Chariots of Fire: Interlude - The Question

I'm taking a break from my Elijah study to ask a very important question, one that I think we should ask ourselves frequently and take time to really ponder it.

Why do you believe what you believe?

I want to argue that everything is a faith issue. It's easy to say things like religion and politics, those are beliefs. But I want to go farther and say things like science and history are belief issues also. To organize my thinking about this, I want to first talk about world views. We all have them, and they are what shape the way we process information. Two people looking at the same event interpret it totally differently, why? Because the lenses through which they view the event are different. Ok that's it for world views.

In the Japanese history books, they downplay many of the atrocities they committed during World War II. And they believe that to be truth. But we say, that's not true, how could they believe that? Turn it around, how do we justify our history books? What proves our books are any more valid than anyone else's? How can you prove that an event happened? You say we have evidence, but you need to believe in the evidence also. I could easily claim that this computer has magical gunshot protection properties because I've never been shot since buying this laptop (it's a logical fallacy... or is it? The truth is I've never been shot, maybe it does have some kind of powers). Regardless, even the "evidence" is biased and we also look at it through our world views.

The thing about history is that history changes. Archaeologists unearthed some new find and suddenly what we believed to be true becomes false and this new history takes its place. We knew something was true, it was a fact, but then it's not anymore. How can that happen? Beliefs change, what's true doesn't. Perhaps, I should define what I mean by truth quickly.

Truth is.

If a man walked on the moon, then he walked on the moon regardless of whether people believe it, if it was recorded, if anyone else saw it. If it happened, it happened. What I mean by this is that the definition of truth I'm using doesn't rely on human perception or interaction. And so history changes. What actually happened doesn't, but what we think happened does.

Let me talk about science for a bit. The thing about science, is that science disproves itself. I read an article the other day in the NY Times that say how Scientists are going to revamp some gravitational equation to account for the rapidly expanding universe (how do we really know the universe is rapidly expanding? We believe people when they say it is, but we've never done the research or seen it ourselves or at least I haven't). Regardless, what was once held to be a fact, is going to be changed. For a time we believed it to be truth, but then we found it false and changed what we believed.

If we applied the same scrutiny to our beliefs that we do to others' I think we'd be surprised at how our own beliefs stand. But we say, what we believe is based on logic, while what everyone else believes is because of circumstance or what other people say. It's never that simple because it's never just one thing, it's always a combination of things that shape us. That and logic itself is based on assumptions and is prone to bias as well.

Whether it be in God, in a friend, in the news, in what you read, in what the weatherman says, I visit the question again, why do you believe what you believe?