Beliefs are real.  In Mind and Matter, I make my case that reality is dual: mind and matter, neither of which reduces into the other.  An idea is a part of mind-reality, it’s immaterial, and it’s as real as matter.  Now permit me a syllogism: Ideas are real, every belief is an idea, therefore, beliefs are real.

OK, beliefs are real.  But when is a belief true?  Remember that the test of truth for an idea is whether the idea corresponds to that aspect of reality to which it speaks.  Therefore, because a belief is an idea, a belief is likewise true when it corresponds with its relevant reality.  For example, the myths of a hunter-gatherer tribe are finely calibrated for the tribe living and flourishing in their physical and social reality.  Their myths are true to that world and that way of being, whereas our beliefs would be false there.

So, to determine if a belief is true, we compare it against the aspect of reality in which the belief lives.  Hence the million-dollar question, what reality? in what aspect of reality does this belief live?  Reality has many sides.  Let’s use communion as an example.  What’s the truth of the bread and wine; to what aspect of reality does it connect?  An unbeliever sees a morsel of bread and a little cup of grape juice.  A believer sees the same, and also the body and blood of Christ.  There are two aspects of reality here: the material belief goes to one, while the spiritual goes to the other.  If the unbeliever laughs at the believer for making too much of a little bread and juice, that means the unbeliever sees only the material aspect of reality.   

What if I’m at church and I look down and see only bread and grape juice?  I feel false because I see only the material reality, not the body and blood of Christ.  Belief has unmoored from the reality that grounds it (body and blood) and attached to another reality (bread and juice).  I free-fall into doubt: what am I doing here in this church?  C.S. Lewis’ talked about this in Letters to Malcom: “Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question ‘What is this?’ – this wafer, this sip of wine.  That has a dreadful effect on me.  It invites me to take ‘this’ out of its holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as a part of nature.”

It's fashionable now to say that all beliefs are fictions, and money is the fashionable example.  The argument goes like this: look at a twenty-dollar bill, it’s just a piece of paper, therefore your belief in the meaning of that twenty is just a fiction.  The argument is shallow because it confuses the reality that applies to money.  Let’s go back to the million-dollar question, in what aspect of reality does this belief live?  The correct reality for a twenty isn’t the material paper, no, the correct reality is our communal belief in the economy in which the twenty is currency.  Our modern belief in money corresponds with a global economy that includes billions of people and that’s changing the physical face of the planet.  The twenty is a ticket into that communal reality, a reality of mind and matter.  It’s all real, including the idea of money, our shared belief in it, our global economy and everything around me bought with money.  The only time a twenty is just a piece of paper is when the economy collapses and the twenty is devalued to zero: now the twenty doesn’t live in a working communal economy, so it reverts to paper and we roll tobacco in it. 

To believe is to come into relation with truth, and truth is lived from the inside.  People live truth, and we do it as a real community in a real time and place.  Truth is a communal faith-- the community’s faith becomes the first premise of all its logical syllogisms, and from that first premise all conclusions must follow.  Look at the pictures below and hear Jacob Bronowski who said, “We must grasp from the outset that a painter was not merely ignorant when he made the figure of Christ larger in his picture than perspective would allow” (from The Western Intellectual Tradition).