Is Belief (or Lack Thereof) a Choice?

[Heyo]

But hopefully not for scientists.

That's right. But even scientists occasionally fail at thinking. That's why we don't trust scientists but the scientific method, i.e. scientific thinking that has been checked and double checked..

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Just do the experiment and report back to me.

Well, first of , you have to prove that objective reality is real, orderly and knowable. Then we can continue.

 

[Mock Turtle]

I'm not doing philosophy but just trying to get agreement as to some reality that we all share regardless of any other beliefs.

And I have never said that reality is the same for all, but that we all do share some base reality. Show me otherwise as to this being untrue - that some individuals defy this base reality.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Well, first of , you have to prove that objective reality is real, orderly and knowable. Then we can continue.

No, I believe in experimentation - so line them up.

 

[Nakosis]

Where is this actual reality? I can't reach it with any of my 5 senses. I have found no scientific instruments, that can measure it. And when I google the scientific theory of actual reality, I can't find the theory of it.
So where is it?

Ok, here is a theory of reality for you.

It has to be consistent locally.
It has to be physical.
It has to be measurable.

For something to be real it has to meet these 3 criteria.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Ok, here is a theory of reality for you.

It has to be consistent locally.
It has to be physical.
It has to be measurable.

For something to be real it has to meet these 3 criteria.

How do time and space fare against your criteria?

 

[Windwalker]

Ok, here is a theory of reality for you.

It has to be consistent locally.
It has to be physical.
It has to be measurable.

For something to be real it has to meet these 3 criteria.

Why does it have to be physical? Why can't immaterial things, like thought, or love be considered reality?

 

[Nakosis]

How do time and space fare against your criteria?

I don't consider either real.
Which a lot of folks, even scientists won't agree with.

To me, time is a measurement of change. IOW you are measure the change in one thing by the change of something else.
For example an hour is the measurement of the rotation of the earth as it faces the sun. The only thing necessary to measure "time" is for the sun and the earth to be real.
Same for distance/space. However many "whatevers" you can place between the earth and the sun for example.

 

[Nakosis]

Why does it have to be physical? Why can't immaterial things, like thought, or love be considered reality?

I don't consider the bio-physical processes of thought or love to be immaterial.
Thought is a bio-chemical process of the brain and love is thought plus chemical hormones released by the brain.

 

[Trailblazer]

Is belief a choice? Why or why not?

I think belief is a choice that people make if they have a reason to believe in God. That might be because they were raised in a religion and kept believing in it as adults, or it might be because of societal pressures to believe in God. Other people choose to believe in God because they looked for evidence of God and found evidence. Other people might choose to believe in God for no other reason than that they want to since they think it is a cool idea.

Is lack of belief a choice? Why or why not?

I do not think lack of belief is a choice. If a person has no reason to believe in God (as noted above) they will not believe in God.
People don't choose not to believe, they just don't believe because they have no reason to believe.

 

[Exaltist Ethan]

Is belief a choice? Why or why not?

Is lack of belief a choice? Why or why not?

In most countries, in most places in the world, people are faced towards each other and the question of religion and spiritual traditions gets brought up. Sometimes this is with their friends, sometimes it is with their family, sometimes they read opinions on the Internet and something resonates with them. It has statistically been proven accurate that people tend to believe the same or similar to their parents, if they were raised in a household which they liked their parents for other reasons. That's the key point. For other reasons.

If your parents are Catholic and you like your parents for reasons unrelating to religion or their Catholic beliefs, you are still more willing to accept those beliefs regardless of how you actually view the Catholic religion. In my case, my parents are Catholics that turned atheist. They believed while they were growing up, but then found each other and then distanced themselves away from the community that the Catholic church brought, and essentially stopped caring altogether if God exists or not. And even though I'm not an atheist, my view points are very similar. When it comes to any monotheistic religion's God, I don't believe that God exists. But I do believe in an underlying view of pantheism, something I've even influenced my mom about occasionally.

