“The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse … confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe,” so said historian Paul Johnson describing the first verification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as it replaced the classic Newtonian view of gravity with its absolute lines, absolute length, and absolute motion.[1]

The solar eclipse showed that a ray of light just grazing the surface of the sun bent by twice the amount provided for by the classical Newtonian theory. This observation was the first of three which would prove Einstein’s theory over Newton’s, and it was no small event. For a few dozen years, the scientific community knew that Newton’s theories could not explain certain anomalies, but they had no new theory that could. It seemed physicists knew they were seeing the world wrongly, yet in Einstein’s theory of relativity, the scientific community was able to take off one set of glasses which they had used for centuries to understand the entire physical order and they put on new ones. Einstein’s new perspective made sense of more observations than Newton’s and it became the dominant theory of gravity in modern physics.[2]

This same replacing of not-quite adequate glasses has taken places a few times in the scientific world. Galileo’s perspective made more sense of cosmology than Ptolemy’s. Kepler’s theories of motion replaced those of Aristotle. In each case, a revolution occurred in which one theory was removed like a deficient set of glasses, and replaced by a new set that made more sense of the observed world. Thomas Kuhn calls the replacement of old glasses, paradigm shifts, and said, “Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses … [and] when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.”

Even in the physical sciences there are philosophies, perspectives, paradigms, glasses which make sense of the world around us. Without even the most basic glasses, we are left without understanding.

This picture from the sciences is helpful in understanding how you and I see the world as well, for we all have different experiences, different priorities, different hopes and desires, philosophies, and paradigms which color, filter, and make sense of everything else. We are all, it seems, wearing glasses—things we believe—that interpret and ground everything we hold as true.

Philosopher Richard Taylor rightly says, “[Knowledge of our world] has to begin with something, and since it obviously cannot begin with things that are proved, it must begin with things that are believed.”[3] Knowledge of our world begins with glasses, with a perspective that makes sense of everything else. In order to affirm anything, we must begin by believing some things without evidence.

For example, most of us believe—totally without evidence—that our brains are reliable. Nothing we do could prove the reliability of our brains. Any evidence we might site to prove that our brains are reliable would be analyzed, affirmed, and given value by the very brain we are trying to prove reliable.

So too, we believe without evidence that we are not stuck in the Matrix. We believe without evidence that those we love have a mind like ours and are cognitively aware as we are. We believe without evidence that the future will be like the past. We believe without evidence that there is a physical world all around us—for everything we see, taste and touch could be an illusion or the details of a dream.[4]
 
 “Yeah,” someone might say, “but everyone believes those sorts of things.”

And this is certainly true if you believe there is a physical world around you, if you believe it is populated with people who have beliefs like yours, if you believe that you can know about the world around you with your suspect brain.
 
If we are self-critical, it seems we believe all kinds of things without evidence. And these beliefs are the glasses through which we see the world. Such assumptions are unavoidable—for knowledge of our world has to begin with something, and since it cannot begin with things that are proved, it must begin with things that are believed.

Objections?