How do you know if you believe?
stonespring
Shipmate
in Purgatory
How do you know if you believe in God or Christian teaching, or any other doctrine or ideology that is not easily proven or disproven by material evidence?
I know that many people with a healthy faith experience a significant amount of doubt that is sometimes quite strong, but I am not even sure how to tell if I have ever believed any of the religious things that I have said that I believed.
Is just saying that you believe without the intent to deceive others enough? Or does real belief require something more?
Is belief a matter of faking it until you make it? Does prayer, worship, reading scripture and other Christian writings, and living in accordance with Christian morals enough “make” you count as a real believer, as long as you haven’t made an inner decision not to believe, even if you never really know if you believe or not?
Is intellectual faith some kind of arbitrary on/off switch in your mind that you decide in a glass half full/half empty way to say if you have it or not, and the only thing that matters a “lived” faith (prayer, morality, and participation in Christian community), even if one’s mind never really knows if it believes or not?
Or is there a different way to know if you believe, and if so, what is it?
(I’m expecting people to compare this to the stereotypical Calvinist or Puritan anxiety about whether one is predestined or not, even if one “thinks” that one is a believer, and the mythical-or-not historical Protestant work ethic that was supposedly motivated by a desire to show evidence of one’s being predestined, but I’m not a Calvinist and that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.)
I know that many people with a healthy faith experience a significant amount of doubt that is sometimes quite strong, but I am not even sure how to tell if I have ever believed any of the religious things that I have said that I believed.
Is just saying that you believe without the intent to deceive others enough? Or does real belief require something more?
Is belief a matter of faking it until you make it? Does prayer, worship, reading scripture and other Christian writings, and living in accordance with Christian morals enough “make” you count as a real believer, as long as you haven’t made an inner decision not to believe, even if you never really know if you believe or not?
Is intellectual faith some kind of arbitrary on/off switch in your mind that you decide in a glass half full/half empty way to say if you have it or not, and the only thing that matters a “lived” faith (prayer, morality, and participation in Christian community), even if one’s mind never really knows if it believes or not?
Or is there a different way to know if you believe, and if so, what is it?
(I’m expecting people to compare this to the stereotypical Calvinist or Puritan anxiety about whether one is predestined or not, even if one “thinks” that one is a believer, and the mythical-or-not historical Protestant work ethic that was supposedly motivated by a desire to show evidence of one’s being predestined, but I’m not a Calvinist and that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.)
Comments
I am certainly not a Calvinist.
The person I follow the most, Luther, would say there are times when in doubt just hold onto the knowledge that "I am baptized."
I am not saying baptism is magical, but in baptism I know God has declared me to be God's child. I am constantly refreshed through Word and Sacrament.
I think it depends on the individual. There are some for whom the intellectual argument has to work, some whose formation in faith is a process of socialisation in community, and others who discover their life’s meaning by living it. The last of these not quite being “fake it till you make it”, but perhaps living “as if…”
But I think it is difficult to maintain a faith which is associated with certain practices if you don’t participate. Those practices will vary with the ways different religions understand what is essential, and the varying traditions within them.
Not to undermine prayer and other forms of experience, but for Christian folks I wonder if the most important (and challenging) practice is loving your neighbour as yourself. That’s the struggle for me.
IME, it feels like the emotional experience of truth when something 'clicks', which usually accompanies (sometimes a little before, sometimes a little after) a rational understanding of something difficult. The non-religious experience this most strongly reminds me of was my postgrad (engineering) experience, which was perhaps similar (a bit of a walk in the dark) in a very different area - so not a unique experience, for me, albeit these days a rare occurrence outside of things to do with faith.
These are all damned good questions that I ask myself on a regular basis, with little in the way of answers.
Ultimately belief is belief,not provable fact but for some people can mean much more than 'mere'facts.
Cardinal Newman said something like 'a man of faith is a man who trusts his beliefs more than he doubts them'.
Yes, I understand that.
My belief stands firm because, in the darkest times, the light is still there. I always remember WW’s prayer “I hold you in the living, loving light”.
