The bat that flits at close of eve has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night, speaks the unbeliever’s fright.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Oh yes, I believe! I believe in what I can see, and what I cannot see.
Patrick White (1912–90), Riders in the Chariot
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), poet
1 | The word belief originally meant something closer to the German belieben, to love, a kind of loyalty.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11: 1
To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
When Gentlemen can see –
But Microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
Emily Dickinson, poet
2 | Niels Bohr had a rabbit’s foot pinned to his laboratory door.1 A visiting scientist expressed surprise that he of all people could possibly believe that a rabbit’s foot would bring him luck, to which Bohr replied, ‘I was told it would bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.’
Science, too, has its own brand of faith: the belief that an answer is likely to be true if the results that it predicts are in accord with experimental observation. The more accurate the observation, and the more critical the questions that the experimenter asks, the greater is the scientist’s faith in the answer; but this does not mean that the answer is ‘right’, or that the scientist has discovered ‘truth’. Scientific theories can never really be proved true; we simply have faith in them to a greater or lesser extent depending on the difficulty and number of tests that they have passed.
The ‘necessary mysteries’ that scientists now accept as a result of these tests lie alongside the other set of eternal mysteries that are the province of philosophy and religion. Their reality is overwhelmingly supported by experimental evidence and their existence, to my mind, constitutes very strong evidence for the existence of a world beyond our direct experience.
Len Fisher, Weighing the Soul
3 | For the sake of a set of massive symmetrical particles, for the sake of parallel universes, for the sake of some hidden variable, the particulate nature of the universe might be preserved. What a strange and wonderful belief system material reductionism is.
To say that one needs art or politics that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognising and condemning things as evil; however, it might stop one from being utterly convinced of the certainty of one’s own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility, and how the very act of certainty, or authoritativeness, can bring disaster.
William Kentridge, artist and animator
A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.
Richard Dawkins
Of all modern delusions, the idea we live in a secular age is the furthest from reality … Liberal humanism itself is very obviously a religion – a shoddy replica of Christian faith markedly more irrational than the original article, and in recent times more harmful.
John Gray, philosopher
And he sigheth deeply in his spirit, and saith, ‘Why doth this generation seek after a sign?’
Mark 8: 11–12
‘I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.’
‘What is that?’ said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’
‘That is a beautiful mysticism – it is a –’
‘Please do not call it by any name,’ said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly.
‘You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it …’
George Eliot, Middlemarch
4 | What is truth? asked Pontius Pilate, his existential cry propelling him out of time.
Truth, that doubtful onion.
Patrick White, novelist
If you’re going to tell the truth, make sure you make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.
Neil Simon, playwright
Truth and belief are uncomfortable words in scholarship. It is possible to define as true only those things that can be proved by certain agreed criteria. In general, science does not believe in truth or, more precisely, science does not believe in belief.
Understanding is understood as the best fit to the data under the current limits (both instrumental and philosophical) of observation. If science fetishized truth it would be religion, which it is not. However, it is clear that under conditions that Thomas Kuhn designated as ‘normal science’ (as opposed to the intellectual ferment of paradigm shifts) most scholars are involved in supporting what is, in effect, a religion. Their best guesses become fossilized as a status quo, and the status quo becomes an item of faith. So when a scientist tells you that ‘the truth is …’, it is time to walk away. Better to find a priest.
Timothy Taylor, archaeologist
… feeling or truth. Both may be important, but they are not the same thing.
Richard Dawkins
Intolerance consists in being so sure of the truth that you want to impose it on everyone else by persuasion, or even by force. We must have an open mind to realise that what suits us doesn’t necessarily suit others.
Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus
5 | He is quoting some recent study, the results of which, he says, conclusively proved the inefficacy of prayer. Face distorted by anger, hideous, odd words and phrases, mumbo jumbo, naïvety, Father Christmas, slavery, Church, fear, children. His anger pulls at them like a riptide, ready to take under and away anyone who dares to struggle. Nobody says a word. Shoulders tense and rise, neck sinews twitch involuntarily, they stay as still as they can as if they were small animals that had stumbled by accident upon some voracious predator.
6 | The universe is full of meaning but we do not know what the meaning means, except for when we recognise it as the truth, like music that makes sense even though we cannot say in words what sense.
If ‘truth’ were whatever I could understand – it would end up being just a small truth, one my size.
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
7 | Truth has a gauge finer than the gauge of even our finest nets. Choose your gauge and live accordingly.