Anatomy of a Belief

In our connection group this past Sunday evening we were discussing John 3:16 in relation to Christian evangelism. It reminded me that I had started a post several weeks back that I had not finished so I thought I would drag it out, clean it up and post something with a bit more depth than just lyrics to my favorite songs each Monday.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

When we use the word belief, what are we talking about? Do we believe things in a vacuum without any supporting beliefs to ground it? And what is more important, what we believe or what we do? In answer to the last question, I believe that our actions run on the rails of our belief. That what we do is a by-product (a natural outworking) of what we believe.

I finished the book several weeks back, but in the book Smart Faith by J.P. Moreland and Mark Matlock, they talk about four components that work together to form our beliefs. They begin the discussion by talking about an unpublished Barna Research Group Report done in 2002 for WisdomWorks Ministries. The title of this report is 2002 Teens and Supernatural Report. While they do not give the exact questions asked, they do give some of the data returned from this report.

During the survey many students would tell the surveyor they believe something, but once we ask them how strongly they believed it, we found that the belief lacked any strength. For instance, when we asked students if they believed there was a spiritual dimension beyond what our five senses could detect, 73 percent said they believed such a dimension existed. Yet when we asked them how strongly they believed this, only 41 percent were confident in their belief. Of the 22 percent who said there was no spiritual dimension, only 8 percent were confident of their belief (pg. 60).

So a question arises. Can something truly be said to be a belief if there is no strength of conviction behind it? This lead them to the following four components of the anatomy of a belief: content, strength, centrality, and plausibility.

Content of a Belief
The content of a belief determines what we believe. The conent may include what we believe about God, morality, politics, life after death, and so on. The content shapes our lives and our actions. A person’s beliefs are so important that, according to Scripture, our eternal destiny is determined by what we believe about Jesus Christ.

By the way people behave today, it would seem that the sincerity of fervency of their beliefs is more important that the content. If we believe that grape jelly will fuel our cars better than gasoline, we can believe that as strongly as we want, but the car isn’t going anywhere. Reality doesn’t care how fervently we believe something. What matters is not whether we strongly believe but whether what we believe is true or not. Just as electricity was real but its power unavailable to us until Ben Franklin’s discovery opened our minds to grasp the true nature of electricity, so the power of the spiritual life is real but unavailable to us if we don’t understand the true of prayer, fasting, or any other spiritual discipline. This is why truth is so powerful. It allows us to cooperate with reality, whether spiritual or physical, and tap into its power.

We’ve all heard people say they live basically good lives and that they don’t believe God will really allow anyone to go to hell. They can believe this all they want to, but the Bible and the natural world point toward the reality of punishment for wrongdoing as well as the reality that Christ is the only way to escape that punishment and find life. There is more reasonable evidence to support punishment than no punishment. So, no matter how much people believe being good is a measure for eternal life, if this content is not true, it isn’t worth believing. The content of a believe will shape your life whether the content is true or not.

Strength of a Belief
There is more to a belief than its content, however. Even if a polled student chooses a true answer, if she doesn’t have the conviction about the answer, then it won’t likely make an impact on her life. To have strength of conviction, we must be more than 50 percent convinced it is true. If we are fifty-fifty even, we wouldn’t yet strongly hold the belief. Instead, we would be thinking the belief is probably true but still deciding. As we gain evidence and support for a belief, its strength will grow. The belief may start off as plausible and then become fairly likely, quite likely, beyond reasonable doubt, until finally, completely certain…The more we are certain of a belief, the more the belief becomes a part of our very soul, and the more we rely on the belief as a basis for action.

Centrality of a Belief
Content of a belief and strength of a belief may seem pretty obvious, but the centrality of a belief is more subtle. The centrality of a belief is the degree of importance the belief plays in our entire set of beliefs - that is, in our worldview. The more central the belief is, the greater the impact it will make in our daily life.

For example, most people would agree based on substantial evidence that exercise is good for us. And many people personally believe exercise is good for them. So one would expect to find more people at the gym and fewer obese people, yet we don’t. In fact, obesity is a growing problem in our nation. Even when people hold true content (exercise is good for them) and strength to the belief (little question that it is true), if the belief is not a central belief in their lives, then they won’t be rushing to go work out. Now, a person may become ill or have a situation arise that moves exercise to the center of his life, but for now, if the belief isn’t central, then the person won’t act on it.

Many Christians hold true beliefs about God, feel more than 50 percent strong in their conviction, but their beliefs are not central to their lives. This means their beliefs about God have little impact on how they live each day.

Plausibility of a Belief
Along with beliefs, our minds measure the world through plausibility. Many great moves are based on convincing the viewer of the plausibility of the central concept for the story. Jurassic Park, for instance, would have failed (even with the impressive special effects) if the viewer was not convinced that dinosaurs could be genetically engineered. Seeing is not believing; the storyteller had to creat a world in which we could believe this far-fetched idea. Some are more easily convinced than others. We’ve all known “fantasy killers,” the people who refuse to buy into the world presented in the story. These people continually point out plot and credibility gaps. To be believable, an idea must be plausible. For instance, if a friend approached you with the idea that the earth is flat, you wouldn’t even entertain such a notion. Our culture and society has so deeply accepted the concept that earth is round that any argument supporting a flat earth is viewed as too ridiculous to even consider.