It’s only a ‘feeling’ - I understand that. But when I’m feeling totally awful the light is still there, so I believe it’s a feeling in the spirit rather than mind/body/emotions.
Hard to describe 🤔
If it is a matter of the will then it can be turned on and off at will. If it is of the emotions we don't have that control.
Pretty sure it cannot be the intellect alone.
Maybe its a mixture of things.
If you behave like someone who believes then, unless there's good reason to think you're doing so for some other reason, you do believe. Or at least you can have faith that you are.
I suppose: if you attend church regularly what would have to change for you not to go?
This is a really good point. As I have changed over the years I have often had to look at what I do and how I decide, to understand what I really believe. There is something here about matching up unconscious everyday ‘going on’ with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Sometimes I can be struck by this kind of realisation in a moment. A good example would be several decades ago when some friends asked me to be a godparent. In the act of making the declarations of belief and promises on behalf of the child, I realised I was serious about what I was saying (and did not know before hand that would be the case).
This is, I believe the nub of it. If I look inside and ask, "Do I love my wife?" I get little back as my attention is not on Mrs RR but elsewhere. If I look at Mrs RR my feelings are real and lead to action. So it is with God.
As to doubts .... Tennyson comes to mind,
" “I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
Don't you just know if you believe or not. Isn't it analogous to liking cabbage or having earache? Isn't it self-evident?
Or maybe there is a specific meaning of "believe" that I haven't come across.
There’s then the question of whether one’s choices are affected by one’s beliefs or by one’s inherent sense of right and wrong. And, indeed, whether those are even different things in the first place.
Do I shun murder because it’s written in the Bible that “thou shalt not murder”, or is it because I just don’t feel it is a good thing to do and would continue to avoid even if I became atheist overnight?
I don’t really feel any sense of doubt or spiritual struggle. Rather, I worry that all of the time that I have identified as Christian that I have been just pretending and playing a game with fun rituals and rules and the good feeling that comes from being part of a group rather than having any real faith.
To be honest, the above sounds exactly like doubt. Which is a bit confusing.
What does ‘real faith’ look / feel like for you? How would you know you have it?
Yup, it's good enough for me as well!
Did CS Lewis say something along the lines of “being a believer means building barriers in your mind, past which you don’t allow your thinking to go”? I know that sinful thoughts are bad thoughts (such as thoughts of disbelief) that you choose to indulge in rather than bad thoughts that randomly come into your head, but I have a very hard time not obsessing over all kinds of negative thoughts and thoughts that question everything about my reality.
I think I also heard that Lewis said that having faith means doing at least one thing a day because He told you to, and avoiding at least one thing a day because He told you not to do that. From the moment I started identifying as Christian, I’m not sure if any of my actions other than ritualistic prayer, worship, or other ritualistic observances have ever been motivated by anything than secular thinking.
There’s a whole spectrum from full on certainty, through to Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited believing *because* it’s a lovely story so he wants to, via David Cameron thinking his belief was like ‘Magic FM in the Chilterns’ - the signal comes and goes - and John Betjeman absolutely torturing himself with the tension between faith and doubt.
Fundamentally I think, for me, ‘do I believe’ is a more first order question than ‘why do I believe’ - the second question is just detail and intellectual tidying up.
A number of people have brought up religious belief as something you feel or experience rather than are intellectually
convinced of. Since I was a child and even before I chose to identify as a Christian as an adult, I have felt a warm fuzzy glow embracing me and extending everywhere that I have thought was the presence of God, but I’m worried that that has just been a narcissistic undemanding feel good New Age Spirituality, a God that exists solely for comfort like some kind of teddy bear. I can also make myself feel like I am having an intense spiritual experience quite easily. Just slow my breath, look at something beautiful or spiritually inspiring, let my eyes roll back into their sockets a little, and rock back and forth and voila, I feel like I’m entering a trance. Do this in a church service or at Eucharistic adoration and I’ll very easily feel as if something real and powerful is working through me (I won’t go as far as speaking in tongues or fainting or flailing my arms and legs as if taken by the Spirit - I don’t go to those types of services anyway). I can get a similar feeling from singing or listening to Church music. It all just feels like fleeting emotional self-manipulation and doesn’t seem like evidence of any secure or lasting belief.
