What you believe vs. what you think

Jordan Peterson is famously cagey about whether he believes in God. He tiptoes around it with all sorts of caveats and explanations.

I’m starting to understand why.

Peterson emphasizes that humans — both in our history, and in our own growth from child to adult — often act out things that we know well before we’re able to articulate them. For example, children are able to play a game by the rules well before they’re able to give a coherent explanation of the rules. They act out roles, like mother, father, or child, well before they can tell you what it means to be a mother, father or child.

To put it another way, the collection of things that you know or believe is far larger than the collection of things you can meaningfully articulate, and the fact that you can’t explain something coherently doesn’t mean you don’t know or believe it in some other sense.

We think of ourselves as intellectual beings, and as a consequence we tend to put too much emphasis on studying what people can say and explain. This article illustrates why that doesn’t work. A famous psychologist named Piaget made conclusions about when children understood that there were other minds based on talking to them. Later studies that watched children’s behavior have shown that children understand there are other minds far before they are able to explain the concept. (I find it amusing how often we think that the way to understand what someone knows or believes is by asking them questions, as if they even know!)

Consider that in light of the navel-gazing sophomore who is wondering if he’s justified in believing in other minds. His train of thought starts with a developed mind. (Or at least as developed as it is as a sophomore.) It approaches the question intellectually. He examines data and arguments.

That’s a useful exercise, so long as you understand the limits. But it’s not at all how he came to believe in other minds in the first place.

That raises the question of “basic beliefs,” which is something Alvin Plantinga has studied extensively. It’s a given that you believe certain things, and you shouldn’t feel that you have to derive or prove everything you believe — no one can do that — and you can’t operate in the world without believing some things. But there is still a question of whether those beliefs are justified or not. From Plantinga’s perspective (if I understand him correctly), the sophomore doesn’t have to prove that other minds exist, he only has to show that believing in other minds is a justified basic belief.

But here’s where it gets tough. Let’s say the sophomore concludes that other minds do not exist. Does he really believe that? Or is it possible that there can be a contradiction between what someone thinks and says they believe and what they actually believe. Or, in other words, is it reasonable to say there is a legitimate distinction between what someone thinks they believe in their conscious, allegedly rational mind, and what they “believe” based on their behavior, and down in those weird mental subroutines that control so much of what we think and do? Could this sophomore vociferously and cogently articulate a belief that he doesn’t actually believe?

As I said before, the collection of things that we know is far larger than the collection of things we think about, or can articulate. Isn’t it possible that those two sets are not always in agreement? For a fun example, think of the song, “I’m not in love.”

Could various propositions, like “there are other minds,” “effects have causes,” or even “there is a God” be wired into our brains in a way that precedes conscious, rational thought? If that’s possible, a person could claim not to believe those things, but in a sense he really does, whether he likes it or not. (That doesn’t make them true.)

Imagine, for example, a professed atheist who believes that life is meaningless and intolerable, who goes on a murderous rampage and then kills himself. If life was intolerable and meaningless, why didn’t he just kill himself? Why did he kill others first? One possible interpretation is that he’s poking his finger in God’s eye, even though he claims not to believe in God.

We all know people who profess to believe some thing but act in a way that contradicts that belief. And of course those contradictory actions cut in all directions. The atheist who claims to believe there is no moral order to the universe often acts as if there is, just as the Christian who believes that everyone is destined for Heaven or Hell often acts as if that’s not true.

I’m beginning to suspect that part of Peterson’s dissembling about whether he believes in God is that he honestly doesn’t know. He may be toying with the idea that some basic concepts about God are hard-wired into our brains, so the question of whether that facade that we call our intellect “believes” in God is simply not all that relevant to the question.