In a previous essay, I introduced the idea of describing our beliefs as “hopes”, reflecting the reality that we cannot be certain about many metaphysical topics. However, a friend suggested that the way I was using the word made the belief seem too weak, and pointed out that I may have been using the word with a meaning that is now archaic.

The older meaning was similar to the way we use “trust” – a confident perspective, but not necessarily based on something that’s certain. This was also one of the senses of the word “faith” when used in ancient times. But again, that word now often means something much weaker, basically believing something without any reason at all, or even in the face of contrary evidence.

I’m not sure why these would have changed over the years. Maybe as we’ve become more confident in our understanding of the natural world, we expect all beliefs to be based on similar levels of validation. When they aren’t then we consider them completely irrational.

Ancient perspectives would have been much different, because without today’s level of scientific understanding, they would have been more accustomed to dealing with mystery and with making metaphysical choices based on little or no information. In that case, the terms “hope” and “faith” would not have been so weak. Instead, they simply reflected the reality of the world at that time. Everyone knew that there were big mysteries and we just needed to make decisions within that.

But now, we consider those terms to be weaker, even devoid of rational thought.

At any rate, it seemed good to reconsider my previous use of “hope” and see whether something else, like “trust” would be better. In trying that out, it seems another element that needs to be kept in mind is the fact that what we’re really doing is making choices. In other words, placing our trust in something is the result of making a choice to do so. In other words, what we’re really doing is choosing to trust.

So, to try this out, I’ll try rewriting some of the previous posts that way, explicitly exploring where we are choosing to place our trust.