I’ve had door-to-door Jesus salesmen use Pascal’s Wager as a reason why I should believe in god. It’s pretty common really. There are several different reasons why I think it’s a poor reason for believing in a god, but how does one choose to believe in something anyway? From my perspective, either there’s adequate evidence to believe in something or there’s not. Now if you want to believe in something, you can trick yourself into being more swayed by the supporting evidence, but that’s not a conscious decision and requires there to be a reasonable amount of evidence to begin with. Choosing to believe in something is like choosing to see everything as blue.
I agree with you that the idea seems nonsensical: choosing to believe in something, as if it were like choosing a car to buy. But, I can only speak for myself and the people I know well, whose belief systems don’t appear to work that way. Religious zealots might have psychologies that truly work differently from anything I can imagine.
Seems to me that hardly anyone, maybe no one, who genuinely believes in God does so because they found Pascal’s Wager convincing. (Somehow I doubt even Pascal did.) I think the Wager is offered up by Jehovah’s Witnesses and other proselytizers, to non-believers specifically, because it resembles a sound and dispassionate logical argument. A pure cost/benefit analysis. Isn’t that what skeptics say they’re looking for? Cold hard reason? Try pushing that on 'em.
I suppose I could try to believe there’s an overlooked slice of chocolate cake in my fridge. If this belief were true, I would benefit from it. If it were false, no harm done really. But somehow my mind just doesn’t work that way, and in any case I find it an unappealing way to seek truth. (Seems like there would be a lot of false positives, for one thing.)
It’s not at all uncommon to hear some one say, “I choose to believe that…” or “I refuse to believe that…” What do they mean by that. I think (I believe?) that there really is an element of will in at least some believing.
We usually talk about “believing” things that are not obvious to see. I wouldn’t say “I believe that my shirt is blue,” unless I’m colorblind or am prone to hallucinations. But I might say, “I believe that my girlfriend loves me” or “I believe that my doctor knows what he’s doing” or “I believe that this food in my refrigerator is safe to eat.” In each case, I can choose whether or not to act as if these things are true. I can choose whether or not to spend time worrying about whether they’re true. And I can choose whether or not to look for reasons why they might be true, or for reasons why they might not be true.
Of course, to a determininst, beliefs can’t be chosen because nothing can be chosen.
I dunno. We’re all familiar with the idea of someone living in denial; choosing not to accept a belief which threatens their worldview, their psychological security, etc. The choice is based on psychological need, rather than on the evidence.
I don’t see any reason why people can’t equally live in affirmation, embracing a belief not on the evidence but because it meets a psychological need; it assists them in living their lives the way they want to live them.
The possibility that somebody would be a theist for this reason is obvious. But there is, in fact, no reason why somebody else could not be an atheist for this reason.
Sure there is: in order to embrace a belief not in evidence, the belief has to not be in evidence. You don’t say someone is in denial for not believing in leprechauns, do you?
It’s funny, sitting in church when I first had Pascal’s Wager laid on me at a Baptist Church in Artesia New Mexico, I was immediately revolted by the concept. The preacher asked what was lost if he was wrong? Where was the downside.
At thirteen in my horror I thought, “A life lost to a pathetic delusion that tells you that all worldly pleasures are bad. Basically you’ve lost your entire life to a lie.”, he also was apparently blissfully unaware of how after-life centric Pascal’s Wager is. The implicit assumption is that we are living for death. I can think of very little sadder and more tragic than the subjugation of one’s life for an After-Life that will never come.
As I understand Christianity though, living for the afterlife is completely wrong, you are supposed to live in the here and now with the hope of a blessed afterlife.
I don’t think people can have a choice in their beliefs. Christianity confirms this as it instructs us to ‘just believe’. Understanding can come from faith but faith does not come from knowledge. If you have faith things will be revealed. So in one sense you are choosing your belief, but can you really be said to be choosing something if the choice is made without any prior information as to what you are being sold?
So no, I do not think it is possible to choose what one believes at least not for most people. I do believe that rigorous self-examination, contemplation, meditation and can lead to such choices being made, but most people do not make that sort of effort. I think it’s rare that a person gets to the point of choosing what they believe, much less successfully change their beliefs.
Again referencing Christianity, you often see within the conversion process a great amount of recidivism of belief. People default to what they already believed before and call it Christianity, which is why local flavors of Christianity in various parts of the world have such different characters. The aesthetics of the way people represent Christianity are very much influenced by the local culture that preceded it. That would be why the Roman Catholic Church so closely followed the Roman order in Europe. Christianity by its very nature is beyond radical, the very notion that your entire world, your entire reality is constructed upon a lie is a very radical notion, in any time, in any place.
