What is Beauty?

Beauty is goodness made present to the senses.

When we speak of something being beautiful, therefore, we mean that we can hear or see its goodness.

We may describe a sunset as beautiful (meaning that we can sense its good qualities), but we may also describe an act of generosity as beautiful (as when Mother Theresa invites an invalid into her home to care for him in his last days), since its goodness is enough to move us sensibly.

Note, however, that the senses involved in the perception of goodness are typically limited to sight and hearing. It would be rather odd, for example, to hear of someone melting over the "beauty" of scrumptious sausages or silky smooth furniture, unless they also happened to be rather visually attractive.

What is Goodness?

Goodness typically means one of two things:

1. Moral excellence or virtue.
2. Excellence in quality.

We speak of a good person, for example, as one who naturally does what is right and good as a matter of course (definition 1). But it is also a matter of #2, since for the truly good person, her moral actions are a result of the kind of person she is: one who is excellent in quality. Just as a car of high quality works very well in doing what it is made for, a person of good quality works very well in doing what she is made for.

A good banana, by contrast, is just a matter of #2.

What is Belief?

Belief is readiness to act as if something is true.

Thus, someone can profess to believe something without actually believing it. Note also that belief does not differ only quantitatively from knowledge, as in, to know is just to believe more strongly (or with the support of better evidence), since one can believe something that one doesn't know, and vice versa.

Moreover, one may attain truth without having knowledge; that is, my beliefs may happen to match up with the way things are (that is, they may be true), though I may not have an appropriate basis for believing them.

(If you're wondering why I'm bothering with all the pedantic definitions, click here.)

What is Knowledge?

Knowledge is simply the ability to represent something as it is in reality on an appropriate basis of reason, experience, intuition, and/or authority.

When we talk about having knowledge, therefore, we simply mean that what we're saying or thinking is more or less true, and we have a good reason for it.

How do I know when I have knowledge, then? When I know that what I'm saying is true and understand my basis to be an appropriate one.

Oftentimes, though, we have knowledge without knowing it! For example, I know that blue is a color, but I can't explain to you how I know it. I can rest assured, however, that my reason is a good one. Who would deny it?

You see, this is one of two crucial mistakes we make nowadays:

1. We think that to have knowledge we must know that we have knowledge.
   
   This is simply false, yet it leaves many of us floating around in Skepto-World whenever we get into philosophical discussions. Nevertheless, in our everyday lives, we would have no problem telling others that we know our own name, even if we can't, in the moment, explain precisely how we know it.
   
2. We think that to have knowledge we must have absolute certainty.
   
   We think that if there's even the slightest possibility of being wrong, we don't know. But again, back to real life: I know that it's my wife who just called me from the bedroom and not an android spy from the planet Vulcan, even though the latter is hypothetically possible.

As with truth, knowledge is obviously a matter of degree, this time on two levels: the degree to which one can accurately represent the thing one is trying to represent, and the degree to which one's basis is appropriate.

Also, it's important to note that knowledge doesn't actually happen unless what you're representing to be the case is actually the case. I might claim to know that I'm not in San Francisco (and even be able to justify that claim), but if I'm standing in the middle of Fisherman's Wharf, then I'm wrong: I'm, like, totally in San Francisco.

(If you're wondering why I'm bothering with all the pedantic definitions, click here.)

Why care about Truth?

Bear with me and I shall tell you, my friend:

1. Everyone has beliefs.

Whether you are conscious of it or not, you have a belief system. This belief system includes a whole slew of things: you have beliefs about who and what you are, where you left your car, what happened in 1492, how likely it is that your face will explode, etc. You may not profess to believe anything—you may even profess to believe nothing—but you are nevertheless ready to act as if certain things are true. For example, you don't behave like a glass of orange juice, and you don’t talk to sinks; when you cut yourself, you don't expect Koolaid to gush out; and you don’t operate on the assumption that our country was founded by gophers who wrote the Constitution by accident during a game of Scrabble.

