How do you know the Bible tells you the truth?

“How do you know the Bible tells you the truth—because we have other religions to go by?” Thus a discussion host poses a question to a believer in God. The answer comes: “Because I pray about it.” Without wanting to be dogmatic, he is right. Here’s why I think he is.

Belief is like many human emotions (if not all of them, actually—visceral). It springs from the heart. If it sprang from the head (as a rational process), there would be no such thing as belief (because we don’t physically have anything to believe in).

If I get excited at the prospect of my summer holiday, you may be pleased for me, and yet you may dismiss my choice of flying as ecologically irresponsible, or tell me that I could have got a better deal going somewhere else, or that I should choose another companion. But only I can feel the excitement of my summer holiday. Do I then allow myself to be influenced by your denigration of my holiday? Am I less excited if you challenge my vacation? And can you not feel the excitement bubbling within me? Truth is, your criticism may dismay me, or I may redouble my enthusiasm, with an attitude of “I don’t care what you think!” However, you cannot feel my excitement at my holiday. Maybe you never get excited at holidays. Maybe you just like spoiling people’s fun. Maybe you think getting excited about holidays is for little kids, and you’re a big grown-up.

In terms of visceral belief, we must distinguish between matters that are inherently provable (like the facts adduced in a court of law) and belief in a deity, which is inherently unprovable, but for the proof of which the believer adduces their own evidence (such as a vision, a dream, a set of coincidences, a sense of wonder, or a shiver down the spine). Even courts of law don’t actually determine belief in evidence: they determine only enough belief (the balance of probabilities, or beyond reasonable doubt, rules of corroboration, etc.). For the rest, with statements like “I believe the president is honest”, the evidential basis on which such so-called beliefs are based can be scant to say the least, and easily manipulated to say the most. So, what does the respondent mean when he says, “Because I pray about it”? Are we only praying that the president is honest?

Our view of our world is a view based on judgment. The allusion to courts of law is not misplaced, but law courts are the least of the institutions of judgment in our life. We ourselves are institutions of judgment. We judge value (in a food store) and we judge danger (on the road), and we judge trust (will we contract with someone, marry them?). There is as good as nothing in our physical world that we do not judge. We probably make thousands of judgments every day. Some are major ones, like a court of law makes. Some are minor, like threading a needle. We get annoyed at the judgments of others and we seek to defend ourselves against their judgments. We ask people to judge us kindly—to like us (please like this article, below).

Therefore, it’s … let’s say, attractive to know—if know we do—that there is an entity out there somewhere that we do not need to judge, and which will essentially judge us, not on what we do, however, but on what we intend to do. That is a surprising switch between our laws and our deity’s laws. Despite our analysis of law between the subjective and the objective elements of a crime, we even have laws that don’t care what you intended (like parking regulations, or even felony murder). The deity’s laws, or judgments, don’t much care what you actually do, but care what you intend to do. That’s why, in many beliefs, you can simply think to the deity that you would like forgiveness, by feeling remorse, and in your belief system, your conscience is thereby cleared. That is the whole purpose of belief; your criminal or civil liability is, of course, not affected.

Whether the deity exists, or exists in the form that the believer thinks it exists, is immaterial, and that is a major hurdle for those who challenge believers, something they cannot get their heads around. Maybe I can help.

Belief is a communion between the believer and that in which he believes. A husband can believe in his wife, even if she is poor, maladroit, ugly, coarse, uneducated. Her husband can still believe in her, because the criteria that he applies in believing in his spouse are not the criteria that those around them use in judging the lady. We say that people should look beyond the outward and see the inner quality of the person. What a believer does is to look beyond the outward manifestation of our world and think (or believe) that they perceive an inner quality. The differences are not vast, but no analogy is perfect, I know.

This is almost an application of quantum physics: if I believe the president is honest, then he is. If I later come to see that my belief was erroneous, then I will change my mind. People can change their minds, and do so all the time. So what’s wrong with that? Well, what is often wrong with that, in the physical world, is that I will be labelled as ignorant, naive, unknowing. I will be judged by those around me, for having been gullible. Even if I was right before and only now am wrong in having changed my mind. And the problem with belief springing viscerally within me or being dampened by later realisations is that I will only ever know if my belief was erroneous when I die, and non-believers want to know now, and that, unfortunately, is not in the deal when it comes to belief: it must spring from a visceral emotion of the heart, and not from a rational judgment of the head. If you don’t believe, I can’t make you believe. And nor can you make me not believe. You cannot reason belief or its absence.

What each believer sees is one of two things, however: it is something they have discovered through their own experience, or it is something that has been drilled into them by tradition and convention The moot question is whether the latter of these is even belief (any more than a court’s holding that evidence is true is a belief). In Asia, the form of what they believe there may be that of Buddhism or Hinduism and, in Europe, perhaps Christianity. These are all outward forms of religious belief. But those who penetrate the outward to recognise the inward values will frequently abandon any importance that was hitherto attached to rites and ceremonies, as being simply cultural attachments. A bit like driving a Hyundai in Korea and a Mercedes in Germany. They both work as cars, but have different forms in different parts of the world. Occasionally, a Korean will even drive a Mercedes, and a German, a Hyundai.

We know phrases like float your boat or do your own thing, and that is pretty much what belief is. The difficulties arise when one person’s conception of belief comes up against what others circumscribe as a definitive model of belief. In other words, there are those who refuse to allow an inward exploration of the deity or the substance of the individual’s belief, and attempt to constrain others to believe in the same way that they believe. This is fatuous, because belief springs from the heart. You cannot persuade another person to believe, still less induce them into believing as you do. You can force them into saying they believe, as with torture, but you cannot make them actually believe. This is an argument that non-believers often get tied up in: they cite all the harm that organised religion and fundamentalists and fanatics do, and therefore say that, because no god could condone such acts, there is therefore no God. That is a bit like saying that because some witnesses lie in court, you cannot ever trust a witness in court. Mendacity is not endemic to all judicial witnesses; and duress and manipulation are not endemic to all believers. But they are traits that can be detected in some of them, just as lying is a trait of which some judicial witnesses are guilty.

I usually sum this up as follows: God is not for everyone. He is for every one. Every one of us will conceive of our belief, or its absence, in a way that suits us, and this freedom, the absolute liberty of belief, is something that our modern world can have difficulty in appreciating, because that mode of thinking removes belief from the realm of what we like to think of as judgment, which is some people making an assessment of the conduct of other people. On the other hand, God’s judgment is where we actually make an assessment of our own intentions; not our acts, but our intentions. Not judged by others, or by God, but by us. Some people feel uncomfortable with that—that judgment should be left to us ourselves. They want to judge others, instead. They want, not to believe in God, but to be God.

However, it is precisely an absence of judgment that marks out the relationship to a deity. We often perceive deities as holders of power, and then we proceed to define power in terms that we think we understand it to be: like great empires, or missiles or guns—the ability to force others to our will. But that is not God’s power. God’s power lies instead in love, which is a nebulous concept that fundamentally comes down to the opposite of what we constantly do on Earth: judging. Love is power to force ourselves to our own will.

Love is not outpourings of kind words or acts, love is not roses and chocolates, love is not physical reproduction of the race, giving to charity or