So where did my belief in pantheism come from? Well, I came to the realization as a teenager that basically anything is possible, therefore, divinity can be gained and lost by just about every human. And when I realized that, I came to embrace alternative ideas about theologies. I understand now that atheists, agnostics and apistevists actually understand God better than the traditional theists because while they don't believe in God, they understand the importance of the natural world and our affect on it. Pantheism is an extrapolation of atheism, and panentheism is an extrapolation of pantheism. My panentheistic, syntheistic and process theology views are not much different than my parents view of atheism. The difference between their view and my own is that I am much more interested in these subject matters than they are, and have conclusive reasons and I've thought through all of this in my head almost on a daily basis. My parents just don't like religion.

What influenced me more than my parents was the Internet. The first year I was on my own for summer vacation back when I was 12 going into 13 I was alone by myself during the day for the first time, and I stumbled across many websites that talked about religions and spiritual ideas. I heard every side of the argument and even the arguments against religion for the first time in my life, as my parents never introduced me to religion. As I started to understand that each and every religion and spiritual tradition had prophets and ideas about God, I realized at one point during study that the moniker, the vail of religions themselves, was unending the understanding for human divinity. I started to believe that all the prophets had in some way developed their own divinity in their respective religions, not because of what they said, but how they encouraged people to even create these religions in the first place. What is said in religion on any topic does not matter; what matters is that people were called from these religions to create temples or churches where action and good deeds could be followed up by people trying their best to make the most out of their lives. All they needed was the direction to do something about it.

When I was convinced of this there was no going back. I called myself agnostic as a teenager because honestly I had no clue what my beliefs were called. I even used made up terms to describe my beliefs like "Exaltist". I still use that term in some places as a username for myself, and I find it fitting given how I came up with my view points. Yes, I want to believe in divinity; a divinity that I am pressed into and directly understand myself. I started to classify divine traits either by what nature does or what humans do, and now I have a very elaborate idea of what God is, which is more than "all that is", "nature" or "reality." While I often say that God is reality, there is so much more to it than that simple premise. And ultimately I draw back all the inspiration to realize this from that one summer vacation I was by myself with nothing but the Internet to keep me company and to study religion on a daily basis, heading to Christian, Confucius, Hindu and other forums and places to help me understand what I couldn't before. When I realized that all I needed to do to understand all their divinities was to drop the idea of individual religions, I started to develop a very omnist mindset that I still hold today.

There is no going back. Unless something drastic to me happens, like I stop taking my medications, or I get hit really hard in the head and receive a major brain injury, the conclusions I deduced for myself will be the ones I will hold for the rest of my life. Panentheism, syntheism, process theology and omnism are the ideas I believe and understand, as I had a coming of age moment for each idea and came to embrace each concept. At my core there is a deep-seeded root of pantheism that will never subset, and when I actually think about these topics in full, I actually veer closer and closer to omnist-type ideals.

So to answer your question: is belief, or disbelief a choice? It is when you are discovering yourself and where your ideals fall. When you study these things, either in one religion or interfaith, you start to develop emotions and connections to these religious ideas and then when you are entrenched in them, either with community or what sounds good in your head, it becomes very hard to disconnect yourself from the original feelings and emotions you held when you originally made the connection. I remember talking to one of my closest Jewish friends on Discord. She is now dating her ex-boyfriend, who lives in a different state and is Muslim. I asked her why, and although she is quite young, she told me that she built up a considerable relationship before with him and is deeply connected to him in ways most people would not understand. I myself have a best friend for more than seven years that lives in a different country than me. When you develop these connections and ties to these ideas and people it's hard to separate the emotions from the beliefs, which is exactly why religion became what it is today.

