Gender: Male Location: Sailing the seas of cheese.
Can one choose to believe in God?
Can you actually make a decision to believe in God or not? Like being gay, I don't think people can choose to be gay, bi, or straight, they are what they are.
If someone says they choose to believe in God, it seems fallible. How can this be a decision? It is what it is, isn't it?
Gender: Male Location: Sailing the seas of cheese.
"Libet's experiments suggest unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, therefore, little room remains for the operations of free will"
I think your comment on predisposition makes a bit more sense for those who say they believe in God. But can people who say they believe actually truly believe without any reasonable doubt?
The voluntarist school of thought argues that belief is a matter of will: we have control over what we believe much in the way we have control over our actions. Theists often seem to be voluntarists and Christians in particular commonly argue the voluntarist position.
Involuntarists argue that we cannot really choose to just believe anything. According to involuntarism, a belief is not an action and, hence, cannot be attained by command, either by your own or by another' s to you.
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no you cant choose. you can listen. once you hear evidence your brain chooses for you. its not really voluntary. once you have enough evidence you swing one way. if you have more evidence to the contrary you swing the other way. it all comes down to experiences, and what you were taught as a child. to force yourself to believe in something rediculus is truly impossible. deep down you know it isnt true.
people have tried, but they cant. i mean look at some gays. some try to be straight. but eventually they know they have to be gay. it isnt really a choice.
This comes up a lot in relation to Pascal's Wager: That we should believe in God "just in case" (that's the nutshell version, not the full version, though hopefully most are familiar with it).
It brings up the problem of choosing belief in a deity. If you believe, can you "decide" to stop believing? Probably not. You can act as though you don't believe, and structure your life as if there is no deity, but if you intrinsically believe, the belief is still there even if its phenotypic effects are not.
And vice-versa with a non-believer deciding to believe.
If I believe that 2+2 = 4, I'd have to be rationally convinced otherwise. It wouldn't be a decision, but a process of one belief being replaced with another.
Sure, but that isn't choosing to believe the opposite. It's the belief being changed as a response to new information/revelations.
The implication in "choosing" in this thread is that there are no antecedent forces present to the decision. Take me for example (hypothetically): "I want to believe in God again. Ok, I do!" For that to actually happen (in me or anyone) I'd have to rationalize the decision somehow. But, if given my current knowledge I cannot rationalize the decision, I can only say that I believe in God, I can't actually believe.
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Mar 24th, 2008 05:48 PM