It’s easy for me to say to myself, “I believe in God and in an afterlife.” But I don’t know if that means that I really believe those things or whether I want to believe those things - or whether I want to think of myself as the type of person who believes those things, or whether I want to belong to a social group or community that believes those things.
Furthermore, when I recite something like one of the Creeds, my mind is very good at stretching the interpretation of the words to mean whatever I want them to, and even in engaging in a bit of doublethink when hermeneutical gymnastics are at their limit. My ease and relative comfort in doing this makes me worry that I don’t have any firm convictions or even much of a conscience at all.
Last one, because at this point when I said something like that a priest once said to me something like ‘never mind all that, do you believe?’
Basically - I interpreted it - is it actually helpful to overthink it?
I only contribute this because I’ve been there, not because I expect you to be the same.
I associate “doubt” with a suspicion that something else, such as atheism or another religion, is true. Whereas my concern is more that I don’t really believe anything at all - that religion is all just dress up and pretend for me. I know that is also a form of doubt, just not capital-D Doubt like I am used to thinking of it.
I can identify with all these forms of doubt.
It seems unavoidable. We can't actually know, therefore we can only hope, hypothesise, hedge, alliterate.
I actually don't recite the creed.
When I studied theology I thought I believed. Then I realised that it was a self contained, self authenticating system of thought. And it crumbled. But I'm OK with that. I live in hope that "all will be well" in the end.
If you can't really be sure about whether it is worthwhile trying to love God (who may or may not exist) then you should concentrate on 'loving your neighbour' who does exist.
that is something which you can do and you might find that it makes the first of the two great commandments easier.
Whereas I came out of a similar period in my life unable to imagine that God was remotely interested in my well-being, if they even existed.
The things you mention as Lewis quotes are almost certainly someone else. There’s very little of his work i haven’t read, and the ideas you mention are totally foreign to him.
It's an interesting set of questions.
In my experience the answer largely depends on who's asking and their definitions. For example:
I don't speak in tongues, or experience other charismatic gifts of the spirit.
I see no reason to question the reality of evolution.
I haven't sold all I have and given it to the poor. I am not even a social justice activist.
I will not vote in ways that would guarantee my entrance into the Kingdom of God.
I love a quite a few atheists, agnostics, blasphemers, apostates, gender non-conformists, and other reprobates. I understand the reasonableness of the views they have expressed to me and wrestle with what that means for me.
I do not "witness."
I do not meditate on "what God wants me to learn" from suffering. In fact I reject the very idea.
And much, much more.
By many standards of belief reflected in these statements about myself, I do not believe in God, Jesus or Christian teachings any meaningful way. At best. By some standards, I will be damned because I don't exhibit the most basic features of saving faith.
I am really not very interested in worrying about if I believe right or not any more. I'll focus more on what Jesus told his followers to do, trust him to be who he claimed to be, and deal with the stuff I can't. Which I think is enough belief.
Thanks for finding words to describe this.... it's how this all feels to me too....some of the details may differ slightly, but this is essentially the conundrum of faith for me.
My answer when asked this question is (channeling the 17th Centuray divineand poet Thomas Traherne), "I need someone to be grateful to". Not logical, of course, but people aren't.
I think it's relatively easy to 'self-hypnotise' or work up some kind of apparently 'spiritual' atmosphere. I know. I've been there. Done that.
It can apply to a wide range of contexts and not only charismatic services or a stratospherically High Mass.
We are embodied and 'affective' creatures. A degree of 'soulishness' is unavoidable.
As long as we are aware of that and take steps to 'regulate' it in some way - such as the Orthodox canons on what is or isn't acceptable in iconography for instance - then that's as much as we can do.
Other traditions will have their own checks and balances of course and draw lines in different places.
I'll give you an instance.
When I first encountered Orthodoxy I found some of the Easter Vigils remarkably 'transcendent.' Now, I find them hard work and, in recent years quite frankly, rather anti-climactic. We've had instances where so many people who never darken the door of church from one 'Pascha' to the next crowd in that the while thing collapses under the weight and where neighbours have complained of groups of Eastern Europeans chatting and larking around in the street until 2am and chucking cans and candle stubs into their gardens.
