How to Believe the Truth
We build our whole lives around what we believe is the truth about God and the world—but how on earth do we decide what to believe?
By Collin Slowey
To live well, or even just to live, we human beings must hold beliefs about God, ourselves, and the world around us. To do otherwise is simply impossible—even the complete agnostic believes that he is incapable of knowing anything, or that his willful ignorance is justified. We can no more operate without beliefs than deny our nature.
At the same time, we must recognize that believing is a difficult and dangerous responsibility. A wife who believes her unreliable husband to be trustworthy will be all the more wounded when she discovers he is having an affair. Similarly, a young man who joins a dangerous political cause because he believes it is just may find himself morally and legally compromised if the opposite is true. In short, when our beliefs are out of line with the objective reality of things, we tend to suffer for it. So how can we improve our ability to tell fact from fiction, thereby more closely aligning our beliefs with the truth?
Our culture typically answers this question by encouraging us to gather more and better data, whether by reading more trustworthy Internet sources, seeking out both sides of a given story, or gathering statistics. But that advice is based on two false assumptions. The first is that consuming information infallibly brings a person closer to the truth. The second is that human beings come to their views by means of a mathematical function—that is, by running external “inputs” though purely mechanical mental processes to generate “outputs.” Both assumptions can be disproven by observing how different people may take the exact same information and draw completely different conclusions from it, or how a person may be unable to intellectually refute a given argument but will still vigorously deny its implications.
Our beliefs about ourselves, the created order, and the Creator form the basis of both our day-to-day and our once-in-a-lifetime decisions.
Ultimately, the quantity and quality of our intellectual data do matter, but they do not directly determine our beliefs. Rather, we arrive at our views, consciously or unconsciously, through a faculty of mental judgment. This is the great insight of Cardinal John Henry Newman in his treatise on epistemology, The Grammar of Assent. “It is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings,” Newman writes, “not any technical apparatus of words and propositions.” Words and propositions may influence us through the ideas they communicate, but they themselves are powerless to change what we think. Simply put, we believe things when we come to believe them—it is circular, but it is the way human beings work.
Newman calls this faculty of “judging and concluding” the “Illative Sense” (“illation” is the process of making logical inferences). Operating in an Aristotelian framework, he argues that its character is “an acquired habit” “formed and matured by practice,” like the character of man’s moral faculties. For Newman, the Illative Sense is to the mind what phronesis—prudence—is to morality. To appropriate Thomas Aquinas’s language, it is the “charioteer” of the intellectual virtues, and it may lead a person closer to or farther from the truth over time, depending on its strength or weakness.
Thinking about the Illative Sense might seem overly abstract or merely academic. But it is actually eminently practical, because all of us wrestle with questions of the mind, whether we are “intellectuals” or not. Our beliefs about ourselves, the created order, and the Creator form the basis of both our day-to-day and our once-in-a-lifetime decisions. Whether someone chooses to plant a garden, go to work on a Friday morning, or propose to his girlfriend, it is typically because he believes that his choice will make him happy, which presumes a belief that happiness is worth pursuing, which presumes certain beliefs about human nature, which presumes certain beliefs about God, and so on. So it would behoove us to hone our Illative Sense as much as possible—which brings us once again to the question of how we should go about doing that.
Ours is a world full of to-do lists and Twitter feeds, nagging unread emails and incessantly buzzing group chats.
The simplest (correct) answer is the Aristotelian rejoinder that we attain virtue by behaving virtuously. Applied to the Illative Sense, that would mean that we can improve our faculty of intellectual judgment by choosing to believe the truth repeatedly over time. It might sound obvious, but it is good advice. The surest way to fall into error is to knowingly commit self-deceit, while the desire for and pursuit of what is right and good is always fruitful. As the Book of Proverbs says: “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” (4:7 ESV). Aside from that basic observation, though, what are some 21st-century best practices that can protect us from misdirection and help improve our Illative Sense?
The first that comes to mind is restricting intellectual “noise.” Ours is a world full of to-do lists and Twitter feeds, nagging unread emails and incessantly buzzing group chats. These things are not bad in and of themselves, but they become dangerous when they overwhelm our mental faculties. If we’re not careful, we may find ourselves “thinking” so much that we cannot actually think at all. At that moment, when the senses are engaged but the mind is dulled, we lose the ability to practice true judgment, and we are liable to be unwittingly deceived.
