True or False?

“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.” Those are words from the movie Secondhand Lions. At the end of last month, Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs shared that statement and related comments with me and a few mutual friends, prompting an interesting discussion. 

Are there things we should believe even if they are not true? That seems to be what is implied in the above-mentioned movie. Three years ago, my wife and I watched, and enjoyed, that 2003 American comedy-drama film. But I hadn’t remembered the words cited above or the longer statement:

That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil …. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

My first reaction to the above words was negative, mainly because I think a person always ought to believe in only what is true. How could it be possible, let alone necessary, to believe in things that are not true? If every statement is either true or false (which I think is correct), why should we ever believe what is false?

There are, indeed, many “facts” that can readily be determined as either true or false. But so much of what we encounter in the world are not facts that can be scientifically verified. Often, we must affirm what we believe to be true without any assurance that those things are, in fact, true.

That certainly doesn’t mean we should believe things that we think are false, even though we must realize that whatever we believe might be false. That is far different, though, than believing things that are false.

Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge (1958) is on my list as one of the “top ten” most important non-fiction books that I have ever read. I spent numerous hours in graduate school reading and seeking to understand Polanyi’s thought. That study became foundational for my epistemology (= the study and understanding of knowledge).

Several years later, my first writing to appear in a published tome was the 18^th chapter of a book published as a Festschrift for Dr. Eric Rust, my major graduate school professor. The title of that chapter is “Scientific Knowledge as Personal Knowledge.”**

Thirty years later, in October 2009, “All Knowledge is Personal Knowledge” was the title of one of my earliest blog articles. In a comment further explaining my point, I wrote,

Knowledge is always tentative. And there is no proof; there is only belief. Thus, there is always the possibility of being wrong. One "can only believe something that might be false," says Polanyi—and he adds that that is his argument "in a nutshell" (Personal Knowledge, p. 312).

Even though everything we believe “might be false,” rather than embracing the idea that we are going to believe what we believe, whether it is true or not, Polanyi emphasizes the importance of “heuristic passion,” the ongoing desire to seek and to find what seems most likely to be true.

Perplexity AI summarizes well Polanyi’s concept of heuristic passion: “He thinks all knowing (from physics to ethics to theology) is personal, fiduciary, and fallible, and therefore always involves passionate commitment and an open‑ended search for deeper contact with reality.”

There is no place for the “lazy” stance of saying we are going to believe what we choose to believe whether it is true or not. No, since none of our core beliefs (including scientific beliefs) can be scientifically proved, we continually strive to examine those beliefs, driven by heuristic passion to seek more adequate, more comprehensive articulations of reality.

If heuristic passion for determining what is true and what is false is necessary for progressive Christians (such as I), it is certainly necessary (and maybe even more so) for secularists on the one hand and conservative evangelical Christians on the other.

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** The title of the book, edited by Robert E. Patterson, is Science, Faith and Revelation: An Approach to Christian Philosophy (Broadman Press,1979). Last month, my wife came across a long letter handwritten by Dr. Rust (over 45 years ago!) in which he thanked me for the essay I wrote about Polanyi for the Festschrift.