I, too, like this restatement of the OP. In your view, though, what happens if we leave out the last two words of proposition one? IOW, we can choose, but not at will? Which is to say, per your conversation with Smiling Bandit, let’s leave out the idea that one can willy-nilly choose to believe any old thing. Rather, let’s assume only that one actually chooses whether to believe in God. When I was a Christian, I think I did such a thing, based mainly on confidence in the Gospels as a historical record. When I deconverted, it was based mainly on a lack of feeling the presense of God, followed by a sense that the theology doesn’t make sense. Further, on reflection and study, I concluded the historical argument doesn’t hold much water.
For purposes of this thread, whether I was right in the former or the latter beliefs is beside the point. The question is whether I chose them. Some might say no as to the first, arguing it was simple indoctrination. They would be wrong, but it’s admittedly true of some believers. Denying that I later chose not to believe, however, would be hard to sustain. Yet, that seems to be your position. Please explain. As Boyo Jim says, have you never changed a belief?
I have this really uncomfortable sense that we’re all talking slightly past each other here, and that we’re using the same words to mean slightly different things…
In my example, of a racist working hard to believe non-racist things, I was thinking about beliefs that aren’t really falsifiable. They aren’t scientific. They’re cultural, or personal. A little like tastes, which is why I brought up (oolluuugghhlllggghh) all that chocolate.
I readily agree that there is a moral problem in choosing ahead of time to believe in objective and falsifiable matters. It’s a really crappy epistemology, and invites confirmation bias, and it’s just plumb rotten science.
But I would say that it is moral – and admirable – for someone to habituate himself – or to dishabituate himself, perhaps – regarding a “bad” belief that he doesn’t want to hold any longer. I guess the moral decision has already been made. He might say, “I am obviously out of touch with current morality with my old homophobic views. My moral decision is to change my beliefs regarding homosexuality, even though these beliefs have been ingrained in me from childhood. Let me make the effort, then, to change these beliefs, to make me a more moral man.”
As opposed to saying, “Let me make the effort to believe that neutrinos travel faster than light, even though the science is not conclusive.” I agree with you that I wouldn’t want someone to believe in something scientific – even something I believe in! – for bad reasons. But taking a moral stance? Seems like a “good thing” ™.
I have already said that it is wrong to think that any non-rational belief is ipso facto chosen. We are all saddled with fundamental beliefs that are not detemined by a rational process. This doesn’t make them “chosen”–they are caused by circumstance, but we don’t choose them.
In my argument, I’m not assuming people are rational. I’m showing that a chosen belief is a literal contradiction in terms.
Of course not, and as I argued above, neither have you. An (at will) chosen belief is a contradiction in terms.
When evidence brings me to change my mind, so that I now believe P, I don’t decide to believe P. Rather, I decide that P is true. I don’t think “Because of the evidence, I will now believe P,” but rather, “Because of the evidence, P.”
You believed that the gospels are good evidence that God exists, and based on this evidence, you did believe God exists. That’s not choosing-to-believe, that’s just following your evidence.
Similarly, your evidence changed, so your belief changed. You didn’t “choose to believe” something different than you did otherwise–the evidence available to you changed, which led your belief to change.
As I argued a few posts ago, a belief chosen at will is a contradiction in terms. Changing beliefs is not choosing beliefs. Rather, a person’s beliefs change not as a result of a will to believe, but rather as a result of the person’s evidence and rational structure change over time.
I’m having a hard time filling in the details to make this a plausible scenario.
“I am out of touch with current morality, therefore, my current views are immoral” seems like a really bad argument to me, and so it would be hard for me to see someone sustaining a particularly morally good decision based on it.
What would lead someone to think that, even though P is true, nevertheless it is immoral for him to believe that P?
I… disagree. Your argument does not demonstrate that. In fact, if we accept your current line of thinking, then no belief has, oir can have, any reason behind it. In fact, you have just nullified the very value of your argument, because if I accept it, I can no longer believe your argument is valid for a reason, in which case it has no value, and its truth is irrelevant.
That’s nonsense, a distinction without a difference. And in particular, it you believe P and see evidence that instead supports Q, and then you believe Q, then your belief has changed based on evidence whether or not you use the word “decide”. There is no question that you’ve made a decision. If you want to believe that it’s some mysterious unconscious process, go ahead, but it’s a decision nonetheless.
When I was a little boy my sister told me that snow was the result of angels having pillow fights. I believed her. When I got older I learned about the various forms of precipitation, the water cycle and that snow is icy water. What I learned made sense and I couldn’t help but believe it; it wasn’t a decision. I also couldn’t now choose to go back to believing that snow is the result of pillow fights. The same goes for me choosing to believe gods exist.
