Jw Apps Claim

JW Apps claim of “A belief is what we accept as truth” can be interpreted differently through many people. Before we can start to defend or disagree with this claim, we must first understand the meaning of truth and belief. A truth is something that is known for certain, has been proven and is a certain fact. While as a belief may not necessary have to be true, it is more about what people accept and think that could be real. From this, we can say that it is possible to defend JW Apps claim as a belief is personal and has been accepted as truth from ‘we’ as it’s believer. However, in order to defend this effectively we have to first know and define exactly who ‘we’ is. When discussing
truth and belief, we often also refer to another important associated term, knowledge. Knowledge according to Plato is ‘True Justified Belief’. A belief without justification cannot be said as knowledge. To fit into this category of knowledge, the belief would also need to be proven as truly true. Without this proving, the belief would have no evidence that it is real and therefore cannot be knowledge. For truth to be knowledge, it must be ‘public’, this means that it must apply to everyone. Therefore if one disagrees with another person’s ‘truth’ then that ‘truth’ is not knowledge. Another factor is that the truth must also be ‘independent’ and ‘external’, it must be independent of anyone’s belief and nothing anyone’s belief or say can alter that truth. It also must forever be true and not just true in only one period of time. Coming back to JW Apps’s claim, “A belief is what we accept as truth”, this is possible as before we can ‘know’ and ‘believe’ something, we must first accept that it is true. Beliefs are personal and each individual has there own perspectives and ideas of what is true and untrue. Different groups of people have different viewpoints on issues and therefore different beliefs. From this, we can see that in order to defend this claim we must first state clearly who ‘we’ in JW Apps’s claim is. Otherwise we might misinterpret that ‘we’ means everyone and will make the claim false as one’s belief may be an absolute nonsense and untrue to others.
A good example of this is the big question of how the earth and humans were created. According to Christians, the existence of us today is completely from God’s creation. However, if we discuss this with many scientists, you would altogether get a different viewpoint as they would most likely disagree with the Christian’s belief. This is because they have their own belief that we humans were created through evolution. However, we cannot totally defend JW Apps’s claim as there are a few problems. Firstly, acceptance as truth of some beliefs may not entirely be from truly believing it. This is because some people would rather try to believe in something and benefit from that belief even though they have their doubts and don’t really believe it is true. An example of this is when of I was a kid, I had always believed that everyone in my family would stay living with me forever. Of course, deep down I knew this is not true. Everyone has to die and cannot always stay living. However, I chose to believe this because the idea from this belief gave me happiness and comfort. Religion sometimes also has the same effect. Some people may want to accept
the belief in their religion as truth because they might want a belief to depend and rely on. As a conclusion, I think it is possible to defend JW Apps’s claim of “A Belief is what we accept as truth”. This is because in order to have a belief on something, we must already accept that it is true to us. However, as said earlier, there are also many problems to this claim which doesn’t make it perfectly defendable. We can see that all truths are beliefs, although it is not necessarily that all beliefs are also truths. However, to a certain extent, I think it is true that ‘A Belief is what we accept as truth”.