"I Believe..."
What does it mean to say "I believe?" Any time this is prefaced to a statement, such as "I believe in Santa Claus" or "I believe I'll have another beer" it means either (1) the fact you espouse is in reasonable dispute, or (2) you yourself are unsure of its veracity.
Most folks don't say "I believe that the sun will rise in the morning" because it's a fact taken for granted by the vast majority. Similarly, no Moslem says "I believe there is no God but Allah," instead they make the declarative "There is no God but Allah."
The Christian creeds begin with the "I believe" preface by and large because they were composed in the Roman Empire, at a time and place when the overwhelmingly vast majority of people were Pagans of one stripe or another. It's not that they were unsure of their faith, but rather that the facts of the creed were culturally in dispute. Whenever a substantial number of people in your own culture or country are apt to disagree with your assertion of unprovable facts, it's only polite (and often politic) to affirm your belief in them, rather than to assume that your mere assertion will inform your audience.
Unprovable Facts
What does it mean, "unprovable facts?" Doesn't modern science demand proof of any hypothesis before accepting it as fact? Doesn't that make the phrase "unprovable fact" a meaningless oxymoron?
Not really, no.
Science and the modern Humanism that is its philosophical outgrowth aren't well equipped to deal with purely experiential, interior truths. Despite the best minds in Psychology and Psychoanalysis working diligently for a century and more, we still don't really understand how Human emotions work.
Science works by making and breaking falsifiable hypotheses to explain previous observations. That is, a scientist observes something and proposes an explanatory hypothesis that it is possible to prove incorrect. For example:
Observation: My socks keep vanishing in the wash.
Hypothesis 1: They're being eaten by a small Gnome who lives in the washing machine.
This hypothesis can be falsified, that is, proven incorrect, through experimentation and observation. At the start of the experimentation and observation phase, we don't know if our hypothesis is true or false, but we proceed on the assumption that it's true until we are confronted by evidence that it is not. In our example, observation disproves the hypothesis: there is no Gnome. However, our observations may suggest a new hypothesis.
We discover that at the start of the spin cycle, some of the water sloshes over the top of the washer drum, leading us to the hypothesis that the socks are being swept away with the tide. In this case, subsequent observation proves that at least for some socks, our second hypothesis is true. Perhaps not all of the socks can be accounted for, however. New hypotheses are proposed and rejected or accepted. Science advances.
Interior Truths
This scientific method works very well with anything physical — anything that can be observed and measured. You can't, however, measure emotions. You can't observe thought. Certainly, you can measure and observe the results of such interior Human workings — ten thousand years of story-tellers and historians is ample proof of that — but to say that Henry VIII's love for Anne Boleyn led to the English Reformation in no way describes or explains the emotion of love, or even proves its existence.
The existence or non-existence of any emotion is not a scientifically valid hypothesis because it is not falsifiable.
Like emotions, faith is an interior truth: an unprovable fact. If one doesn't accept the existence of the universe as prima facie evidence of the existence of a divine, creative force, no other physical evidence will be accepted either. Science cannot be used to prove the existence of God because the only real, undisputable evidence is experiential and therefore outside of science's purview. The fact is unprovable.
So when we say "I believe", it isn't because we're unsure of ourselves; we could easily rephrase the credo as a series of simple assertions of fact. But since these facts are unprovable, prudence dictates that we must instead simply assert our belief in them.
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