From time to time, someone will try to talk me into one religion or another. While sometimes certain aspects sound very nice, there’s no getting around the fact that I simply don’t believe them. They pile on the appealing features and detail the dire consequences of not following their rules, but they don’t seem to understand that I’m not choosing to disbelieve them and that even if I wanted to believe them (I don’t), the best I could do is pretend.
Do most religious people actually believe their religions? Do they “choose” to believe, or do they think their religions are factually true?
Well, you illustrate your question by talking about religious belief, but the question itself - is belief a choice? - is equally relevant to any belief, whether religious or not. Somebody may believe, for example, that lying is wrong, or that a woman has the right to choose an abortion, or they may believe the opposite of those things. Are those beliefs chosen? If they are, then we have no reason to suppose that religious beliefs are not similarly chosen.
Religious beliefs can be chosen. Martin Gardner, a stalwart of the skeptical movement, chose to believe, because belief afforded him personal comfort. “Credo consolans,” I believe because it makes me feel better.
In modern formal philosophy, belief is imposed by reason and evidence. We can’t “choose to believe” that the sky is green if our senses tell us it is blue. We can’t “choose to believe” in unicorns.
However, we can give extra weight to propositions we may have reason to favor. If a guy is about to marry a Catholic woman, and wants to be together with her in faith, he may give additional weight to what his fiancee’s priest tells him. He may say, “Well, I begin to see what you mean” when, without the inducement of a happy marriage, he might have said, “I don’t really accept what you say.” The man has, so to speak, put his thumb on one pan of the scales. He isn’t exactly choosing what to believe, but is choosing what line of reasoning to favor.
I suspect we all do this to some degree, and thus we all choose to influence our beliefs, if not to select them outright.
Nonsense. Plenty of people believe things that fly in the face of reason and evidence. And over the centuries, some philosophers have embraced knowledge based on empirical evidence, while others have discredited it. But of course this raises the question of why some people’s personal epistemology is based on evidence, while other people’s are not . . . even when confronted by the same evidence.
Not “nonsense” at all. I didn’t say “good” evidence or “scientifically valid” evidence. I said evidence. When Preacher Jim tells his congregation that Jesus loves them, that is, for many, sufficient evidence, and supports their belief.
I already pointed out how people can (and often do) assign weight to evidence according to their desires or needs. People believe things that fly in the face of evidence…because they cling to other evidence in support. They may be basing their belief on a mere mote, and ignoring the vast plank of evidence against – this is the case for many believers in creationism. But even creationists have “evidence” (really shitty evidence, but evidence) on their side.
I don’t think anyone has ever chosen a belief. They have chosen to assent to things, but “belief” is not the kind of thing you can choose. Belief happens to you, based on your evidence and your epistemological character. You can do things to affect the evidence available to you, and you can do things to affect your epistemological character*, but you can’t, on the spot, as an act of immediate will, simply choose to believe something.
*Because of your ability to affect these things, you can “choose to believe” something in a certain sense–by deciding you want to affect yourself in such a way as to guarantee that you’ll come to believe it later on. But later on, when you come to believe it, it will seem like a belief forced on you by the evidence, and will not seem (anymore) like a choice.
I don’t think you can consciously choose to just start believing something straight away, but I suspect you can make a choice that starts you down a path which leads to you caving under the pressure of persuasion.
What you choose, I think, is the basis on which you form your beliefs.
Of course, we may well choose a basis because it enables us to form the beliefs that, for other reasons, we want to form. To that extent, we choose our beliefs.
Personally, I have never liked the word “belief”.
I simply avoid using it.
As much as I can, I prefer to know, and there is no belief required for fact.
For unproven scientific theories, I may have an opinion, one way or another, but I will not believe a theory is true until proven, and once proven, there is no longer need to believe, since it is then fact.
I for one, have chosen never to believe.
I suspect you’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. On a practical level, we believe things all the time - it would be impossible to function otherwise.
You believe your car keys are in the place you last saw them (in fact, they may not be there for a number of reasons), rather than beginning a search for the facts of their location afresh every time.
No, I don’t think one can choose to believe. People will believe whatever seems right and sensical to themselves, and not believe those things that feel wrong and illogical.
Which is why I’m disgusted by mainstream Christianity’s belief regarding hell. If hell is reserved for the Hitlers of the world, that would be one thing. But I’m supposed to believe that’s where people who just can’t brainwash themselves are sent after they die? Yeah…I REALLY want to spend all eternity with the pious folks who think that’s perfectly reasonable and fair. :rolleyes:
My minister is a UU agnostic with a PhD in Divinity from Yale. She’s met a lot of people who become UUs because “we let you choose what to belief.” She says that she’s never really met anyone who has truly gotten to choose. Her point is that you are what your experiences have led you to be - you can’t escape those - and often in escaping those you are making the choice you are forced to make in order to escape your past.
