Understanding Imagination, Belief & Faith

A path to tolerance and an open mind
 

imagination:  “the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.”  Webster’s new universal Unabridged Dictionary

Every second of every day the mind is busy creating what we call reality.  The three dimensional images we see are imagined in our mind using input from a two dimensional image provided by our eyes.  The mind is regularly creating an internal model of the world in much greater detail than we immediately sense.  That model allows us to fill in the blanks in the images presented to our minds and form plans for future actions. What we call reality is only a version of our external world as we imagine it based on our limited senses and previous experiences. What we know as true reality is imagined in our minds.  The process of imagining is not just for fairy tales and fantasies;  it is a fundamental process of our brain that we use to form our perceived reality and plan future actions. 

Of course, our imagination also creates new concepts, relationships, designs, art, mathematics and other abstract concepts that may not be reality based at all. Imagination is what allows us to read a novel and envision the whole world created by the author.  Surprisingly, imagination is also at the heart of the scientific process, which starts with an imagined hypothesis and ends up with an imagined theory.  When Isaac Newton created his theory of gravitation he imagined that there is a gravitational force that attracts objects proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.  As this theory was tested over and over by other scientists this imagined theory became more and more believable because experience proved its validity.  Today Newton’s theory of gravitation is extensively used by astronomers and engineers to solve an almost infinite number of problems.  But, despite this validation, it turns out that what Newton imagined didn’t really work in all cases.  Fortunately, Albert Einstein also had a wonderful imagination.  He imagined that gravitational attraction was caused by the warping of space-time, and his imagined hypothesis was worked into an imagined general theory of relativity and tested by engineers and scientists until it was believed by all….. or at least by those that understood it!  For others, who don’t understand Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, they can only imagine that it is true or not.

What is the relationship between what you believe and what you only imagine?   As we said above, what we imagine forms the bases for our entire reality not just our fantasies.  Of course, all of what we imagine does not end up as part of our reality.  Our personal reality is formed by testing what we imagine with evidence and experience, like a scientist might test an imagined hypothesis, but probably not so rigorously!  So we can say that we believe something that we have imagined when that imagining has been tested by experience.  But not everything we imagine has been tested so our world view is a combination of imaginings that have been tested to the point that they become beliefs and imaginings that haven’t been tested.   Whether tested or not, our imaginings often elicit strong positive or negative emotions.  For example, a loved one is late coming home, and we imagine that they have been injured in some way even though we have no evidence of that.  One category of imaginings is particularly troublesome: when we imagine something that we can’t possibly validate with our experience.  These imaginings can never become beliefs validated by experience, but they can still play a very important part in our lives, either good or bad.  

Let’s use our imagination now to create an imagination spectrum.  On the left are those imaginings that we have validated with experience.  We will call those beliefs.  In the middle are the imaginings that can be checked by our experience but at this time we have insufficient experience to call them beliefs.  We will call these hypotheses.  And finally on the right we have imaginings that cannot be validated by experience.  Their validity is unknowable.  We will call these faiths.  Beliefs, hypotheses and faiths are all important to us.  Imaginings from anywhere on the spectrum might play an important part in our lives.  We are not purely logical machines.  We are humans that operate on emotion as well as reason.  Our faiths and our hypotheses may be as important or even more important to us personally than some of our beliefs, but it is still important to differentiate between the three.

         BELIEFS                                        HYPOTHESES                                               FAITHS
<=================================================================>
                                                          Imagination Spectrum

Consider an example.  You are standing on the side of the street and see a speeding car coming down the street.  You rapidly pull three imaginings off the imagination spectrum  1) the belief that if you step in front of a speeding car you will be gravely injured or killed, 2) the hypothesis that if you step in front of the speeding car you might be able to jump high enough that the car will pass under you and 3) Your faith that God will protect you if that is his plan.  Which of these imaginings do you act on?   

