Most of us have beliefs we rarely think of as beliefs.

They feel more solid than that.

They feel like facts.

We believe certain things about God, relationships, morality, success, ourselves, other people and the nature of reality. Some of those ideas were taught to us explicitly. Others were absorbed so gradually that we may struggle to remember when we first encountered them.

But how often do we stop and ask:

How do I actually know this is true?

Not why does it make sense to me?

Not how many people agree with me?

Not even how strongly do I feel it?

But:

What would justify my confidence that this belief accurately describes reality?

That question can be surprisingly uncomfortable.

Because questioning your beliefs doesn’t simply involve examining ideas. Sometimes it means examining parts of your identity.

And once you begin doing that seriously, you may discover that the boundary between what you know and what you have simply become accustomed to believing is much less obvious than it first appeared.

Questioning Your Beliefs Begins With Asking Where They Came From

Think about some of your deepest convictions.

Where did they come from?

Your parents?

Your culture?

Religion?

School?

Books?

Personal experience?

Social media?

A teacher?

A painful experience?

Something somebody told you when you were seven years old?

We arrive in the world knowing remarkably little about what anything means. Other people begin providing explanations almost immediately.

This is your family.

This is your country.

This is God.

This is right.

This is wrong.

This is success.

This is what a good person does.

This is what happens when you die.

This is who you are.

Long before we have developed the ability to critically examine these statements, many of them have already begun forming the framework through which we understand everything else.

That doesn’t make inherited beliefs false.

Our parents can teach us things that are true. Cultures preserve enormous amounts of accumulated knowledge. Traditions can carry wisdom across generations.

The interesting question is different:

Would I believe this if nobody had taught it to me?

And if the answer is no, that still doesn’t make the belief wrong.

It simply tells you something important about where it came from.

Believing Something Strongly Doesn’t Make It True

One of the most useful distinctions we can make is between confidence and accuracy.

They are not the same thing.

Human history contains countless examples of people being profoundly certain about ideas that later generations rejected.

And we don’t even need history.

Look around the world today.

People hold contradictory religious, political, spiritual and philosophical beliefs with enormous conviction.

One person knows there is a God.

Another knows there isn’t.

One person knows their sacred text contains divine revelation.

Another person has precisely the same certainty about a different sacred text.

Someone interprets an extraordinary coincidence as communication from the universe.

Someone else regards it as probability.

Both may be completely sincere.

Which creates an interesting problem.

If certainty itself proved truth, contradictory beliefs could simultaneously be proven by the confidence of the people holding them.

Clearly, something else is needed.

Questioning Your Beliefs Without Automatically Rejecting Them

There is a misconception that questioning something means becoming opposed to it.

It doesn’t.

You can question your religion without becoming anti-religious.

You can question a spiritual experience without declaring that it was meaningless.

You can examine something your parents taught you without deciding your parents were wrong.

You can question science without rejecting scientific methodology.

And you can question an unconventional idea without automatically retreating to the conventional explanation.

Genuine enquiry should work in both directions.

Otherwise, what looks like open-mindedness can simply become another form of confirmation bias.

For example, imagine somebody has an extraordinary experience during meditation.

They feel a presence.

They see something.

They receive what feels like a message.

One form of certainty says:

It was definitely spiritual.

Another form says:

It was definitely generated entirely by the brain.

But perhaps the most intellectually honest answer, depending on what evidence is available, is:

Something happened. I experienced it. I don’t yet know exactly what caused it.

That position leaves the experience intact without pretending the interpretation has been proven.

What Would Change Your Mind?

There is a question I find particularly useful:

What evidence would make me change my mind?

Try applying it to something you strongly believe.

If the answer is nothing, something interesting has happened.

The belief may no longer be functioning as a conclusion based on evidence.

It has become unfalsifiable.

Whatever happens can simply be incorporated into it.

Evidence supporting the belief proves it.

Evidence contradicting the belief becomes part of the explanation for why the belief is still true.

This can happen in religious thinking.

It can happen in conspiracy theories.

It can happen in relationships.

It can happen in our beliefs about ourselves.

