What does “I believe in…” mean? You can “believe in” concepts like God, or the love of your spouse, or the goodness of humanity. In popular vernacular you can also “believe in” more concrete, fact-based formulations like evolution, or the monogamy of your spouse, or the success of a particular school of economics.
The difficulty for me comes in the fact that we use the same term — “believe in” — for matters of pure inclination (the very idea of eating raw meat is gross to me) and also for matters where we mean “I have been convinced by the evidence” (I got sick eating raw meat and so believe it’s unsafe).
Would “I operate as if X is true” serve as a functional replacement for “I believe X”? Then believe in God is operating as if God is really there; He’s a fact. Belief in evolution would be to operate as if evolution is a fact. Belief in a political position would not simply be the belief that the position represents the best course of action, but would also entail taking that action!
So is a held belief that doesn’t have any operational component in effecting how you act really any belief at all?