is a Scary Word

“Believing” is a Scary Word

Many people get nervous when I celebrate believing. They point to

an asymmetry between our sense of what “doubting” and “believing”

mean. Believing seems to entail commitment, where doubting does not.

It commonly feels as though we can doubt something without

committing ourselves to rejecting it—but that we cannot believe

something without committing ourselves to accepting it and even living

by it. Thus it feels as though we can doubt and remain unscathed, but

believing will scathe us. Indeed believing can feel hopelessly bound up

with religion. (“Do you BELIEVE? Yes, Lord, I BELIEVE!”)

This contrast in meanings is a fairly valid picture of natural ,individual

acts of doubting and believing. (Though I wonder if doubting leaves us

fully unchanged.) But it’s not a picture of doubting and believing as

methodological disciplines or unnatural games. Let me explain the

distinction.

Natural individual acts of doubting happen when someone tells us

something that seems dubious or hard to believe. (“You say the earth is

spinning? I doubt it. I feel it steady under my feet.”) But our culture has

learned to go way beyond natural individual acts of doubting. We

humans had to struggle for a long time to learn how to doubt unnaturally

as a methodological discipline. We now know that for good thinking, we

must doubt everything, not just what’s dubious; indeed the whole point

of critical thinking is to try to doubt what we find most obvious or true or

right (as Lippman advises).

In order to develop systematic doubting, we had to overcome

believing: the natural pull to believe what’s easy to believe, what we

want to believe, or what powerful people tell us to believe. (It’s easy to

believe that the earth is stationary.) As a culture, we learned systematic

doubting through the growth of philosophical thinking (Greek thinkers

developing logic, Renaissance thinkers developing science, and

Enlightenment thinkers pulling away from established religion). And we

each had to learn to be skeptical as individuals, too—for example

learning not to believe that if we are very very good, Santa Claus/God

will bring us everything we want. As children, we begin to notice that

naïve belief leads us astray. As adults we begin to notice the dreadful