CHOOSING TO BELIEVE

Can you change what you believe just by deciding to?

When I was in my early 20s I thought I had fallen in love.  (True story.)  But there was a problem:  She was a devout Christian, and I had become a steadfast atheist.  She let me know that she felt it was vital to our relationship that we both be Christians.  Given that ultimatum, I told her that I would see what I could do.

At her suggestion I read Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis.  I had read several of Lewis’s other books and knew him to be an interesting writer who had reconverted to Christianity after a period of doubt.  What I gathered from Mere Christianity was the notion that, while belief in God, as well as in Jesus’s divinity and resurrection, might not be supported by credible evidence, those were beliefs that God required as a condition for salvation.  To be honest, that may not be what the book was really about, but that’s what I took from it—the idea that God requires us to hold beliefs that are not supported by objective evidence, because that is the essence of faith, and faith is a condition that God has imposed for salvation.

Now this to me seems supremely unfair—in two ways.  First, in most matters intellectual we are encouraged to base our point of view on the very best evidence and on rational analysis.  Generally, believing something without considering the evidence or just because someone tells us to is considered quintessential gullibility.  So to accept something as true in the absence of evidence is counter to our best educational training.  Why should it be any different for religion?

Second, and more to the point, God’s insistence on belief amounts to requiring us to do what we cannot do—believe something just because we are told to.  To illustrate, here is a question for you:  If a friend asked you to believe that the neighbor’s chihuahua speaks fluent Portuguese, could you do it?  Not just to say that you believed the chihuahua could speak Portuguese but to actually believe that it could.  I’m guessing not, even if you wanted to because you wanted to please your friend.  (By the way, that is why Pascal’s Wager—we should believe in God just in case—is nonsensical.)

So it was with my friend.  In the end I confessed to her that I couldn’t believe in God, Christ, or the salvation story just because she wanted me to or even because I wanted to.  And that was that.

But this raises an additional question.  Our beliefs do change.  Mine have.  How does that happen?  Of course, I’m one who believes that free will is an illusion, that we do not have a genuine ability to make choices.  So it is easy for me to say that, of course, we do not have the power voluntarily to change our beliefs, that it is more accurate to state that our beliefs change than to state that we change our beliefs.

Our beliefs change, in my view, not because we will them to change, but because we are exposed—whether voluntarily or otherwise—to ideas that diverge from our existing beliefs and those ideas eventually result in modifications to our beliefs.  Several years ago I was frankly skeptical of human-caused climate change.   However, as I continued to be exposed to the issue, at some point the scales tipped and I accepted what I now believe is the reality of human climate change.   I didn’t stay up late one night and choose to accept human climate change.  Rather, I think it is appropriate to say that the idea fermented in my thinking, and at some point there it was.  This, at least, seems to be my experience, not just regarding climate change but for the other beliefs that I now hold.   And I wonder if others have had the same experience.


© 2017 John M. Phillips