The Easter Vigil now feels like an exercise in crowd control with our old and poorly parish priest trying to herd mobs out of the building and to persuade them to go home.
I hasten to add that not all our Eastern European friends behave that way but there are certainly issues with custom and tradition and even downright superstition.
Somehow 'Pascha' happens despite all this.
The Gospel doesn't depend on our 'feelings' or whether I feel 'short-changed' by a ramshackle Easter Vigil that collapses under the weight of custom and familiarity.
It doesn't depend on any 'buzz' I might feel in a charismatic service or whether 'my heart is strangely warmed' by a Bible reading or a Wesleyan hymn or whatever else - lovely though those things are.
That's not to say these things aren't important.
I listened to the Sunday service on Radio 4 this morning. It came from a 'community church' in Nor'n Ir'n' and contained all the familiar tropes I associate with such groups, whether welcome, irritating or indifferent.
No longer my scene, but I don't begrudge them any buzz or deeper impression they derive from it. There's more beneath the surface in any tradition.
As @Heavenlyannie says, there are times when everything seems stripped away and naked faith is all we can cling to.
Feelings can be deceptive.
We can't elide them entirely, of course. Nor should we try. We can't 'empty' ourselves of our own humanity, nor should we attempt to do so.
Thanks for reminding me about Lionel Blue - I’d say he was much missed by me, except clearly I don’t remember him often enough. The mere mention of him by you though and I can hear his voice. Not often you come across someone with a twinkle in their voice, but his had one.
As I was trying to indicate clumsily on another topic, God cannot be known in the 'savoir' sense (nor, I would add, can people) but can be known in the connaitre sense. That is, through a personal relationship.
I would go further: scientific facts only become fully known and appreciated when we have made some sort of personal investment in them. Studied the phenomenon for years perhaps. So called 'objective' knowledge is too often arrived at cheaply and as easily ignored when it is convenient to do so.
The problem is that this experience of "knowing God in a personal relationship" just doesn't happen for some people. For one thing "personal relationship" means different things to different people. It's not like you can pop down the pub for a couple of pints with God, meet up for a walk over the mountains or have a two way conversation. So what is meant by the phrase? I'm not personally all that sure.
@stonespring I encourage you to rest in that state you describe. If you can induce it, that's brilliant. If you start thinking about the ins and outs of belief, just put those thoughts aside if you can, and get back to that place of peace. If you can't push them aside, that's ok. They are just thoughts. Tomorrow you might find you can put them aside.
Try to remember that you are worthy of love, if you can. Most of all, keep inducing that place of peacefulness, that feeling of connexion. If you can't induce it, by all means put yourself in circumstances where it comes upon you. The feeling you describe is one to be treasured.
I'd agree with this but, do try to nurture the Fruits of the Spirit. To attain these, even in a small way is an earnest, an indication that your feelings are authentic!
But by and large we appear to avoid 'personal relationship' language that can sound twee, trite or pietistic. There's certainly an emphasis on an 'encounter' with the Divine and on the process of 'Theosis' or 'divinization' - of union with Christ etc.
There's a Russian saying, 'The one who prays is the theologian.'
That's why you'll find some Orthodox railing at what that see as the somewhat 'dry' and Scholastic nature of much Western theology.
Saying all that, I have some sympathy for KarlLB's reticence with the 'personal relationship' thing as it can get a bit 'My mate Jesus' and can lead to an emphasis on woozy-woozy feelings and extrovert behaviour which alienates and marginalises those who aren't effusive or demonstrative.
My wife was very much an introvert and always felt under pressure in evangelical charismatic circles where there was an expectation that you had to be upbeat and bouncy all the time.
We can cultivate the 'Fruit of the Spirit' but I tend not to see that as something we consciously 'work up' rather they are qualities and attributes that grow and develop in the normal everyday hustle, bustle and hassle of life. If we have them, other people may recognise them and not we ourselves.