And it can happen in supposedly rational or sceptical thinking too.

None of us automatically escapes it simply because we consider ourselves intelligent.

That is why questioning your beliefs requires more than finding evidence for what you already think.

Sometimes the more revealing question is:

What evidence against my position have I seriously considered?

Your Experience Can Be Real Without Your Explanation Being Right

This distinction has become increasingly important to me:

An experience and an explanation of that experience are two different things.

Suppose I walk into a room and suddenly feel profoundly uneasy.

The feeling is real.

But what caused it?

Perhaps I noticed something subconsciously.

Perhaps the room reminded me of somewhere else.

Perhaps I detected another person’s body language.

Perhaps I was already anxious.

Perhaps I experienced intuition.

Perhaps there is some mechanism I don’t understand.

The fact that I cannot immediately explain the feeling does not mean the feeling didn’t happen.

But the intensity of the feeling doesn’t automatically prove whichever explanation I attach to it either.

This becomes particularly interesting when we consider spiritual experiences.

People across cultures and throughout history have reported encounters with gods, ancestors, spirits, visions, revelations and other extraordinary phenomena.

We can acknowledge that human beings genuinely have these experiences without immediately claiming to know what ultimately causes them.

That space between experience and interpretation is enormous.

And I think some of the most interesting questions live there.

Questioning Your Beliefs About God and Spirituality

Religion makes this particularly fascinating because our interpretation of spiritual experiences often reflects the worldview we already possess.

A Christian might interpret an extraordinary experience through Christianity.

A Hindu may understand something similar through Hindu cosmology.

Someone practising an ancestral tradition might understand it as communication with ancestors.

A secular person might interpret the same phenomenon psychologically or neurologically.

Again, this doesn’t tell us which explanation is correct.

But it raises an important question:

How much does the framework we already possess determine the meaning we give an experience?

If I had been born somewhere else, into another family, another religion and another culture, would I interpret my experiences in exactly the same way?

Would I use the same name for God?

Would I imagine the divine in the same form?

Would I believe the same things happen after death?

Would I recognise the same experiences as revelation?

These questions don’t disprove spirituality.

For me, they make spirituality more interesting.

Because once we stop insisting that our inherited explanation must be the final explanation, the mystery becomes much larger.

Who Gets to Decide What Counts as Evidence?

We also have to consider what we mean by evidence.

Personal experience matters.

But personal experience also has limitations.

Scientific evidence is enormously valuable, but science does not claim to have answered every possible question about consciousness, existence or reality.

Tradition contains accumulated human experience, but longevity doesn’t guarantee truth.

Authority can give us access to expertise, but experts can be wrong.

Consensus can protect us from individual error, but groups can be wrong too.

So where does that leave us?

Perhaps with something less satisfying than certainty but considerably more useful:

degrees of confidence.

Instead of needing everything to be either true or false, perhaps we can say:

I have strong evidence for this.

I think this is likely.

I believe this, but I cannot prove it.

I experienced this, but I don’t know what caused it.

I currently doubt this.

I have no idea.

Those are very different intellectual positions.

We often collapse them into only two:

I believe.

I don’t believe.

Reality may deserve more nuance than that.

Questioning Your Beliefs Also Means Questioning Your Disbelief

This is where things become especially interesting.

Scepticism can become an identity too.

Once someone thinks of themselves as rational, scientific or sceptical, they can become just as invested in maintaining their worldview as somebody who identifies strongly with a religion.

Rejecting something automatically is not necessarily more rational than accepting it automatically.

“That’s impossible” is still a claim.

Sometimes we have enough evidence to make that claim confidently.

Sometimes what we really mean is:

That doesn’t fit my current understanding of how reality works.

Those aren’t necessarily the same statement.

History repeatedly reminds us that human knowledge changes.

But that fact should not become an excuse to believe absolutely anything either.

“Science doesn’t know everything” does not mean every alternative explanation becomes equally plausible.

Again, there is a middle ground.

Curiosity without gullibility.

Scepticism without arrogance.

Wonder without abandoning discernment.

Perhaps that balance is harder than certainty on either side.

