The Relationships Between Belief and Truth
Below is a diagram that captures important relationships between what we believe and what is true. A critical goal in life is aligning our beliefs with what is true.
Each intersection or segment represents a specific combination of belief and truth, leading to the defined categories listed below:
Knowledge The intersection of Belief and Truth when the evidence is high. Represents the things you believe that are true for which there is a high degree of evidence proving their truth.
True Faith The intersection of Belief and Truth with limited evidence. Represents things you believe that are true but for which there is limited evidence proving their truth.
Vain Faith Part of Belief but outside Truth, with limited evidence. Represents things you believe that are actually false and for which there is limited evidence proving their falsehood.
Delusion Part of Belief but outside Truth, with high evidence that it is false (but evidence is ignored). Represents the things that a person believes which are false, and for which there is a high degree of evidence they are false but that the person ignores or discounts.
Unawareness Part of Truth because it is known by others with high evidence, but outside of Belief for a given person because of their lack of awareness of the available evidence.
Unexplored Part of Truth but not yet Belief because it hasn’t been discovered or confirmed. Represents undiscovered truths.
A color gradient is used as a visual enhancement within both circles, including the intersected portion. It runs bottom to top starting with white and ending with dark blue at the top. The gradient represents the degree of evidence available for a given proposition that would fall in one of the categories. Dark blue would be 100% evidence and white would be 0% evidence.
What Can We Learn From This Diagram?
- By definition, it’s impossible to know with complete certainty if a given assertion, for which only limited evidence is available, is true faith or false faith. Only as more evidence accumulates will this become clear.
- It’s likely the case that everyone can see themself in each segment of the diagram.
- Because of this, we should be patient with ourselves and others as we gradually refine our understanding.
- We should be forgiving of ourselves and others when beliefs later prove to be misplaced.
- We should adopt a spirit of humility as we continue to seek more truth and allow our beliefs to be refined as new evidence emerges.