Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty. In other words, belief is when someone thinks something is reality, true, when they have no absolute verified foundation for their certainty of the truth or realness of something. Another way of defining belief is, it is a
mental representation of an
attitude positively orientated towards the
likelihood of something being
true. In the context of
Ancient Greek thought, two related concepts were identified with regards to the concept of belief:
pistis and
doxa. Simplified, we may say that pistis refers to
trust and
confidence, while doxa refers to
opinion and
acceptance. The English word
doctrine is derived from
doxa. Belief's purpose is to guide action and not to indicate truth.