> There are many things considered facts which are really little more than fictions which have been accepted society-wide.

[…]

I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.

‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.’

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-’

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

‘So we can believe the big ones?’

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

‘They’re not the same at all!’

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET— Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—’

MY POINT EXACTLY.

[…]

— The personification of death, and his granddaughter Susan; Hogfather, Terry Pratchett, 1996

“What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the brain awake. Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake, and it also dreams when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a material frame that makes us perceive things in a linear way. When we go to sleep we do not have the frame, and the dream has the tendency to change constantly. Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society's dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society's rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays. We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child's attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream. Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions of things simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind. The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. That is the way we learned everything we know. By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong.“

From a book called ‘The Four Agreements’

indeed, many things that we take as facts are really just theories that have been generally accepted. even for things like gravity, fact is only that masses somehow attract each other. how that actually works is a theory, and it's accepted until we find a better one.

This is something I often think about. What is the difference between me, accepting some scientific theories as fact, even though I have no physical means of testing all of them myself, and someone deeply religious who chooses to believe in some higher spiritual ideas? There are things I can be reasonably sure of, maybe because I see what the theory behind it says and predicts, and it agrees with what actually happens in real life, yet there are also things that I just have to take for granted (and I guess hope that the other knowledgeable people alive will make sure it's actually correct).

The difference is you get to choose what to verify.

Science says you can use electricity to turn water into oxygen and hydrogen and then burn them to get water again. It further says what the flame will look like and how much heat it will produce etc etc. Now, if any of that seems unlikely it’s fairly cheap to verify, if something else bothers you then verify that.

Sure, verification of every idea is impossible, but pick a few at random and that should logically give you more confidence in the others.

On the other hand with matters of faith you can’t verify any of it. Which should then give you some pause.

religion largely claims to make your life better by teaching you how to interact with each other. it uses believe and fear of an unprovable entity to do that, sure.

but you can verify if it does make your and everyone elses life better or not.

those that claim to be messengers of god should be recognized by their fruits, that is, by the effect they have on society.

This is a great way to frame the counterargument. I'm wary of the comparison between religious faith and scientific belief because it seems to sometimes trigger a cascade of irrational beliefs if it goes the wrong way.

The difference is usefulness. Scientific models are based on observed behaviour. The model tries to predict the behaviour. If it gets the prediction wrong, then it's not a good model to be using in that situation (but we might still use it in other situations where it does make good predictions). Whether you believe in the model or not is completely irrelevant. What matters is whether or not you can use the model to achieve some goal.

Religious people often asks me if I only believe in things that I can prove. I reply that I can prove nothing other than my own existence, and I can't even prove the nature of that existence. I accept things that are useful to me and abandon them when they are no longer useful. I may later come back to accept them if they return to being useful (as they are likely to do).

Like most other people in the world, I believe in lots of things. Life is pretty uncomfortable without belief. I don't happen to believe in the things that major religions believe in, but I don't see it as a problem. Believing something, or not believing something is neither here nor there. I am 100% OK with the idea that my beliefs may be wrong. In fact, I rather suspect they are. Why should that worry me?

How important is our belief of something vs the acceptance of something that appears to work? Are we invested in the unknowable truth? Does it matter to us if we are wrong?

I feel that it's the importance we assign to being right in our beliefs that defines our religions.

interestingly i just had this discussion a few weeks ago. contrasting belief in scientific "facts"/theories vs belief in religious claims.

in the end both depend on the absence of evidence contradicting the claims.

but that also means that science and religion can co-exist if they do not contradict each other.

we should accept on either side that anything with contradictory evidence can obviously not be true, and stop to pit one side against the other.

any contradictions we find on either side are a sign of misinterpretation of either the scientific evidence or of the religious claims. and on both sides we then need to make an effort to find a better interpretation.

i believe that doing that is possible. even if we remove everything from religions that contradicts current scientific theories there is still a whole lot left for a spiritual belief.

Sounds like what Harari called intersubjective truths, like: money, human rights, etc.