The book, chapter 4

Why we believe

Belief and faith go hand in hand; they are both translated from the same Greek word. Which English word is used to translate πίστις is largely a matter of context. Even though the same Greek word is used, in English ‘Faith’ is something that we have; ‘Believe’ is something that we do.

So why do we do it?

Predicting the future

God has created our brains to perform calculations at a rate that defies measurement. One of the things that the brain is good at is predictive reasoning. This is what makes driving possible – if you could not predict the motion of the other cars at an intersection, there would be far more crunched fenders.

Early in life, we learn to associate “hot” and “pain” by experiencing the two in close proximity. Some people learned to connect these two ideas by having their hands slapped as they reached for the hot stove. Others learned by actually touching the stove.

Similarly, we learn to associate grief with loss, pleasure with sugar, and certain unruly behaviors with severe tongue-lashings. In time, we develop the ability to predict the outcome of an action without having to experience it directly. I remember a childhood friend describing sliding down a razor blade into a pool of lemon juice – even though I am positive that he never had such an experience. Yet both of us made the expected noises and I know I shudder still at the thought. I cannot honestly imagine the pain that might ensue, but I can draw from other painful experiences in my life and extrapolate what it might be like.

The forcefulness of the predictive image is directly related to the seriousness of the consequences. When I was about ten years old, my Dad took the family in our four-wheel-drive pickup truck up a just-barely road to see a marble quarry in Colorado. As my four year old brother raced on ahead to see this wonderful site, a lady grabbed him by the arm and halted his progress. She looked at my parents and explained, “There is a drop-off there with no guard rail, and a patch of ice right before it.”

When we got to the edge of the quarry, there was indeed about a 50-foot drop straight down to a solid stone floor. And there was a frozen puddle about ten feet across just at the rim of the quarry. To this day, I still shudder at what could have happened there that morning. In my mind’s eye, I can still see my brother’s green sweater and the white marble with red streaks through it, the black ice, and the long drop to the stone below. Even though no accident befell us, the predictive ability of the brain clearly saw a dire consequence and imprinted these images where they will not be forgotten.

When things do not work out as our brains predict, we look for another explanation so that we can refine the process of predicting the immediate future. For example, experience teaches us that the cost of the things we buy will continue to go up in relatively small increments. When we see a price drop, we need to know why. Sales and negotiated discounts are familiar explanations, so they are included in the model of reality that the brain uses to predict the future. There are some products that defy the trend, like consumer electronics. So we add a clause to the mental rule, saying that prices go up, except for sales, model year closeouts, and computers.

Eventually, we develop a highly refined sense of how the immediate future should look. Little surprises us, because we have vast experience and a million corrective clauses to adjust a thousand situational rules. You might even say that we have faith that the near future will look pretty much like our predictions. And, for the most part, we are right.

So believing is, in part, based on those sets of rules that we have constructed from years of experience. Are those rules set in stone?

No, they are always fluid, because we are always finding new ways to tweak the rules that we use to predict the future. So when something does not quite fit the pattern we have imagined, it is no big deal. We revise the rule and keep moving on. If something is dramatically different than our predictions, that causes a little pain, because we have to totally re-examine the rules and all the little corrective sub-rules that explain things.

Superstition and magic are things that humans have invented because someone built a bad set of predictive rules, and those rules were seriously violated. If you break a mirror and there follows a string of ‘bad luck’, it is sometimes easier to add a rule to your predictive model that says “If you break a mirror, you get seven year’s bad luck” than to consider that breaking a mirror is nothing more than breaking a mirror. And of course, having heard the old superstition repeated often enough, some of us start cataloging all the bad stuff that follows a broken mirror as proof of the theorem. It becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

Superstition is reinforced by inaccurate score-keeping. By being selective about what we define as ‘bad luck,’ we choose to reinforce the superstition rather than weaken it. Mental discipline can use this tendency to move in the opposite direction. By an act of will, we can choose to define broken mirrors and black cat path-crossings as simply ignorant beliefs of the superstitious. Having done so, we can choose to see how much good luck follows a broken mirror, and further weaken the grip that the superstitions have on our predictive reasoning.

It is this mental discipline that is all too often lacking in today’s busy world. “If you make people think they are thinking, they will love you. If you really make them think, they will hate you.” That quote is variously attributed to Paul Gaugin, Mark Twain, Don Marquis, Arthur Costa, Plato, and Aristotle. Whoever said it, it seems self-evident to me.

