Last week, I wrote that "the question of whether religious belief is a choice is a fascinating, open debate." Since then, I've been preoccupied with this question. What makes an atheist believe there is no god, while a religious person believes there is? Or what makes a liberal Democrat believe that Donald Trump is a deranged narcissistic fascist, while a devout Christian Republican believes he's a modern-day Cyrus the Great?
Christianity takes the view that belief is an act of free will. We choose to believe in god or we choose not to, say Christian theologians from Thomas Aquinas to Søren Kierkegaard. For what other basis is there to condemn non-believers to hell, if belief in god was not a matter of choice? This attitude is perhaps seen most clearly in Pascal's wager, which goes something like this:
"God either exists, or she doesn't—the odds are fifty-fifty, like a coin toss. If you were to bet on this coin toss, you should bet that God does exist, because you have more to gain if you're right than you have to lose if you're wrong. Therefore, you should believe in God, or try to."
There are problems with Pascal's wager. For one thing, if you gamble on the wrong god and it turns out that Ba'al is actually the jealous god of the universe, you're screwed. But moreover, I've always found it unconvincing that you can simply choose to believe in a god out of self-interest. Surely belief isn't something you can cynically turn on and off like a light switch, is it?
Take a moment to think of one of your deeply-held beliefs—either religious, or political or philosophical. Then ask yourself, did you choose to believe that? Probably not. Beliefs, in my opinion, are a result of our perspectives, which are informed by life experiences. For instance, I was bullied mercilessly in school, and probably because of this I arrived at a belief in the need for strong institutions to restrain the worst instincts of humanity. This makes me politically liberal.
And yet, some people take the view that bullying is a character-building experience—a necessary "toughening up" at a young age. The people I've encountered with this belief tend to be more conservative. Many of them were bullied themselves. But how can two people with a similar experience come to such different conclusions? And do we have any agency over what we believe?
Yes and no, I think. Austin Cline, formerly of the Council for Secular Humanism, writes that Christians perceive belief as a voluntary action that we can control, whereas most atheists don't see it this way.[1] Indeed, despite what many Christians would say, I don't consider my atheism to be a choice; rather, I am compelled to believe what is most persuasive to me, and the evidence for a god is underwhelming, as I see it.
But it is also possible to start from a conclusion and reason backwards, picking and choosing evidence to support what we already believe. As Cline writes, "A theist may wish it to be true that a god exists and this could certainly have an impact on how they look at the evidence." I think many of us are guilty of this, in politics as well as religion. Taken to an extreme, this is how people can believe truly insane things, like the wacky QAnon conspiracy theory. Nietzsche would argue that this is all belief really is—a willful attempt to make the world fit our preconceived notions.
But I disagree with Nietzsche. Man's will is shaped by his environment more than the environment is shaped by man's will. That is to say, most of our beliefs are involuntary—the result of life experiences that we may or may not be conscious of. In this sense, belief is not a choice. As someone who was raised in an irreligious household, my experience is different from someone who was raised in the Christian religion and perhaps taught to value faith as much as, or more than evidence.
But what about the bullying example? What if two people have the same experience and come to different beliefs from it? I can only conclude that the experience wasn't the same—in my case, I found refuge with authority figures, but others have felt betrayed by authority figures who refused to stop the bullying, or even blamed them for fighting back. This can make someone deeply distrustful of institutions, while I came to the opposite conclusion. I believe the system works because it worked for me, whereas they believe it doesn't work because it didn't work for them.
Ultimately, I can be sympathetic to someone else's view, but I can't believe other than I do. Not without rethinking my beliefs based on new experiences. This can be very difficult for some people, but I believe that a flexibility and willingness to change one's beliefs is more virtuous than holding onto a belief regardless of new experiences, and this is something that seems to set me philosophically apart from most Christians.
[1] https://www.learnreligions.com/beliefs-and-choices-250536