In this post I want to reflect briefly upon the nature of belief. I want to show that it is important to distance the idea of belief from an affirmation concerning the world that can be defended empirically. Indeed it is the idea that belief can be defended empirically that I argue actually eclipses the nature of belief itself. Instead belief must be understood as an affirmation concerning the nature of things that interacts with, but is not restricted to, facts. In short, beliefs are not placed into danger by being exposed as counter-factual.

Take the idea of universal human rights discourse. One does not argue that all people are equal by engaging in empirical research to compare such things as intelligence, awareness etc. between races or sexes. People would be rightly bemused by the researcher who heard we were all equal and then attempted to construct some quantitative research to prove it. The moment we place the belief into the realm of quantitative research the belief is fundamentally undermined. For example, as soon as someone argues that torture is wrong because it does not work, because it is not effective in the obtaining of reliable information, they have given too much ground to the advocate of torture and lost, even if they win. As Zizek points out, the truly disturbing thing about the Bush Administration admitting that they tortured people was not that it was a revelation (we already knew that they were doing it, we had evidence of rendition flights refueling in the UK etc.). Rather the horrific element of the disclosure was the way that they were making the unspeakable speakable. By opening up a debate about torture they took the US into very troubling water. As Zizek says, we all agree that rape is wrong, but we do not rationally defend this position around coffee tables. It would be a moral disaster if rape was to become acceptable for our society to discuss and something we critiqued on rational grounds.

To return then to the belief in universal human rights, it is an affirmation that may at times seem to sit well with empirical research and, at other times, sit badly with it. It is a belief insomuch as we live by it, are inspired by it and fight for it, all the while being able to acknowledge its lack of epistemic justification. In this way it is a tool for reforming the world rather than merely describing it. For instance, it may be true that a certain segment of society commits more crime than another. However, the belief that no specific group of people are more prone to crime, when acted upon, helps to reform the world in such a way that it begins to resemble what we affirm.

Here our belief about how things already are does not necessarily refer to the way the world exists in its present form, but can help us to build the world in such a way that it corresponds to the belief. Such claims turn out to have an eschatological dimension. What we claim to be the case ‘now’ is ‘not yet’. It is a claim that may have no factual legitimacy in the present, but which can create the factual legitimacy when one conforms ones actions to it.

In the battle between Christian fundamentalism and science what we are losing is the category of belief itself. For the Christian fundamentalist wishes to understand his or her theological claims in scientific terms. Here the Christian fundamentalist eclipses belief in the very claim that they can offer it an epistemic foundation. Yet, if we take a traditional Christian idea concerning say, the divinity of Christ, the point is not to attempt to ground this claim in some kind of empirical evidence, as if there were some divine spark in Christ’s eye that we could point to as proof of the claim. It is a belief insofar as it is not problematised by its absurdity (that a flesh and blood fragile being is the incarnation of the source of all). This is not to say that faith claims are always absurd, for there may be times when they appear to make more sense of the world, the point is merely that their experience as counter-factual is not a problem within the tradition.

A belief is thus an affirmation that can be fully asserted by a person at the same time as that person admits its absurdity and acknowledges their own doubt as to its veracity. Indeed this is often when belief is at its must luminous. Take the example of activists who protest against the building of a motorway through a forest. It is perfectly possible to find many, if not most, of the protesters acknowledging both the futility of their mission and even questioning its justification. The protesters may know that, on purely rational grounds, the motorway is needed. They may know that, were they to engage in a public debate, their position would be exposed as lacking the rational framework that would justify their actions. Why? Because, the hegemonic ideological matrix that we exist within dictates the scope and limitations of the rational framework itself. So why do they act? Because the activists are affirming now a reality that does not yet exist, a reality that would, if it was instantiated, justify the actions that they are presently engaged in. They are fighting without justification for a world that would offer that justification.