The process by which one may acquire a new belief is being, ‘born-again’, and I am using this in a broader sense than just the Christian one. Someone can be born-again as an atheist, but that is rarely articulated as a choice, most atheists that I have spoken to consider it to be a position they defaulted to due to the lack of other plausible options. That cannot really be argued to be, ‘choosing’, atheism.
So my answer to it is provisional, yes, we can choose what we believe, but barely and rarely.
I think people (if they are not just getting along to go along) choose their beliefs based on what they feel and their experiences. I was raised a conservative Lutheran and sent to Prep School to be a pastor at age 13. I could never get around the concept of original sin. To be damned for the acts of a distant ancestor did not feel like a scenario a loving God would create. I adjusted my belief system accordingly.
Not only is this possible, this is exactly what I have to do as someone with an anxiety disorder. You have to realize that you are telling yourself a bunch of things that aren’t true, and start telling yourself something else. Eventually you will believe what you tell yourself.
It’s not even a matter for debate: it’s something that’s been psychologically proven. Look up Self-talk. People who tell themselves good things eventually wind up believing them, making themselves happier people.
You guys are way too focused on the religious aspects of this equation. And those beliefs are a lot stronger, which is why you find them hard to change. Try working on a much smaller scale.
And I find Pascal’s wager entirely convincing, myself. When you have OCD, you realize you can doubt anything. I’ve successfully used the wager to combat that. The idea that Christianity is denying oneself all pleasure is probably where mswas is going wrong. It’s recognizing that things that might be seem good for a little while are going to hurt you in the end–even before the afterlife. But that’s a whole other topic.
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Enuma Elish**: But I think the question they are asking is, Could you have chosen to believe in original sin anyway, despite your disgust? I think so, but your mileage may vary.
No I couldn’t have chosen to believe in original sin. I tried for 15 years. It just never felt like anything but a horrible lie.
So is it fair to consider your change of heart to be a ‘choice’?
I for one do believe in original sin, but not in any religious sense. If our parents shit in the streets, we have to walk in it, we are not free from the consequences of the actions of our ancestors. Not only that, but we are taught by those same ancestors who we are also genetically descended from. Any sort of genetic defect that gets passed on to us is something we have to deal with. Any erroneous teaching is something we either have to learn an alternate to or we will continue to believe it to be true or just not think about it at all. This is not coming from a place resembling Christianity, but from rational observation.
If Cain killed Abel then we have to deal with the knowledge that one human being can murder another. My favorite allegories are ones that explore Cain more deeply. Particularly the idea that Cain is the founder of ‘civilization’. One that I’ve heard is a story regarding Abel being a herder and Cain being a farmer. Abel allowed his sheep to eat Cain’s crops. This is what Cain killed him for. In terms of its relationship to the loss of the freedom of a nomadic herding life for the systematic relationship to a particular plot of land brought on by agriculture. Agriculture and its attendant ills have led to the political scene of civilization today. We are still murdering one another over land disputes.
The best example of this would be Serbia/Croatia, those people were killing each other because their parents killed each other. They definitely were locked into original sin, the blood feud. Christianity worked very hard against the reality of the tribal blood feud that characterized most of our existence as a tribal people. It’s most significant contribution is the relaxation of the adherence to the ‘an eye for an eye’ notion of justice that predated it.
So I guess you did make a choice in a way. You could have discarded the idea of a loving God, rather than doing so you chose to discard original sin instead.
Many people believe something then later question it, and learn it is not true, then disgard it. One can believe a partener is faithful, then learn it is not. Knowledge can replace belief. Some people used to believe there were men on Mars, now knowledge shows there isn’t. One must want to believe something,like a man who believes his wife is faithful until she may become pregnant by another man, he is hurt but the truth allows him to accept what he doesn’t want to hear.
One can believe in A God, then question it, and decide what he or she believed is not the truth,so they change. Faith comes from desire, we want there to be a higher power, it is comforting to a person,and at the death of a loved one it is a comfort to believe they will see that person again.
Certainly, this was not Pascal’s own reason for believing.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the Pensees (the (unfinished) work in which the Wager appears), but I think it’s fair to say that what Pascal was trying to do in them was, not to prove the existence of God or the truth of Christianity, but to show that it was no less irrational to believe in God or accept Christianity than not to—to break down intellectual barriers to belief.
