I began writing this short post in Sant’Agata, an Italian village near Sorrento.
At the time, I was reading a book called Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All.1 When my wife noticed the title, she said, “That’s kind of a dumb question.” In this post, I will argue that she was half right.
The second we left our accommodation, it became obvious that she was at least half right. The journey from Sant’Agata to Sorrento was about thirty minutes by bus, manoeuvring winding, narrow, precipitous coastal roads. Every time we approached a turn, the driver chose one of several different horn sounds to alert oncoming traffic. In several particularly tight situations, the driver was forced to stop completely and even reverse back up the road — all while Vespas sped past whenever they could.
So, in this case, why believe? Why trust the driver to navigate this situation safely? Why trust that the bus was durable and carefully built? Why trust the cliff edges to hold our weight?
While there are several ways to approach these questions, the simplest is this: the reason to trust the driver is because we had no other choice. We were in an Italian village, a short bus ride from the station, which is a longer train ride from Rome, which is a short flight from London, which is a much longer flight from Sydney. The alternative to trusting the bus driver was … what?
Say I had just gotten back into bed and pulled up the covers, content to eat authentic, freshly-made, €6.50 pizza for the rest of my life. Then I wouldn’t be forced to depend on anything at all, right? Sure, I would then be relying on the structural integrity of the bed and on the sanity of the pizza chef (the ‘pizzaiolo’, apparently); but what if I decided that I didn’t care if the bed broke, or even if I got hungry? What if I resolved never to do anything again? Although this grates against human nature, it’s not impossible to imagine.
Even in this most extreme of cases, would I not be making a commitment? Even in an attempt to dissolve all dependence, would I not be putting all my existential cards on the belief that there is no afterlife in which I might deeply regret my apathy?2
In the end, three things are true for humans: (1) we have no choice but to act; (2) every act is a commitment, and (3) therefore every action involves belief.3
Ultimately, our existential position mirrors my position in Italy: inactivity is not an option, and the only alternative is trust. At the bedrock of the human condition is an inescapable responsibility to believe. So the question we must answer is not whether to believe, but in what to believe.
This is what Mikaela meant when she said that asking why we should believe anything at all is dumb. The question simply reveals a misunderstanding of the human condition and the nature of belief. So with respect to the point she was making, Mikaela was entirely correct. And that is the least surprising part of this whole exercise.
The Other Half of Our Predicament
There’s another way to formulate the question, which is much trickier to unpack, so it will be better to interrogate it in a follow-up post.
For now, we’re left with (1) the conclusion that humans simply must operate on the basis of beliefs, and (2) the challenge for each of us to interrogate his or her own framework of beliefs.
On what do you ultimately depend? Can your worldview withstand the pressure of your questions? Your relationships? Your life? Your eternal destiny? The stakes are high, so let’s choose our foundations wisely.
James W. Sire, 1994.
One might ask why we could not approach our eternal destiny with the same pulling-up-the-covers sort of apathy. But the claim I’m making here is that humans must choose what to believe. If someone wants to say that, actually, humans don’t need to choose what to believe, because they could just voluntarily surrender themselves to the worst imaginable eternal future, then I would probably respond that we are no longer talking about humans, because that so deeply contradicts our nature.
I would also probably respond that ‘voluntarily surrendering yourself to the worst imaginable eternal future’ can only be done on the basis of belief — for example, the belief that you are able to discern your own ultimate preferences accurately.
This observation underlies the notion of ‘sins of omission’.