Slavery of African-Americans provides a more serious example. An honest examination of the practice finds it wrong on all counts. Slavery blatantly contradicted the values of our nation: equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How could the hypocrisy survive? The plausibility structure of our nation during that era offers one answer: At that time, many people did not consider slaves human beings, so the plausibility of slaves possessing rights on par with nonslaves was incomprehensible. The truth that slaves were human beings was not part of their plausibility structure until many thinking people began to realize the incongruities.

Unfortunately, the plausibility structure surrounding Christianity has changed to its detriment. At one time in America, belief in God and the authority of Scripture was considered plausible. That is not so today. Many factors have changed our plausibility structure, but one event marked a turning point. In the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, creation and evolution theories were put on trial. Because the Christian mind had already been weakened and because Christians thus offered few reasonable arguments to support creationism, the faith was made a mockery.

If a culture reaches a point where the beliefs of Christianity are no longer part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to even entertain the idea that the beliefs are true.

While I apologize for the length of this post, I hope that this gives us something to think about. We may not agree with everything that Moreland and Matlock had to say regarding belief or how its different components, but I know for me it has caused me to investigate and view my beliefs in a different light. I know that I believe certain things are true and I believe them rather strongly, but how are they impacting my life; how central are they in comparison to other beliefs that I hold and how plausible is the belief that I have? Well, whether you agree with all they wrote or not, hopefully it will give you some added insights to your beliefs as well.

Motor Of Love

I can’t get over your love
No matter how hard life seems
There’s a light in my dreams
Thanks to you

My friends keep asking me why
With such a smile on my face
There’s a home at my place
Thanks to you

I don’t want anything from you
Turn on your motor of love

Motor of love
Motor of love
Heavenly Father look down from above
I can’t get over your powerful
Motor of love

I can’t get over your love
No matter how lost I feel
I know my love is real
Thanks to you

You simply reached out your hand
And touched me deep in my soul
I came in out of the cold
Thanks to you

I won’t steal anything from you
You give me more than enough

Motor of love
Motor of love
Heavenly Father look down from above
I can’t get over your powerful
Motor of love

There was a time
When I was down
And counted out
Well I remember I felt so bad
I nearly threw away
Nearly threw away the keys
Oh no, no, no, no, no

Motor of love
Motor of love
Heavenly Father look down from above

Motor of love
Motor of love
Heavenly Father look down from above
I can’t get over your powerful
Motor of love

- Paul McCartney, Flowers In The Dirt (1989)

While no one can accuse Macca of being a theologian by any stretch of the imagination, this is still a pretty powerful song. While the words may not be doctrinally correct, I do think the sentiment is there in the picture he attempts to paint with them. By using the word motor I do not sense that Paul is trying to convey an unfeeling, mechanistic type of love being churned out unknowingly. There is definitely a very personal touch to the love that Paul is singing out and therefore I would tend to view the motor as a powerful, yet controlled force that is personable and is able to caringly touch us on the level of where our soul resides. Whether Paul is talking about the Judeo-Christian God here or not, I don’t really know if there is anyway of telling. But if he isn’t, then he was singing about something that is awfully similar - a Heavenly Father that looks down on us and loves us and touches us in order to show that he loves us in spite of who we are.

She’s Leaving Home

Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more

She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the backdoor key
Stepping outside she is free.

She (We gave her most of our lives)
is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives)
home (We gave her everything money could buy)
She’s leaving home after living alone
For so many years. Bye, bye

Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown
Picks up the letter that’s lying there
Standing alone at the top of the stairs
She breaks down and cries to her husband
Daddy our baby’s gone.
Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly
How could she do this to me.

She (We never thought of ourselves)
is leaving (Never a thought for ourselves)
home (We struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She’s leaving home after living alone
For so many years. Bye, bye

Friday morning at nine o’clock she is far away
Waiting to keep the appointment she made
Meeting a man from the motor trade.

She (What did we do that was wrong)
is having (We didn’t know it was wrong)
fun](Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy)
Something inside that was always denied
For so many years. Bye, bye
She’s leaving home. Bye, bye

- The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Well, for those of you who did not know, it was the 40th Anniversary of this album this past Friday (June 1, 2007). This was truly a landmark album on so many different levels, from the technical recording aspects to production to packaging to the overall concept, it is remarkable at how this album really helped cast the mold for the Pop genre that has since flooded out over the airwaves and launched countless careers and bands. I could have picked any song off of this album as my choice today, but I specifically went with She’s Leaving Home because, in my opinion, this launched the entire pop music movement. The soaring harmonies and the great melody line, the hooky lyrics and lush musical arrangment - this is the prototype for what a pop song ought to sound like. It is what all pop songs since have strived to attain. If you write pop songs, trust me, this is what your pop song dreams of being when it grows up.