One solution to this is simply to consume less information. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which sees the acquisition of more data and appeals to ever-higher authorities as reliable paths to truth. But all the data in the world are useless if we are so burdened by them that we cannot make sense of them. Moreover, we must remember that the highest authority of all is God, and that He speaks most clearly to minds that are calm and attentive. In the words of Cardinal Robert Sarah, author of The Power of Silence, “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?”
Plato understood that truth is an end in itself, which one must approach with disinterested yearning to enjoy.
Another, closely related way to strengthen the Illative Sense is to focus the mind on personal responsibilities and the legitimate pursuit of liberal learning. The average 21st-century adult spends a great deal of mental energy on ideas that are genuinely important—but perhaps important to someone else, rather than to the person at hand. We readily believe that by wading into political, moral, or intellectual debates we have no personal experience of or expertise in, we are doing good work and being responsible citizens. But is that really the case?
For centuries, Christian moralists have considered curiosity to be a vice. Ancient theologians like Augustine, medieval scholastics like Aquinas, and modern thinkers like Hans Boersma alike argue that while knowledge is good, its pursuit may be disordered if directed by a desire for mere intellectual gratification rather than true wisdom. Whether the subject of that knowledge is trivial (e.g., the score of the latest Baylor–TCU game) or elevated (e.g., the difference between quidditas and haecceitas) makes no difference. According to the Christian tradition, any investigation or discussion may become a distraction unless it helps us help others or develops our own virtues in a concrete way.
Computers and cell phones make it difficult to avoid curiosity, because they lend a sense of urgency to things that may not actually deserve our attention. They even make it feel wrong to look away from them. “It would be hardhearted,” we may think to ourselves, “to ignore this article about the latest child murder,” or, “It would be irresponsible not to read up on the latest genocide in the third world.” The fact of the matter, however, is that we best serve God—and our neighbor—when our minds are sharp. And our minds are sharpest when they are not worried about issues that are totally beyond our responsibility or experience.
We best serve God—and our neighbor—when our minds are sharp.
Finally, perhaps the best way to hone the Illative Sense is to practice a receptive—as opposed to possessive—attitude toward the truth. Since the likes of Francis Bacon and Niccolò Machiavelli became preeminent in Western cultures, we have been mired in the belief that truth is essentially a tool for the betterment of human life. But Plato understood that truth is an end in itself, which one must approach with disinterested yearning to enjoy. And in Jesus Christ, God revealed that Truth is really a Person, who will not allow Himself to be mastered or used for selfish purposes.
Thus the way we interact with truth determines how able we are to distinguish it from falsehoods—and reap the benefits of wisdom in consequence. If we enter intellectual debates as warriors entering a battlefield, intent on using mental force to achieve victory, we are sure to fail, even if we “win” by the world’s standards. Similarly, if we pursue knowledge as a source of security, motivated by anxiety or fear, it will slip out of our grasp. But if we treat Truth as an honored guest, Whom we are unworthy to receive and incapable of controlling, but nevertheless willing to serve, He will invariably come to us. God hides His mysteries from “the wise and understanding” but reveals them to “little children” (Matthew 11:25).
Cardinal Newman knew this well. In his chapter on the Illative Sense, he writes that in all things, but “especially… as regards religious and ethical inquiries,” we can learn nothing, “however much we exert ourselves,” without a divine sanction. Newman even speculates that God has made the theological–philosophical “path of thought rugged and circuitous above all others,” so that “the very discipline inflicted on our minds in finding Him, may mould them into devotion to Him when He is found.”
Truth only comes to dwell with us when we desire Him for His own sake.
The idea that humility and reverence for the things that are above us are among the most—if not the most—prerequisite virtues for good mental judgment stands in stark contrast to the mechanistic model of epistemology we are accustomed to. It is a rebuke to modernity’s irrational obsession with quantitative data. But Newman’s insights are also a rebuke to pride generally, including religious pride. They remind us that no person, whether because he has access to statistics or because he has access to divine revelation, should imagine that he has mastery over the Truth. He who does so will make himself a fool in the end.
In the end, the answer to the question of how one may hone one’s Illative Sense is the answer to every question of self-improvement: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). The ability to distinguish fact from fiction is exceptionally valuable. “Wisdom is better than jewels,” as Proverbs declares (8:11). But if we want to acquire it, we cannot make an idol of our own intellectual gratification. Truth only comes to dwell with us when we desire Him for His own sake.
Illustrations by Anthony Fosu
Collin Slowey is a writer living and working in Washington, D.C. He hails from Bryan, Texas, and holds a degree from Baylor University. Collin’s work can also be found in Public Discourse, The American Conservative, and The Dallas Morning News, among other outlets.