Let’s consider another example: your religion.  When talking about religion we often use the terms ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ interchangeably.  In our common usage of these words we don’t always distinguish between them as we have above.  But I would like you to suspend the usual way you think of religion and apply the terms beliefs, hypotheses and faiths as we have displayed them on the imagination spectrum to your own religious beliefs.  Take a blank piece of paper and make three columns headed ‘BELIEFS’, ‘HYPOTHESES’ and ‘FAITHS.’  Then start listing your most important religious imaginings under the appropriate column.  List enough items so that you can see a trend.

Here are some examples of where some people might categorize various religious teachings.  Imagine that this list is a concatenation of the beliefs of a group of people, so you will see conflicting beliefs in this list.

BELIEFS
—————
There is a God with whom we can communicate.
Love should be the guiding force in our lives.
Love your neighbor as yourself
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Do not murder.
Do not commit adultery.
Do not steal.
Do not bear false witness.
Do not defraud.
Honor your father and mother.
Be humble.

HYPOTHESES
———————
There is a God with whom we can communicate.
Humans have a self.
Humans do not have a self.  We are just one part of a living cosmos.
Each of us can be directly in touch with God.

FAITHS
————
There is a God, the creator.
There is not a God, the creator.
God created man in his image.
There is life after death.
There is not life after death.
The rich will not get into heaven.
Jesus is God.

Those imaginings that have been listed under beliefs have the common characteristic that their imaginers felt they had been validated by their own personal experience.  Many of these beliefs (but not all) are wisdoms or moral dictums which we can implement in our own lives and see implemented in other’s lives.  We can see if the living world validates them or not.  Some beliefs might be spiritual but nevertheless have been experienced regularly by those who placed them in the beliefs column.  These beliefs are knowable through our own experience.  The same is true of those imaginings in the hypotheses list.  They are knowable.  However, the imaginers have put them in the hypotheses list because they do not have enough personal experience or evidence to know if they are valid or not.  Finally, those imaginings in the Faith list are unknowable.  They may be the most important thing in our own life by far, but they are not things that we can personally experience in our life time.  Many things on the faiths list relate to events that have been reported to have taken place two thousand years ago.  These are events that we have no way of testing or experiencing in real life.  Others, like faiths regarding life after death, are also unknowable.  You have faith that they are true but have no way to validate them.  The statement “Jesus is God” in the faith list is an interesting one, because you could argue that you experience Jesus as God in your own lives.  And if you do have experiences in your own life that you interpret as experiences with God, and you call that God Jesus, then you certainly could put ‘Jesus is God’ in your belief list.  But if by ‘Jesus is God’ you mean that the historical Jesus that lived 2000 years ago was God, you have no way to experience or test that, so you would have to put that in your faith list.  

You might dislike the idea of the Imagination Spectrum because you feel it is a challenge to your belief system.  You might react to it as an attack on your religious faith.  You may feel that you believe things at the ‘faith’ end of the scale as much or more than you believe things at the ‘belief’ end of the spectrum.  And that is fine.  The Imagination Spectrum does not come with a preference for one end of the spectrum or another.  It only asks you to understand how imaginations are validated by experience along the spectrum.  But you might ask, why do we want to differentiate our imaginations by what validating experiences we have had?  The answer is that we want to make this differentiation to inform ourselves so that we may show greater understanding and tolerance of the opinions (imaginings) of others!  Placing our imaginings on our own Imagination Spectrum does not need to modify how we value each of our beliefs, hypotheses and faiths, although it might.  Rather, realizing where and why our imaginings are placed on the Spectrum will allow us to tolerate other’s imaginings.  Can we not better accept that others could have different faiths than us, when we realize that the subjects of these faiths are imaginings that cannot be validated by our own experience?  And might we not understand the different beliefs of others, when we realize that they have different validating experiences than we have?  And might not the hypotheses that we share in common with others allow us to form a bond through a common search for validating experiences?

Because our entire reality is based on how we imagine the world to be (based on our limited sensory inputs and our own experiences) we are forced to tolerate and be open to the beliefs, hypotheses and faiths of others that were formed by the same processes as our own (albeit with different inputs).  What if in our interactions and discussions with others we started with everyone displaying their own Imagination Spectrum on pertinent points of discussion.  That would be weird, but perhaps an effective way to communication and understanding.  In my view it would certainly be path to tolerance and an open mind.