Everyone's a believer

Kevin and I have attended a group called TGIF a number of times. This is a group of philisophically minded people who meet at various venues in Joburg and Pretoria to listen to a short presentation on a variety of thought-provoking topics and discuss these, largely from a Christian perspective. The organiser of these events, Thorsten, normally precedes the weekly TGIF email-update with something similarly thought-provoking and I appreciated what he wrote this week:

The term "unbeliever" is sometimes not particularly helpful and potentially misleading. It wrongly suggests that some people don't hold beliefs, while others choose some or other belief as an optional "add-on" to the facts of existence. In this paradigm, it is unsurprising that people would dismiss "belief" or "faith" as superfluous. More truthfully, however, we should recognise that all people have beliefs, though not all beliefs are necessarily "religious".

Just about everyone holds some beliefs about how we can know reality (reason, intuition, tradition, revelation, ...), what type of universe we live in (fluke, illusion, creation, ...), our identity (product of evolution, fertiliser, one with the universe, I am because we are, made in God's image, ...), our core problem (ignorance, desire, religion, evil spirits, rebellion, ...), the solution (enlightenment, science, appeasement, voluntary extinction, atonement, grace, ...), and so on.

We all have basic presuppositions regarding these key questions of life, and to do so is to hold beliefs. Even the sceptic lives life making some assumptions about the reality in which she lives and about how knowledge does and does not work. People never move from unbelief to belief or vice-versa, but rather from one set of beliefs to another. Everyone's a believer.