Belief Isn't Binary
When we talk about belief, we should be talking about plausibility.
Most Christians talk about belief as if it were binary—on or off, black or white, open or shut. We think of people as being in or out. We say things like, “She lost her faith” and “He’s not a Christian anymore.” Christians are the believers, everyone else is an unbeliever. But we should be more careful about how we use language; it shapes reality. And this is one area where common Christian ways of speaking of unbelief haven’t served us well.
While it is certainly true that people can leave Christianity, if our basic metaphor for belief is an on/off switch, we are not living in reality. The truth is more nuanced, patchwork, and humbling.
We Should Be Talking About Plausibility When We Talk About Belief
When we talk about belief, we should be talking about plausibility.
Plausibility is a big word that will help us think well when we think about belief. It refers to the believableness of beliefs—how much credibility, worth, or trustworthiness we assign to a belief or view of the world.
When our beliefs have a high level of plausibility they are more static, fixed, and stable. Each belief holds its place in the web of ideas that make up our view of reality. But when plausibility ebbs and a belief or cluster of beliefs becomes less believable, the network becomes imbalanced, frangible, and primed to shift.
When someone becomes a Christian, it is because of plausibility. When someone leaves Christianity, it is because of plausibility. When apologetics fail or succeed, when we experience seasons of doubt, when we find that either our faith has crumbled in the face of our suffering or that our faith is a mighty fortress against the pain that finds us, it is all because of plausibility.
Belief isn’t like the Titanic, unsinkable until the fateful iceberg hits. If it does hit an iceberg and begin to sink, it is because there was already more going on under the surface. Plausibility is always a concatenation of many things. Although there might be a straw that breaks (or makes) the camel’s back, there are still many straws.
Plausibility directs our attention to the iceberg, to the straws, to the web of considerations that together make up the things we believe. If we can get our heads around it, we will have more insight into why so many people are experiencing a plausibility collapse today when it comes to their confidence in Christianity.
What Affects Plausibility?
The million-dollar question, then, is: What affects plausibility? What makes it grow and diminish? Where is that hidden threshold which, when crossed, makes us say “I believe this.” What makes us walk away from convictions we formerly cherished?
For many, these are not academic questions. They are life and death—for themselves or for those they love.
The short answer to the question of what affects plausibility is: nearly everything. Anything can be a part of our believing or unbelieving. We are like flat-bottomed boats in a turbulent sea; we blow with the wind and rock in the waves.
We will look at each of the most potent factors in our believing at greater depth in the future, but here is the start of a list by way of introduction:
Rationality
Part of what it means to be human is to be a thinking creature and so our belief shifts will always have a rational component.
If questions about Christianity present themselves and don’t find satisfactory answers, they can create a faultline inside one’s mind, a seam in one’s faith. Questions deferred can cause plausibility crises if enough pressure builds along that faultline and doesn’t find release.
Our rationality should be a tool of faith. If Christianity actually does describe reality truly, we should not be afraid to break it with our questions. In fact, we ought to riddle it with questions, to seek to wring from it answers that match the way the world really is. Handled in this way, even doubts can be the doorway to greater trust.
Culture
Everywhere you find humans, you find culture. We create norms and modes of being in the groups we inhabit, no matter what size the group. Believing always has a cultural charge. Our culture’s plausibility framework pulls at our efforts at believing like the moon pulls the tide. Culture can render certain ideas more or less believable before we even know them.
We do not assess plausibility in a vacuum but within a complex (and often invisible) cultural matrix of judging value and assigning believability. You might say culture circumscribes plausibility. It is difficult to see beyond your culture’s plausibility structures. If you do see beyond them it is both the product and cause of a whole cascade of plausibility shifts.
Emotions
In the Christianity of my upbringing, emotions were seen as a less reliable means of understanding the world than rationality. (Even the way the statement is framed shows a bias that the world is something we navigate by understanding it.) God also meant for us to feel our way through reality; our emotions are supposed to support our efforts at conforming our plausibility structures to what is real. Things are supposed to feel true as well as make sense.
The emotional aspect of our nature is always a player when it comes to structuring our beliefs. If something feels wrong, but makes sense it is harder to assign much plausibility to it. If something sits well emotionally, but we don’t fully comprehend it, we may still want to believe it. Emotions can put a headwind or a tailwind on any belief and that effect is multiplied in a culture like ours in which emotions and intuitions have been given pride of place when it comes to discerning what is real.
Fullness
Fullness is the good, the true, and the beautiful. When we experience fullness - be it through a relationship, a movie, an act of kindness, the birth of a child - it helps us orient ourselves morally and spiritually. We have a sense that something transcendent is breaking through the clouds of everyday life like a ray of light.
Plausibility follows fullness; we always want to believe in it. We want to rearrange our categories to account for it and to get more of it. Fullness is its own justification and does its work at both the conscious level and the preconscious level. It is harder to believe something is untrue if we have experienced it to be good. It is harder to believe something is wrong if we have seen its beauty.
Behavior
Our actions also have an effect on our beliefs. The Law of Cognitive Dissonance says that when a belief and an action are mutually exclusive, and yet the action persists, the belief will eventually conform to the action.
When we do something we don’t believe in, the action produces dissonance that we find difficult to live with. Studies have shown we either stop the action or live to see the belief conformed to the action. The things we can do can either bolster or erode our beliefs; they are existential leverage for our plausibility structures.
