know the most about each specific area. Like to believe things about our health because our doctor – who has dedicated their education and professional life to gaining the best available knowledge – tells us to believe it.

(Likewise, when the people who know the most about the earth’s climate tell us that we’re facing a crisis, the only sensible thing for anyone who cares about the truth to do is to depend on those scientific experts to tell them what to believe.)

But this approach depends entirely on the trustworthiness – or lack of it – of the Authorities.

Those who have expertise – in areas of study where the body of knowledge is developed by the best means people have been able to devise (science, scholarship) – are not infallible. But the beliefs they’ve arrived as are as good as we’re going to find.

But many rely on Authorities who offer people beliefs whose truth is not rigorously tested. With what such Authorities say, anyone dedicated to Truth will follow what Ronald Reagan declared he’d do regarding arms control agreements with the Soviet Union: “Trust. But Verify.”

There are reasons to be cautious about trusting such Authorities.

Our broken world is an arena where forces continually struggle for power. One of the main instruments in the toolbox of some of those forces is the establishment of “Authorities” that manipulate people into believe things that are not true.

People who’ve chosen to believe untrustworthy Authorities have throughout history become the unwitting agents of “Evil” forces.

So “believing Authorities” is also not my preference.

The way I believe in.

• Continually seek good evidence;
• Continually apply reason to the evidence to reach hypotheses and conclusions;
• Continually question, test, and develop one’s conclusions.