We love to think that we are thinking; it is the sort of bad score-keeping that allows us to believe that we are smarter than the average picnic basket. However, Paul reminded “…every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think…” (Romans 12:3). In context, Paul was speaking of getting puffed up about how much faith we have, rather than how much intelligence, but the same principle should apply.

Thinking can be hard work. It requires setting aside preconceived notions and telling that prediction engine to chill out and prepare to accept new information. This sort of thinking requires some uninterrupted time. When I am driving, my brain is furiously anticipating all the stupid moves that the other idiots on the road could make. I just know that half of the oncoming drivers are yakking on their cell phones, and another thirty percent are otherwise distracted. My mental energies are directed at keeping an escape route open. Sometimes, I am so wrapped up in how the other drivers could do something stupid that I do something stupid myself. This of course, reinforces the belief that all drivers – myself included - are just disasters waiting for the right opportunity. So I do not find that driving is a good time to ponder the deep philosophical issues of the day. I am too busy surviving to think clearly; I let the predictive engine run wide open.

Time to think
In our interrupt-driven world, there is rarely a time when we can focus on one thought for any length of time. Our attention spans have become shorter as our access to information has expanded exponentially. News sources feed us carefully filtered facts designed to lead us to some conclusion. Talk radio hands us our opinions fully formed and mocks the contrarian opinions of the many callers. Every Web site is a sub-set of information designed to convince us of something.

If you notice, there seems to be a defining theme for each time period. The late 90’s we were taught to fear the anarchy that would result from the Y2K computer crisis. No sooner was that fear safely past than September 11th, 2001 issued in a crisis so that we could fear terrorists. Not long after the Department of Homeland Security had been established, we had to go to war because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After the American people wearied of hearing about the war, suddenly the price of oil doubled, raising prices at the pump dramatically. As I write this, the unthinking masses are being herded into pressuring Congress to open up costal waters and the Alaskan reserve so that we can drill for oil in those areas.

Sometimes, I stop to catch my breath. It is exhausting being stampeded from one opinion to another; I need to get some time alone to think.

Consider what this means. Shut out the world for a while, quiet the voice inside your head that bounces from topic to topic like a sugared-up toddler in a toy store. Slow your breathing, relax your muscles, and focus on one thought for a minute. Taking time to think is a lot like praying.

Jesus talked about entering our ‘closet’ of prayer in Matthew 6:6: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret…” This closet is an inner sanctuary where we can be alone with God. In our world, this may not be a physical location so much as a behavioral practice.

Communion with God is a good place to examine our preconceived notions. Ask Him if the future really has to be as we anticipate it. Discuss current events with your heavenly Father and seek His opinions on the things that we are being fed. But above all, be aware of that predictive engine running in your brain and challenge its rule set. Because those rules often take the place of thinking; we simply make assumptions about the future and wait for them to be validated.


Inhibitor to faith?

This amazing predictive ability of the brain is what prevents us from enjoying faith to the fullest. Because we have often seen similar situations and circumstances, we are convinced that the outcomes must follow the pattern that our predictions forecast. In a sense, we have faith that things will continue as they have… and so they do.

Thinking that all things will continue as they have is not an inhibitor to faith so much as an unintended application of faith. It rarely enters our awareness that expecting things to continue is a form of faith. After all, it takes so little faith to believe that nothing miraculous will happen today.

The opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is faith applied backwards – doubt is faith that something will NOT happen, rather than faith that it will happen. For example, if I want it to rain, and pray for it to rain, and look out at the sunny sky and think to myself, “It’s not going to rain today”, then I have just put faith in failure. I have canceled out the effects of my earlier prayer by applying an equal amount of the substance of faith, but I applied it in the opposite direction. So doubt is a form of faith.

Fear is also a form of faith – a specialized subset of faith as a whole. Fear is faith in bad things happening. It has side effects like adrenalin fatigue, panic, or just a low level of constant stress. Fear is faith in personal harm, but it is a form of faith. Perfect love casts out fear because when we feel loved and protected, we are no longer thinking about being harmed.

So what can inhibit faith? Only a failure to think at all. If you can turn off your brain and park your body, you will have no faith. Other than that, if you are thinking, you can use your faith to change the world around you. For good or ill, whether we intend to do so or not, we do change the world around us with our faith. It is the way that we have been created.