It occurred to me today that I sometimes have good reasons, but at other times, I do not.
I’ve got my reasons for believing in the things that I believe in. Some of those reasons –that I have for believing in the things that I believe in– are very good reasons. Some of the things I believe in, I don’t have very good reasons at all for believing in those things.
When we think about why it is that different people believe the different things that they do, everybody has their reasons. I have a hard time believing that there’s anybody who believes in something without having a reason –no matter how insignificant that reason might be– so the question is what makes something a good reason to believe and what makes something a bad reason to believe.
For example, I can believe that the Chicago Bears are the best football team in the NFL. As I’m writing this post, they are beating the Carolina Panthers pretty soundly, but I probably could get a bunch of my friends together and beat the Panthers, so there’s that. Anyway, if I decided to believe that the Chicago Bears are the best team in the NFL, I would have to put up an argument about their record, which is currently 4 wins and 1 loss. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?!?! But, the combined records of all of the teams that the Bears have beaten this season is 4 wins and 15 losses, so someone could very easily argue that winning for the Bears, so far, has been a matter of succeeding over crappier teams, which isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of their dominance.
But, I have a different reason for thinking that the Chicago Bears are the best team in the NFL.
When I was in the fifth grade, the Bears won the Super Bowl, and my friends and I played out on the playground, pretending to be the ’85 Chicago Bears. My friend Chad was always Jim McMahon. My other friend Derek usually pretended to be Richard Dent. The rest of us would take turns pretending to be Walter Payton, or Refrigerator Perry, or Mike Singletary, or Jim Covert, or any one of the other players from that team, as we played out on the playground, throwing the football around.
We would do the Super Bowl Shuffle together on that playground.
When I look back on that memory, with all of the fondness that we often have for our childhood memories, it warms my heart; and that’s why I think they’re the best football team in the NFL.
Now, whether or not my emotional experiences, attached to the Bears in 1985, make them the best football team in the NFL, we could put together any interesting debate on either side of the assertion. In the end, though, we have to look at certain reasons for believing certain things as better than other reasons.
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If I went around and told everyone that Doritos are the best snack chip and that no other snack chip can even compare with Doritos, someone would eventually ask me about my reasons for believing in the superiority of Doritos.
If I said that Doritos are the best snack chip because they are purple, and no other snack chip is, that would raise some eyebrows. Why? Because Doritos are not purple.
Believing that Doritos are the best because they are purple is a bad reason for believing in them. It’s not even true.
So, via this example, we’ve illustrated that there are bad reasons for believing in something. That then must mean that there are good reasons for believing something. What reasons could someone have for believing that Doritos are the best snack chip?
What if I told you that more Doritos are sold in the United States, more than any other snack chip? Would that be convincing to you?
Is that even true? How would you know?
I wrote my Master’s Degree thesis on a philosophical movement called relativism, and the effects that relativism is beginning to have in the classrooms of America. Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn’t well received by the university and its faculty in the Education Department, mostly because it tends to be a politically-charged topic. I actually had to argue with that university in order to eventually receive my Master’s Degree.
Relativism, roughly put (according to the philosophers at the University of Stanford), is “the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification, are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them.”
In layman’s terms, this means that truth is not absolute. All statements of truth become relative to the person that makes them and the context in which they make them.
In a relativistic society, there are no good reasons for believing, and there are no bad reasons for believing. If the Bears never won another football game, ever again, I could go on believing that they are the best football team in the NFL, because –FOR ME– they are.
Does that sound right to you? Can we agree that there are good reasons for believing and then there are bad reasons for believing?
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The idea that relativism is a plague on our society is a topic that I’ve discussed in previous posts, so I’m not going to continue to beat that particular dead horse.
Rather, I would like to make a final statement about the reasons that we are all choosing to believe the things that we believe.
I don’t know if it’s just me, or if anyone else is realizing this as well, but I’ve had a number of conversations with people who really do believe certain things, for the most ridiculous reasons out there. Whether that tendency is one of the unintended results of relativism, or whether people really think that it’s okay to believe what they do without a leg to stand on, the problem is that beliefs will normally lead to actions. What we decide is true in our hearts will cause us to behave in certain ways; if our beliefs are not properly founded, we end up with actions that are not properly founded, either.
I guess what I’m suggesting is a certain path for our lives. On that path, there are plenty of possible choices that we can all make that keep us on the path, while allowing for a diversity of options. But, when we start believing things without having any good reasons for doing so, what we’ve done is that we’ve purchased lies. Then, those lies affect our behaviors and our actions. Then, we end up off the path.
It Occurred To Me Today 