Can you explain this? I don’t have any idea why you think it’s true.
(Ah–I think what’s happening is that, since I said some beliefs we are just “saddled with” by circumstance, we are not responsible for them–and I think you’re thinking that this must infect every belief based on these beliefs, such that we’re not responsible for any of them, and I think you’re thinking that for something to be a reason for me, I must in some sense be taking responsibility for connecting that reason to that belief.
Maybe?
The response to that would be–though I said “saddled with” I didn’t mean “stuck with.” All beliefs are open to revision. But not through an act of will, but rather, through the practice of learning how to get a better grip on reality. We’re responsible (in a moral sense IMO) for developing that practice–and as such, we’re responsible for the beliefs engendered by our skill (or lack thereof) in that practice.)
I can see someone coming to distrust their own opinion about race because people they respect have the opposite opinion. But this isn’t a choice to stop believing–to distrust my own opinion about something is just to stop having the opinion at all. Distrusting my own opinion because of the opinion of someone I respect is changing my belief-state because of evidence. I have new evidence–namely, the opinion of someone I respect–and this new evidence changes what I believe.
What I’m saying, in part, is that any time anyone changes from not believing P to believing P, it is because, at the moment of the change, that person has evidence sufficient to seemingly “force” P upon him. He might be able to see how you could argue either way, but for him at that moment, based on the evidence available to him, P seems to be the view that’s actually true. He doesn’t choose to believe P–P simply impresses itself on him as a result of his evidentiary position. He may have more or less confidence in P, but if he believes it, then P’s apparent probable truth is something he’s simply responding to. It’s not something he chooses for himself.
Yes, and even the people on this thread who say that they can change their belief at will describe a process as you have outlined. They considered other evidence and came to the conclusion that their current belief was insufficiently explained by the newly considered evidence, so they “changed” their belief rather quickly. Then, to change back, they considered the evidence again and realized they were mistaken, and “changed” their belief again. When really, their belief was changing in response to a new thought process.
Belief and opinions are always based on experience and evidence. Beliefs can and do often change, but it is always in response to a particular stimulus (whether external or internal).
With respect, if you grant this, we’re basically arguing over semantics. I use choose beliefs to mean arrive at by a deliberative process. For, as you seem to acknowledge here, evidence is not self-executing in establishing or negating belief. It’s a thought process. If we’re responsible for that process - with which I wholeheartedly agree - then something like the argument described in the OP or your restatement of it in Post #62 goes through.* We’re just quibbling over how exactly to state the first (and key) proposition. Bear in mind, BTW, that I’m an atheist.
Actually, there’s another issue, mentioned in the OP and famously argued by Bertrand Russell, but not much discussed in this thread. Somewhere in the list should be the proposition that we’ve been given sufficent evidence from which to draw the correct inference. (Notice that, ultimately, the question only arises if God actually exists and we’re hauled before the judgment seat.) IMHO, that is the better objection to this particular Christian doctrine.
As you know from reading the thread, Smiling Bandit and at least one other participant in the thread do not use “choose beliefs” the way you do. I am in substantive disagreement with them–it is not merely semantic. Moreover, there are many people in the world who use “choose beliefs” in Smiling Bandit’s sense, and who believe that choosing beliefs in that sense is possible. These people are wrong on a substantive matter, not a merely semantic one.
A silly little thought experiment. In the film Memento, the protagonist manufactures evidence implicating another character in the death of his wife. He knows that his later self will, not remembering his own duplicity, draw the desired conclusion.
Was that belief chosen as an act of will? It seems so, unless his later and earlier selves are not the same person.
I love that movie in part because of the way it illustrates that seemingly abstract philosophical problems about personal identity can be made very plausibly concrete.
(Similar thoughts concerning The Prestige, btw.)
I think that this is a borderline case of a failure of personal identity–I think that, arguably, the protagonist at the later time is not (at least not in all ways) the same person as the former. I think his story illustrates the way that different threads of personal identity can be separated, such that two entities might count as “the same person” according to one thread but “not the same person” according to another thread. This isn’t something that happens very often, if at all, in real life–but it’s more than a merely theoretical possibility, as the story illustrates.
I made a statement of fact which is true not because I stated it, but because it is.
You can refute an individual’s assertions, like mine for example, but you can’t refute reality. The statement “there are no gods” is reality, it’s not my opinion.
Given the results of the past 2,500 years of the human species’ scientific inquiry, it’s obvious and evident that there are no gods, not because any individual human claims it, but because the rules of nature, otherwise known as logic or reason, show that there aren’t any.
As an individual you can refuse to accept reality, that’s your choice, but reality is there independently of humans.
There are no gods, and that’s a Universal Truth, or a Cosmological Reality as I like to call it.