Belief and Debate

A quick dedication to "Eric." If you read this and know it's you no worries mate this is just why I get angry when you try and debate me.

Belief is defined by dictionary.com (based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary) as:

1. An opinion or conviction
2. Confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof
3. Confidence; faith; trust
4. A religious tenet or tenets.

I don’t understand the point of belief. It is a useful word especially when used as in case one or two as in, “I believe his story over yours.” The third definition and the forth definition are the ones that give me trouble. I don’t understand the equivalence between belief and faith the way many religious people use the words.

When speaking to people at my school I sometimes hear that something is the way it is because they have faith and believe it to be so. This means that in some of actual arguments they do not see their belief as an opinion or simple confidence in their idea. They present it as a fully supportable fact with an unbending strength which is where I grow weary. There is no argument one can present to disagree with them or debate anything. They will not give on a single aspect. The belief shot is where an argument dies. Case in point: me and a fried I will call “Eric” were discussing evolution. I was trying to understand how he could say that God created one of each species and it became all sorts of the species (like having grizzlies and pandas) without evolution having happened at all, guided or not. “Eric” stayed firm and kept restating his belief, which I did not mind, but as he grew more repetitive and I had different arguments for each point, “Eric” threw his trump card. He said, “This is my belief because I have faith.” There is no way of trumping that. “Eric” and I have had several discussions and almost all of them ended in this same statement.

As time has passed I have come to wonder, why did he use the word belief, especially in his discussions about God? The way he thinks of God is in a factual nature, the same way as I think about the wind. The problem I run into is that I would never say, “I believe in the wind,” or, “I have faith that the wind moved the leaves.” This is ludicrous to me. It is there I see the effects and can explain its origins and the nature behind it and that is how “Eric” feels about God. This is where I strain. Why say “believe” or “faith?” If it exists and can be proven in your mind, why should one use these straddling terms? There are people, who argue that the earth is the center of the universe and argue most vehemently their case for a heliocentric universe. Those of us who disagree with their ideals do not say that we believe the sun is at the center and the only thing rotating around the earth (besides man-made objects and debris) is the moon. We know it. It is fact. Why add the ambiguity of belief to the situation?

When religious believers like “Eric” debate they speak of belief in the same way I speak of theories. It is something known and just short of fact. This is where people who want to argue with the vehemently religious need to see the connection. If, in a debate about the beginning of the universe, a leading scientist says, “Well, the Big Bang Theory allows us to...” he will quickly be stuck in an argument about an absolute beginning and who started the Big Bang. Instead, if the scientist would just say, “I believe in the Big Bang,” they would be just as stumped as everyone else is when debating them. So this is my call for all scientists to use their beliefs in facts and fight fire with fire and for people who would argue a belief as fact think of what life would be like if we all went around saying things like, “I believe in this table and will therefore put my drink down on it.”