In particular, I think the Wager was meant to address a specific objection: “Why should I give up earthly pleasures and self-indulgences for a reward in a Hereafter that might not even exist?” Answer: When weighing certain against uncertain rewards, you should consider, not just their probability, but also their magnitude and duration.
And this might make a small bit of sense, but if probability is (according to available confirmational evidence) zero, of what magnitude must duration and reward be for the deal to make sense? Since there a multitude of offers on the table, each with the same amount of available confirmational evidence as to their veracity, how can one be faulted for picking the wrong one?
That’s the whole thing I find frustrating about Christian Apologetics - those people come up with all kinds of (invalid) arguments why it’s OK to believe Christianity is true, but not one of those people are believers because of any of those arguments.
My agnostic Unitarian minster once had a sermon where she said “people come here and say ‘this is the church where you can believe anything you want.’ You can sure try that, but in 30 years of being a minister, I’ve yet to meet anyone who really chooses.” The sermon goes on to talk about how your experiences, your predispositions, what speaks to you and what doesn’t, shape what you end up believing. For reference, our congregation is pretty heavily Humanist leaning - like many UU congregations.
Short comment: I think the idea that accepting Christianity means sacrificing all earthly joy is pretty darn wrong.
Exactly right. Choosing to believe something very often amounts to recognizing which arguments are foolish, no matter how emotionally compelling they may be, and then choosing to disregard them. This isn’t always easy, especially in times of inconvenience or emotional distress.
For example, an acquaintance of mine recently slighted me with regard to an interpersonal issue. I was sorely tempted – and still am – to believe that he is a deceitful, inconsiderate lout. However, I choose to remind myself that this is only one aspect of his personality, and that he may not be consciously aware of his offense. In other words, while it’s very tempting and convenient to think the worst of this man, I consciously choose to avoid thinking in such a manner. I try to remind myself of my own failings, and I remind myself that even the finest of people will sometimes act in selfish or inconsistent ways.
This subject comes up a lot when it comes to theistic matters. Skeptics dismiss theists when they say that they choose to believe in God. “Aha!” they declare. “This proves that your beliefs are just arbitrary, like the flip of a coin.” That’s typically not what a theist means, though. In my case, for example, I have gone through some pretty severe personal trials, during which I was tempted to dismiss God’s existence. Instead, I chose to remind myself that I don’t see the whole picture-- that I don’t know why everything occurs. I reminded myself that there have been times when a greater good came about due to some personal suffering, and that there is probably more happening behind the scenes than what I realize. I remind myself that our ultimate purpose is not mere happiness on earth, but our character and eternal existence. I also choose to remind myself of other reasons why I believe in God – reasons that are not rooted on my personal comfort or circumstances.
We can also choose to be open to new evidence, or to consider existing evidence in a new light. In my younger days, for example, I once harbored a grudge against a certain schoolmate. I never believed that anything good could come from this fella. In my later years, I still wanted to think that way; however, I had to continually remind myself that people change. I chose to believe that he could become a different person, even though my emotional core didn’t think it was possible.
So when someone says that they can’t choose their beliefs, that’s only partially true. We cannot simply force ourselves to believe any arbitrary thing, but we can choose the way we react to evidence and they way we handle our emotional responses.
Do you really believe that? Because that most certainly is not my experience. I, for one, came to believe precisely because of some of those arguments that you consider to be invalid.
I’m by no means the only one. CS Lewis is famous for saying that he came to Christianity “kicking and screaming.” Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel are both on record as saying that it was the evidence that convinced them. Ditto for author Frank Morison and legal expert Dr. Simon Greenleaf . Now one might disagree with their reasoning, and one might even choose to believe that these people are deluding themselves. However, I see no reason not to take them at their word when they say that it’s the arguments that (rightly or wrongly) caused them to change their minds.
Actually, that’s a common caricature of what Christianity teaches. Neither Jesus nor any of the New Testament writers said “Just believe for no reason whatsoever” in their writings. Quite the contrary; Matthew appealed to Old Testament prophecies, Jesus pointed to his fulfillment of the Scriptures, Paul defended his Apostolic credentials, and Peter explicitly urged his readers to “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).
It’s common for both scoffers and immature believers to say that Christianity means that Christianity commands us to believe for no reason whatsoever. That’s not the example that’s been set by Jesus or the Apostles, though. One might disagree with their claims or conclusions, but the point remains – blind belief is not what they command people to do.
26A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
28Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
29Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
(John 20:26-29)
Jesus didn’t fulfill any OT prophecies, by the way, so that’s not a very strong thing to point to.