Why Being Wrong Can Feel So Threatening

If beliefs were simply pieces of information stored inside us, changing them might be easy.

But beliefs often become connected to identity.

My religion.

My politics.

My community.

My family.

My spirituality.

My understanding of myself.

So when somebody challenges a belief, it can feel as though they are challenging us.

We defend.

We justify.

We search for evidence supporting our position.

We notice flaws in the opposing argument much more quickly than flaws in our own.

And sometimes we stop investigating altogether.

This is one reason questioning your beliefs can require courage.

You don’t know beforehand what will survive the examination.

Perhaps you’ll investigate something and become even more convinced of it.

Perhaps you’ll modify it.

Perhaps you’ll abandon it.

Perhaps you’ll discover that the answer is far more complicated than either side suggested.

Or perhaps you’ll arrive at a place that can initially feel deeply uncomfortable:

I don’t know.

“I Don’t Know” Is Not an Intellectual Failure

We are often rewarded for having answers.

Few people build authority by repeatedly announcing that they don’t know things.

Yet there are questions humanity has been asking for thousands of years.

Why are we here?

Does consciousness continue after death?

Does God exist?

If so, what is God?

Why does anything exist at all?

Does life have inherent meaning?

What is consciousness?

Are spiritual experiences encounters with something beyond us, phenomena produced within us, or some combination we don’t yet understand?

People have proposed extraordinary answers.

But proposing an answer and establishing it as fact are different things.

Perhaps I don’t know deserves more respect.

It doesn’t close the investigation.

It keeps it open.

Questioning Your Beliefs Changed the Questions I Was Asking

This is part of the journey that eventually led me to write Maybe I’m Crazy.

I wasn’t simply interested in deciding whether particular spiritual or religious ideas were true or false.

I became interested in something underneath them.

How do we decide what counts as true in the first place?

I began examining experiences I had interpreted spiritually.

I began examining ideas about God.

Revelation.

Authority.

Coincidence.

Intuition.

Meaning.

The stories human beings construct around experiences we cannot easily explain.

But I also became interested in questioning the opposite assumptions.

If I cannot prove that an experience had a spiritual cause, that doesn’t prove it didn’t.

If I find problems in a religious explanation, that doesn’t automatically establish a materialist one.

If something cannot currently be explained, ignorance doesn’t become evidence for whichever explanation I prefer.

I kept arriving at the same place.

Not certainty.

Possibility.

And strangely, I found that much more interesting.

Maybe I’m Crazy

The title Maybe I’m Crazy contains the word that became increasingly important to me:

Maybe.

Not I am.

Not I’m not.

Maybe.

That small word creates room.

Room to examine what we inherited.

Room to question our interpretations.

Room to consider competing explanations.

Room to recognise when an experience is real but its meaning remains uncertain.

Room to change our minds.

And room to admit that some of the largest questions about existence may remain unanswered.

Maybe I’m Crazy explores inherited certainty, experience and interpretation, revelation, authority, competing possibilities and what happens when we stop demanding that every mystery resolve itself into an answer.

It isn’t an attempt to replace one belief system with another.

It is an invitation to examine how we construct certainty in the first place.

You Don’t Have to Stop Believing

Perhaps the purpose of questioning your beliefs isn’t to become a person who believes nothing.

Maybe it’s to understand your beliefs differently.

To know which ideas you have evidence for.

Which ones you inherited.

Which ones emerged from experience.

Which ones you hold because they give your life meaning.

Which ones remain possibilities.

And which ones you have never actually examined.

You can believe deeply and remain curious.

You can have spiritual experiences and question your interpretation of them.

You can trust your intuition while acknowledging that intuition isn’t infallible.

You can respect science without turning current scientific understanding into the boundary of everything that could possibly exist.

You can say:

This is what I currently believe.

And leave enough space after the sentence for:

But I could be wrong.

Perhaps that isn’t weakness.

Perhaps it is one of the most honest relationships we can have with our own minds.

Because the question isn’t simply:

What do you believe?

The more interesting question might be:

How do you know what you believe is true?