I had friends in college, and even friends now, who have attempted to convert me to Christianity, but I have always resisted due to my previous connection to my internal private thoughts about this and coming to the mass realization that all things possess some degree of divinity in them. I talk like an atheist when I am with them, because I don't believe in their God, but my ideas and ideals are the furthest you can get from typical agnostic atheism that is currently the trend right now for those not brought up in a spiritual tradition. It would be practically impossible to change my mind on these matters because of the trends I have seen which have increased the amount of human understanding of themselves and the world around them, and I expect this trend will only continue to increase. When it comes to the God of Judaism, the God of Christianity, the God of Islam, and even the God of the Baha'i Faith, I am firmly atheist, but when it comes to the real people who were prophets in these religions and helped people understand reality better with metaphors and parables, I have increasingly understand why people think people like Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Baha'u'llah, among others are not just passively but actively divine on their own right. What they said doesn't really make any sense to me, who doesn't practice monotheism, but the lives and communities they shaped are divine. And Jesus may be the only person who had achieved an entirely sanctified life for his entire life, a feat that people should not hold lightly.

TL;DR - So, in short, belief is initially a choice when you are studying religion while growing up, but the communities you participate and form connections to are likely going to make an impact that will change who you are and what you think for the rest of your life. Deciding what religion to believe has more to do with the experiences and connections you form regarding this than the actual beliefs themselves. That's why you see so many people being raised and staying inside one spiritual tradition for their entire lives. It's a community, not a commodity. When people start to treat their beliefs like a commodity, then they drift towards atheism, like my parents have.

 

[F1fan]

Do you never wonder who you or what you are? Or have the sense of being a part of something greater than yourself? Have you honestly never tried talking directly to God, or listening in the silence for an inner voice not perhaps your own?

These are all questions that many of us wonder and ask. What I have learned in life is that the answers I decided were true were naive and poorly informed. Many of these questions get asked due to anxiety, fear, and emotional insecurity, and our minds look for answers that comfort these emotions. This is why there are many irrational beliefs based on answers that soothe anxiety. Maturity and groundedness allows the self to reject these bad answers and even move beyond the motivation to ask the questions. It's wise not to ask these trap questions since there really aren't any objective answers. They trap the mind until it grows beyond these primal urges.

 

[Willamena]

Is belief a choice? Why or why not?

Is lack of belief a choice? Why or why not?

Traditionally, no. "Belief" means that one sees truth in a thing, and one lacks belief when there's no such seeing of truth in a thing. No choice involved.

 

[Windwalker]

I don't consider the bio-physical processes of thought or love to be immaterial.
Thought is a bio-chemical process of the brain and love is thought plus chemical hormones released by the brain.

The thought itself is not physical, even though it registers in the physical body. I'm talking about the actual content of the thought itself. And love itself is more than just chemicals. It has a content that is not physical, nor is the content understood by looking at brain scans. You cannot understand love, by looking at chemicals. If it was all just a matter of biology, then why bother to consult poets? Why not just a team of lab researchers with test tubes and pocket protectors?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Ok, here is a theory of reality for you.

It has to be consistent locally.
It has to be physical.
It has to be measurable.

For something to be real it has to meet these 3 criteria.

Yeah, the problem is that the meaning of the bold one, is not logical as such, not physical and not measurable and thus not real.
You have made an axiomatic system, that works in you mind, that is all.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

And I have never said that reality is the same for all, but that we all do share some base reality. Show me otherwise as to this being untrue - that some individuals defy this base reality.

No, I believe in experimentation - so line them up.

Give proof that we share this base reality.

Let me show you how it works.
For example you will clam you know there is a we.
Then I ask how you know that you know. When I do that, we have left science and entered philosophy and the short answer is that nobody for the 2000+ years for recorded history has proven how somebody knows that they know.

The problem is this in part. You can't point to God, but that is the same for reality. You can't point to it.
You as an in effect naturalist believe that reality is natural. A theist believes it is from God. But neither of you can prove it.

So as a skeptic, I am just honest and admit I can't prove reality, but that I have faith in it so be real, orderly and knowable. I.e. I act as if reality is real, but I don't know that.
For you as an atheist in effect, I just let you be that as a non-belief and concentrate on your positive belief that you know what reality is.