You even have beliefs about beliefs. And you have beliefs about knowledge, about truth, and about the relation of your beliefs to knowledge and truth. You have ethical beliefs, and you have religious beliefs—again, even if you don’t profess to. Skeptics may profess all day long to believe nothing, yet all day long they accept things as true (that is, they are ready to act as if certain things are, or are not, the case). They may, for example, claim to have no belief whatsoever about whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, but they still go on as if it will. Agnostics may disclaim beliefs as to whether God exists, yet they are often still ready to behave as if He did not.

You have beliefs. Loads of them. If you didn’t, you’d be absolutely paralyzed, immobilized—unable to act. Having beliefs is, in fact, a necessary condition for action.

2. Beliefs are incredibly important.

Given what I've said above, what we hold to be true is going to hugely impact our actions by definition. I mean, if you want to know what someone really believes, just watch what they do!

(Spoiler ahead: I’m reminded of the climactic scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Indiana is challenged by Walter Donovan to retrieve the Holy Grail: “It’s time to see what you really believe,” that is, what Indiana is actually prepared to act on. If he hadn't had at least some degree of faith in the power of the grail, he would not have risked his own life for his father's.)

Beliefs are powerful! Crusades, wars, millenia of persecution, planes flying into buildings . . . I mean, holy crap! (no pun intended)

If you agree with me that these are important matters, I really shouldn’t have to say much more. People are ready to act on their beliefs, however wrong they may be, and those beliefs are sometimes, nay, often really messed up.

But this is not only true with regard to large-scale religious beliefs, it's also true on an individual level. If I believe the light is green and it's not . . . uh-oh. (And no amount of rationalization—"But it looked green!"—is going to get me out of the hospital quicker.) It works backwards too: if my neighbor is plotting to kill me, I better believe it (and have some pretty good evidence for it)!

So, what's the point of all this?

3. We need to take care of our beliefs!

We all have beliefs, and it’s clear that beliefs are unbelievably important, because they serve as the basis for almost everything we do: from driving to neighborly relations to suicide bombings.

What does that mean for us? Well, it means that we have a majorly serious and inescapable responsibility to ensure that our beliefs are true!*

Because worse than planes flying into buildings is our secular equivalent: apathy.

Since we are morally obligated to take great aims to ensure that what we hold to be true is actually true, apathy about what we believe is absolutely devastating. And it’s insidious in our culture.

Of course, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, because modern thought has many of us under the mistaken conceptions that there is no truth, that knowledge is impossible, and that goodness is subjective!

And if we don’t know, we can’t know, and everyone just has their own morality, who cares? What’s all the fighting about? Can’t we all just get along?!

Well, the good news is that yes, we can! But not if we each have different beliefs about what it means to get along; not if we think that nobody knows the answer—and certainly not if we think that nobody can know the answer; but more importantly to this discussion, not if we operate under explicit I-have-no-beliefs-ism (walking around pretending like we don’t know or believe anything) and think this is going to prevent us from getting into trouble.

We must acknowledge the existence and importance of our beliefs. But most importantly, we have to acknowledge the absolute moral imperative to take responsibility for them, however innocuous they may seem.

So let us start by examining ourselves, and let's clean house! If there's a long-standing falsehood that's been stubbornly preventing us from seeing clearly, let us scrub it off and start over. Perhaps we've been under the delusion that "one more ___ won't hurt anyone." Perhaps we've convinced ourselves that it's his job to reconcile with me. Maybe I still think that I'm at the center of the world, and who are you to tell me that what I'm doing is hurting myself and my family.

Once we've removed the log from our own eye, then we can start, with a healthy dose of truth, love, and humor, to remove the splinter from our brother's.

* For more on the importance of living a life of reason, see Dallas Willard's "How Reason Can Survive The Modern University: The Moral Foundations of Rationality") and "The Faith of Unbelief."

What is Truth?

Truth is the way things are.

So when we talk about having the truth or of things being true, we just mean that the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, or statements in question more or less match up with the way things are.

For example:

'Roses are flowers' is a true statement, because roses really are flowers.
'I like ice cream' is a true thought, because I actually like ice cream.

It's that simple!

However, for the skeptics among us, the doubts will already be surfacing. "But can we know the truth? And how do we know that we know?"

Well, it turns out knowledge is fairly straightforward too.