I Don't Believe in Belief

Something that is often zoomed in on as a major fault line in the social world is personal belief. Theologians, philosophers, social scientists and historians all seem to have at some point developed tunnel vision for the relationship between the beliefs that an individual harbors and his/her thoughts, attitudes, actions, happiness, outlook, worldview, political positions, intellectual positions, and outcomes in relationships with others.

Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the existence of souls? Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe in unicorns? Do you believe in aliens? Do you believe in UFOs? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe in science? So many personal beliefs are, ironically, believed to be pivotal in the personal behavior of individuals and collective behavior of groups. We put so much weight on personal belief that revealing one's beliefs could mean the difference between being included in or excluded from a group, praised or ridiculed, taken seriously or ignored, and even in some extreme cases protected or harmed.

Clearly, many people, ironically, strongly believe that there exists a direct relationship between the personal beliefs harbored in people's minds and desirable or undesirable outcomes.

The stakes are high when it comes to what one "believes", to say the least.

However, what if someone was to, uh, believe that personal beliefs are mostly inconsequential?

Here are just a few outcomes that can be realized completely independent of personal belief:

1.) A juror could personally believe that a defendant is not guilty but, using the standard of reasonable doubt and the evidence presented in court, vote that the defendant is guilty.

2.) A scientist could do research and write a paper about his/her findings, but not believe that any of it reflects reality.

3.) A preacher could deliver years of sermons but not believe one word that he/she is saying behind the pulpit.

Someone might ask why anybody in a position like that of a professional scientist would generate and/or communicate ideas, narratives, arguments, etc. that she doesn't believe to be true or real. Well, she probably has bills to pay. There is the pressure to conform. There is the pressure of an employer's job performance expectations.

Furthermore, it is not being dishonest or misleading. Reporting one's research activities and findings and possible interpretations of them isn't saying that she believes or does not believe anything.

Personal belief, it seems clear, has nothing to do with science.

Personal belief can be irrelevant and unrelated to many outcomes.

A voter in an election could even put aside personal belief and vote based on pressure from peers, feelings of anger, guilt or shame, wanting revenge, etc.

Someone might argue that the behavior of the juror in 1.) is in fact determined by belief: his belief in following the spirit and the letter of the law. That, however, could be considered a matter of values rather than a "belief". Furthermore, it is not the kind of belief in question. It is not the same thing as "Do you believe in God?" or "Do you believe in the Big Bang?"

Meanwhile, if it is going to be argued that the juror's beliefs about the law determine his behavior it could then be argued that his beliefs about the authority of the state determined his beliefs about the law, and so forth, and we would have an infinite regress. Where, then, exactly are personal belief and desirable or undesirable outcome causally connected? Is it really the juror's beliefs about the law that determined his conclusion, or is it his beliefs about the authority of the state?

If personal belief can have no impact on a person's behavior, or if a causal connection between belief and behavior/outcome cannot be established, why do so many people give so much weight to what they or others personally believe?

If we value objectivity as much as we say we do, why do we spend so much time and energy concerning ourselves with the subjective experience of personal belief? Is one person's experience of personal belief even the same as the next person's experience of what is supposedly the same belief? Is believing in God the same experience for everybody?

Also, can any person really know what another person believes? Do we really know anything other than what an other person says/reports that he/she personally believes?

Yet, in spite of such a weak foundation for it many people seem to, uh, believe that all kinds of social outcomes from discrimination to scientific discoveries to wars hinge on people's personal beliefs.

So this is all contradictory / internally inconsistent, right? Arguing against believing in the role of beliefs in social outcomes is arguing that a belief determines a social outcome and is therefore circular reasoning, right? Therefore, personal beliefs really do matter, right?

The answer to the latter is, not really. Even if it has been said that belief in the impact of personal beliefs on outcomes has outcomes--and I don't, uh, believe that that has been said anywhere here--it is not the same thing as "Do you believe in God", "Do you believe in souls", "Do you believe in reincarnation?", "Do you believe in anthropogenic climate change?", "Do you believe that men's brains are different from women's?", "Do you believe that humans are born as malleable blank slates or as hard-wired products of evolution?", etc. Those are the kinds of questions where it is, uh, believed that people's personal beliefs are part of a high-stakes process that can produce desirable or undesirable outcomes, or both.

In other words, in the bigger picture personal beliefs do not bear the weight that people insist on putting on them. A person’s personal beliefs, which may not be knowable to others anyway, don’t tell us much about anything other than a description of him/her. The only correlation that can be established is between what a person SAYS he/she believes and other variables. A clear causal relationship between personal beliefs and other variables does not appear to have ever been established by any method.

So where does this leave us? It is simple: don't ask so much about subjective things like people's personal beliefs. Instead of asking, oh, "Do you believe in God?", ask objective things like, "Does God exist?" The latter, I would argue, is the kind of question that has led to things like scientific discoveries, engineering feats, happier lives, etc.

What purpose does knowledge of people's personal beliefs serve other than to aid in discrimination, social marginalization, etc.? What purpose does it serve other than to justify the same behaviors that it is supposedly meant to help avoid?