We are Born to Believe

 

Every human being is born into a world they do not understand. A newborn enters the world without language, science, philosophy, religion, or political ideology. It does not know what fire is, why rain falls, or where the sun goes at night. Yet from the very first day of life, it must act. It does act. It drinks, sleeps, cries, clings, and responds. It cannot wait until it has gathered enough evidence to make rational decisions.

In short, before we learn to think, we learn to trust.

This simple fact is one of the most profound truths about human existence. Belief is not an accidental feature of the human mind. It is one of its basic operating principles. Long before we acquire knowledge, we survive by believing.

The common notion that belief belongs to religion is not correct. Religious belief is only one manifestation of a far more fundamental human capacity. Belief permeates every sphere of life, including science, politics, economics, and our most ordinary social interactions. Far from being the opposite of reason, belief is often the starting point from which reason itself proceeds.

Can a scientist work without trusting the reliability of scientific methods? Can a patient ever get along without trusting the doctor’s diagnosis? The passenger trusts the pilot. The child trusts the parents. The citizen trusts the currency in his wallet. Every ordinary day is held together by thousands of beliefs that most of us never stop to examine.

The question, therefore, is not whether human beings believe. The question is why we cannot avoid believing.

Belief is Unavoidable

Imagine waking up tomorrow determined not to believe anything.

You refuse to believe your alarm clock shows the correct time. You doubt the floor beneath your feet will support your weight. You distrust your memories. You suspect every traffic signal, every weather forecast, your friends, and even scientific truths and mathematical equations.

Your life would be impossible.

We have to trust a lot of things if life is to go on. Modern society functions because millions of people routinely accept information supplied by others. Belief is obviously not merely a religious phenomenon. It is the invisible foundation upon which daily life stands.

Every infant is a clear manifestation of this truth. Trust is the foundation of an infant’s feeling of security. Before children understand logic, they understand reliability. Before they ask whether something is true, they learn whether some is dependable.

Reason develops slowly. Trust comes first.

The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson argued that the first and most fundamental task of human life is the development of what he called basic trust. During the earliest months of infancy, the child is completely dependent on caregivers for food, comfort, protection, and affection. If these needs are met with consistency, warmth, and reliability, the infant gradually develops a deep and largely unconscious conviction that the world is safe and that other people can be trusted. This basic trust becomes the psychological foundation upon which later confidence, emotional security, and healthy relationships are built.

Erikson’s insight has profound implications for understanding belief itself. Before children can evaluate evidence, weight arguments, or distinguish truth from falsehood, they must first trust. They trust the face that smiles at them, the voice that soothes them, the arms that hold them tenderly, and eventually the words that teach them about the world.

In this sense, trust is not merely one belief among many; it is the soil from which all later beliefs grow. Reason, scepticism, and critical thinking are achievements of a mature mind, but they emerge only after this primordial act of trust has enabled the child to engage confidently with the world.

Catholic theologian Hans Kung took Erikson’s concept of basic trust a quantum step ahead and gave us the idea of fundamental trust.

Kung argued that every human being must answer a fundamental question: Can reality itself be trusted? Scientific knowledge can explain how the world works, but it cannot answer whether life is ultimately meaningful, whether goodness is worth pursuing, or whether hope is justified in the face of suffering and death. These questions require a fundamental trust in reality. For the religious believer, faith in God is the deepest expression of this trust. God is understood not as a substitute for evidence or scientific explanation, but as the ultimate ground that makes confidence in the world, in truth, and in the future intellectually and existentially reasonable.

Kung’s is not the childish credulity of many religious believers, the kind of faith that Freud dismissed as regression to childhood dependence. Freud would say that a religious believer puts his faith in God as a child puts its faith in parents. For Freud, religious faith is essentially a psychological projection. Just as the helpless child depends upon a powerful father for protection, the adult, faced with the uncertainties of life, creates the idea of an all-powerful heavenly Father. God, in Freud’s famous phrase, is an illusion. An illusion, however, need not necessarily be a deliberate falsehood; it is more often a belief born of deep emotional wishes rather than objective reality. Religion, for Freud, represents a continuation of childhood dependency into adult life. The mature individual, Freud believed, should gradually replace faith with reason and scientific understanding.

Hans Kung accepted Freud’s insight that trust is rooted in early childhood, but he rejected the conclusion that religious faith is therefore infantile. Drawing on Erikson’s concept of basic trust, Kung argued that the ability to trust is itself a normal and necessary feature of healthy human development. A child who has learned to trust does not remain psychologically immature; rather, that trust becomes the foundation for mature relationships, responsible freedom, and confidence in life. Faith in God, for Kung, is not a retreat into childhood but an adult affirmation that reality is ultimately trustworthy despite suffering, uncertainty, and death.

Freud and Kung offer us two contrasting views of human existence. Freud interprets faith primarily through the lens of psychology: religion is explained as the fulfilment of unconscious emotional needs. Kung, while acknowledging those psychological dimensions, insists that psychology can explain why humans are capable of faith but cannot determine whether the object of that faith is real. Explaining the origins of belief is not the same as disproving its truth. The fact that a belief has psychological roots tells us how it arises, not whether it corresponds to reality.

Stated in another way, for Freud, trust culminates in reason and leaves religion behind. For Kung, trust culminates in a mature faith that includes reason but reaches bey9nd what reason alone can establish. Their debate illustrates a central theme of this book: the same human capacity for belief can be interpreted either as a source of illusion or as a gateway to meaning.

Kung does not make any claim that his concept of fundamental trust can prove God’s existence. In fact, one of the hallmarks of his theology is that he rejects the idea that God’s existence can be demonstrated with the kind of certainty found in natural sciences or mathematics.

In Kung’s view, there are two possible responses to the question of faith in God. One may adopt fundamental trust without God, affirming life and reality despite the absence of any transcendent ground. Or one may adopt fundamental trust in God, seeing God as the ultimate ground that makes such trust fully intelligible. 

For Kung, faith in God is not the conclusion of a logical proof but an interpretation of reality that provides the deepest warrant for trusting existence. 

Albert Camus’s novel The Plague offers a vivid literary illustration of the two responses to reality that Kung later described. The novel is set in a town devastated by an epidemic, where suffering and death force every character to confront the question: Can life still be trusted when it appears indifferent or even cruel?

One of the characters, Father Paneloux who is a Jesuit priest, answers that question through faith in God. Even when confronted with innocent suffering, the priest refuses to abandon his conviction that reality ultimately has a divine meaning beyond human comprehension. His trust is rooted in God, even when God’s purposes remain mysterious. For Paneloux, faith is not the denial of suffering but the refusal to believe that suffering has the final word.

Doctor Bernard Rieux, on the other hand, arrives at a different answer. He does not believe in God, nor does he expect the universe to provide justice or consolation. Yet he continues to fight the plague with unwavering dedication, caring for the sick simply because they are human beings in need. His trust is not placed in divine providence but in human solidarity, compassion, and moral responsibility. In Kung’s terms, Rieux embodies fundamental trust without God, an affirmation of life’s worth despite the absence of religious belief.

Both Father Paneloux and Doctor Rieux possess what Kung called the fundamental trust. Both continue to act, hope, and serve others. They disagree about the ultimate foundation of their trust, but they share the conviction that life must be affirmed rather than abandoned. God became the ultimate ground of the priest’s faith while humanity shaped that ground for the doctor.

To be continued.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2.0