Keep in mind that UU beliefs - those of us that get to “choose” and then talk to a minister about our choice in a environment that welcomes atheists and theists alike - are all over the board. We have Muslims and Buddhists in our congregation. She isn’t talking simply about choosing to believe in God.
And I tend to believe her. This is her lifes work. She’s a smart cookie and she is insightful about people.
If belief is not a choice, how can we hold people responsible for their actions when they are acting in accordance with their beliefs?
If it is a choice, how do we go about choosing? Saying you have “chosen to believe” something just sounds like you’ve decided to proceed as if you believe it, while trying to brainwash yourself into thinking it’s true. I guess if you succeed, maybe you’ve chosen, but how is it different from wishful thinking? Expecting others to engage in self-delusion doesn’t seem reasonable.
And you really believe that?
You hold people responsible for their actions, not for their beliefs. If they act respectfully towards others, then it doesn’t matter what their beliefs are that motivate that behavior. If they don’t, then it doesn’t matter either.
This really depends more on how we define choice, but I’d tend to agree with the idea that belief is a choice. The thing is, this sort of gets into the whole idea of what freewill really is in the first place, and if we accept that it exists in other situations, why is belief any different.
For example, let’s say I’m offered a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Well, that seems like a pretty straightforward and obvious situation of a choice. But my decision there is ultimately based on pre-existing requirements. If I have a strong preference for one flavor or the other, well how much of a choice is it to choose between a flavor I enjoy and one I don’t particularly care for? Or maybe I’m on a diet and eating ice cream is a clearly bad idea in that case. Or, let’s say I really don’t have any meaningful preference for either, I enjoy both equally, is it really a choice if the result outcome doesn’t have any meaning?
This is what makes belief a choice. Just like those situations above, that some of us may have a preference for flavor, maybe of us have reasons to favor a particular belief system, because it’s how we were raised, or culture, or our peers. Some of us end up with very strong beliefs, some relatively mild. So sure, people will tend to pick their favorite flavor, just as people will tend to pick the beliefs they were raised with, but that doesn’t mean everyone always does.
What really makes choice interesting isn’t so much our preferences, but how we assign weight to those preferences. For instance, I tend to prefer vanilla over chocolate, but considering it’s not isolated, sometimes I like chocolate for variety, or everyone else is having chocolate so why get the other ice cream out, or whatever. Or, mentioned upthread, maybe someone is really interested in exploring another belief because of marriage or other events in their life.
Speaking personally, my beliefs didn’t change because I lost faith or was convinced by others. I made a conscious choice to explore other ideas, and the aspects that I found had a good case, I accepted and now believe. I could have kept going with what I believed, it was serving me fine, but I wanted to see what else was out there. Some people don’t want to do that at all.
And that’s exactly why attempted conversions generally fail, it’s not because belief isn’t a choice, per se, it’s that the people aren’t interested in changing their beliefs. Even for open-minded people, changing beliefs can still have a significant impact on your life. It can affect a number of your relationships, and depending on how strongly you choose to abide by whatever that belief system may or may not require, it could result in major changes of life style, particularly diet, clothing, service, and behavior. That’s a big consequence, so it’s not much of a surprise that most people are unwilling to even consider it.
I think that a lot of belief is a habit of mind, and like other habits can be trained in and trained out to some extent.
But our willingness to do so, our underlying motivation, influences how much effort we’re willing to put into it.
I think we can essentially brainwash ourselves and that the ways of thinking we then establish can be fairly hardy.
Let’s say you are asked which tastes better: vanilla ice cream or a steaming mound of poop.
Would you say a person who has a revulsion to eating poop is just being a willful, close-minded person?
Or would you say that a person’s opinions are formed through a combination of experience and innate personal inclination–none of which are controlled by that person?
But there are things we call “acquired tastes,” where we’re training our tastebuds to accept or even like things we initially didn’t like. Is there a reason to think we are untrainable in other ways?
But training those tastes creates an experience. You are making a conscious choice to develop those tastes, but its the experience itself that develops them. And even when you make that conscious choice, it might not stick. I still don’t like beer. I try it from time to time, I spent a few years in college trying to develop the taste - nope, don’t like it.
Likewise, with belief. You can choose to see yourself as a spiritual person, to cultivate spiritual beliefs (or logical person/logical beliefs) and choose to expose yourself to the ideas that will shape you into the person you want to be. But sometimes those ideas don’t take - you can WANT to believe, but just not buy it in the end, or you can WANT to be a skeptic, but never shake the feeling that more is out there.