That isn’t to say that the effect is always bad. If our actions lead our beliefs like a dog on a leash, it doesn’t mean our beliefs are always mis-led. The hesitant convert who begins a tentative practice of prayer can find that the habit grounds and strengthens her belief in the immediacy and reality of God. The difference between those whose faith endures to old age and those whose faith is discarded is often a question of what practices they have committed themselves to—and the stabilizing effect of those habits on their belief across the span of decades.
Pain
Not all challenges to belief occur in the realm of ideas, life itself presents obstacles that our faith can either help us overcome or be crushed by. The things that happen to us, whether good or bad, can affect how believable we find certain things. Pain can test and destabilize our view of reality and of God. When pain comes to us through a certain channel—a person, a church, an event, a place—it can produce a plausibility allergy to everything associated with that thing.
Psychology
The psychological aspect of humanness has often been downplayed or disregarded among Christians, but it can be a powerful engine behind why we believe or disbelieve something. Our actions and beliefs are not always totally explainable from why we see on the surface. Rather, psychological forces can move beneath our beliefs like currents of magma beneath tectonic plates. When something has the momentum of hidden psychological motivations behind it, it can feel powerful, even irresistible.
Fallenness
Human sin produces “reality-interference.” We don’t believe as we should, will as we should, or love as we should. That isn’t to say that our intuitions and ideas about reality are totally off—God made us such beings as are able to exercise our minds to understand him and his well-ordered universe. But it is to say that we often stumble in our journey into God’s reality. We are prone to running off on odd belief tangents and investing ourselves in them.
Our fallenness drives us to reduce God into something that is more easily categorizable and controllable. These reductions help us carry out our campaign against God’s truth in order to gain power, to play games with our creator, to enfranchise ourselves over others, to dodge pain, and to shift blame. We use them to build unreal castles of belief that we hope are real enough to live in.
Finitude
We find it hard to see past the limits of our own developmental horizon. It takes time to grow, to learn, to see the marred image of God restored in us. Sometimes we settle down inside our current limits and tell ourselves we’ve seen it all, comprehended it all, lived it all in the proper fashion. The portion of reality that lies inside the circle of our beliefs is always only a fraction of the portion that lies outside it because God is reality and so reality has an infinite depth and breadth.
Like a seed, we start with little. Our notions about reality have a lot of mistakes in them. Also like seeds, we grow slowly. Under God’s guidance, however, the tree of our beliefs can grow into mighty oaks, but it takes a long time. Because of our finitude, the story of a human life is a story of shifting plausibilities.
Morality
Moral beauty calls to us any time we encounter it; moral ugliness repels us. If a belief is rationally consistent, but morally repulsive, it is in jeopardy.
In Searching for a Better God, Wade Bradshaw tells the story of how in the early church, the moral purity of the Christian God was seen as desirable against the backdrop of the foibles and misadventures of the Greco-Roman gods. Today, many people find the “God of the Old Testament” implausible because he is viewed as morally inferior to modern standards of right and wrong.
The thinking goes: a good God would never tell Abraham to sacrifice his only son, would not tell Joshua to destroy the cities of Canaan, would not flood the earth, would not be so fickle, self-focused, and angry. These days Yahweh has become Jupiter. When the God of the Bible seems morally regressive, the plausibility dominoes begin to topple.
Relationships
We do not only form our beliefs by looking within, to our thoughts and emotions; we absorb the beliefs of those around us.
We understand ourselves and our reality in relationship to others and the way they understand themselves and reality. This runs counter to the idea that in order to be genuine and authentic, people must find their faith for themselves free of input from parents, society, or any institution, as if they had to become naked souls to have warranted beliefs—but that never really happens.
We are always becoming more like our environment through a steady and often invisible process of osmosis. Our social environment helps determine the range of things we find plausible. We cannot fully shake what we have absorbed. Your social environment is always part of the plausibility structures that channel your belief (even if you are rebelling against it).
Belief Isn’t Binary. Neither Is Deconstruction.
The binary view of belief just doesn’t stand up to reality. That isn’t how belief works. People are always moving through dense, complex frameworks of plausibility. They are the medium in which our faith moves, lives, and has its being.
The binary view hasn’t helped Christians who are deconstructing. To the degree that we conceive of belief as binary, we make it brittle. After all, if belief is a light switch and you aren’t “on,” then you must of “off.” It doesn’t leave very much room for the myriad states between “on” and “off.” In the binary view, belief is like glass, if you leave it untouched it will stay intact, but if you put any weight on it, it might just shatter.
Because if belief is binary, then so is deconstruction. If you begin a deconstruction at all, then you have already left the Christian reservation. That doesn’t leave much room for soft deconstruction, but rather, it hardens and galvanizes the deconstructions that eventually do occur. If belief is binary, then there isn’t room for the many “little deconstructions” that all of us need to undergo as we re-orient our faith and life around God’s infinite reality. The pressure behind doubts and questions builds until it can’t be held back anymore. When the landslide finally comes, it can bring the whole edifice of one’s faith tumbling down too.
The framework of plausibility is more flexible, more friendly, and less prone to snapping in unexpected places at unexpected moments. It is more resilient because it is more real and more human. I can’t help but wonder if the narrative around deconstruction might be shifted if our framework for belief is changed. I can’t help but hope that some of the momentum behind deconstruction these days will be checked if a more robust view of belief becomes dominant in the church.
That long list above is still not comprehensive, but hopefully, it will start to put a dent in the metaphor that belief is an on/off switch. Perhaps it will be enough leverage to make us a bit more slow to judge when someone in our church community comes with questions and doubts. Perhaps it will make us quicker to listen to where people are at and what has brought them there the next time we’re tempted to apply the label unbeliever to someone.
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)
Photo by elnaz asadi on Unsplash