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You Gotta Believe?
The word belief, or more properly, the concept, does have value - but only in matters where certainty is impossible, such as predictions about future events or guessing about peoples' motives. And the word itself stands for different concepts. One can speak of one's beliefs as in one's principles. One can hold beliefs about future events - and here one is implicitly admitting uncertainty. Ore one can say I believe I'll have a beer - which is simply a figure of speech one usually uses as a more polite way of telling the waitress "bring me a brew, wench!"
But in the most important sense, and in the most important cases, the quote is correct. Reality does not require belief. One cannot see that the sky is blue but claim that one will believe that it is orange. One cannot know math but believe that two plus two makes five. And one cannot choose to believe.
The ultimate bizzarity of the religious faithful is their admonition that one has to try or choose to believe in God. What exactly does this mean? Either one does or does not believe something. It is not a matter of choice. I can no more choose to believe something than I can chose to know something - either I do or I don't. And if God exists, should one prefer to know this, rather than to believe it? If God, as in a personal being whose wishes in some way determine one's ultimate fate does exist, wouldn't one rather know this than relegate it to the realm of uncertainty about future events or the intentions of others?
Of course, it does all come down to the intentions of others. Those who say that you have to believe are social metaphysicians with faulty epistemologies. They are the one's who 'believe' that reality is what other people think. They find no incongruity in the idea that one has to believe in God because for them ideas at more than one or two removes from the perceptual are floating abstractions - words they have heard others assert which they mouth like parrots. Such people don't understand science or history or morality. They don't understand Avagadro's experiment determining the number of molecules in a drop of oil by measuring its area as it spreads out on a surface of oil. They don't understand how the fact that sediment layers all over the earth always lie in a certain order, with those holding more primitive fossils and more decayed radioactive isotypes lying beneath those with more recent fossils and less decayed isotypes shows that the earth is slightly older than 4,004 BC. They don't actually even know that the world existed before they were born.
If God exists, he knows whether or not you "believe" in him. Going to church and mouthing the ceremony, or sleeping through it so that at least your neighbours see that you attend scores you no points. I don't believe in God, and so I do at least show Him this much respect, I don't go into His house and blaspheme by pretending to a belief I don't have.
Ted Keer
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Reality does not require believing - it demands knowledge, which comes from your reasoning faculty [which is why you have it, and what it is for].... only the non-real demands believing..