So here it is for something I have not written, but is about science as you believe in it.
"... According to Robert Priddy, all scientific study inescapably builds on at least some essential assumptions that cannot be tested by scientific processes;[43] that is, that scientists must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions would then be justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions."[44] Kuhn also claims that all science is based on assumptions about the character of the universe, rather than merely on empirical facts. These assumptions – a paradigm – comprise a collection of beliefs, values and techniques that are held by a given scientific community, which legitimize their systems and set the limitations to their investigation.[45] For naturalists, nature is the only reality, the "correct" paradigm, and there is no such thing as supernatural, i.e. anything above, beyond, or outside of nature. The scientific method is to be used to investigate all reality, including the human spirit.[46] ..."

Philosophy of science - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That is it. Methodological naturalism is a belief system, that starts with the beliefs that the universe is real, orderly, knowable and natural. You would know that if you had learned to check your own beliefs and not just those of the religious people.
I were trained by your kind of in effect scientific skeptics to doubt any claim. I just then did something, you don't do. I doubted, if we know that reality is natural. And as it turns out, we don't.

 

[Heyo]

Brainstorm session!
Just some free floating ideas about the subject.

Epistemic hurdle
If I want to believe as many true thing and as few false things as possible, I have to have a well adjusted epistemic hurdle. Is the bar too low, then I believe some false things I shouldn't. (#LowBarBill) If the bar is too high, I don't believe things I should. (#Solipsism)

(Modified) Euthyphro Dilemma
Where Do I get my epistemic hurdle from? Did I set it to justify the beliefs I have - or do I have my beliefs because of my epistemic hurdle? What about the belief where the bar has to be?

Logical thinking is hard
Absent from value decisions, logic should give us a definitive answer to the truth value of a statement. Is it possible that people who can't (or won't?) follow the logic for or against a proposition, (don't) believe something because of their limited mental capabilities?

Can we detect True Beliefs™?
Some people profess a belief but their actions are (in our mind) not consistent with that belief. Can we label them as "false" believers?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Brainstorm session!
Just some free floating ideas about the subject.

Epistemic hurdle
If I want to believe as many true thing and as few false things as possible, I have to have a well adjusted epistemic hurdle. Is the bar too low, then I believe some false things I shouldn't. (#LowBarBill) If the bar is too high, I don't believe things I should. (#Solipsism)

(Modified) Euthyphro Dilemma
Where Do I get my epistemic hurdle from? Did I set it to justify the beliefs I have - or do I have my beliefs because of my epistemic hurdle? What about the belief where the bar has to be?

Logical thinking is hard
Absent from value decisions, logic should give us a definitive answer to the truth value of a statement. Is it possible that people who can't (or won't?) follow the logic for or against a proposition, (don't) believe something because of their limited mental capabilities?

Can we detect True Beliefs™?
Some people profess a belief but their actions are (in our mind) not consistent with that belief. Can we label them as "false" believers?

Meta on your meta. Your hidden assumption is that you can have a set of justified axioms with logic that matches reality as such and that no other set of axioms are possible.
There are 3 positions possible.
People in reality who don't use logic as you do in even the most basic from.
You, who do the correct version of it.
People, who know there is no single, universal correct version of it and that even logic has a limit. (I am one of those).

In practice for the world, you have the following problem. You can observe all 3 kinds of people and thus if you want a model of that, you can't explain away that there are different ways of doing it. In short for false in all its variants you either operate with a version where false in effect is an ontological real negative as really unreal. Or that false is not false, but a different cognitive state.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Give proof that we share this base reality.

Let me show you how it works.
For example you will clam you know there is a we.
Then I ask how you know that you know. When I do that, we have left science and entered philosophy and the short answer is that nobody for the 2000+ years for recorded history has proven how somebody knows that they know.

The problem is this in part. You can't point to God, but that is the same for reality. You can't point to it.
You as an in effect naturalist believe that reality is natural. A theist believes it is from God. But neither of you can prove it.

So as a skeptic, I am just honest and admit I can't prove reality, but that I have faith in it so be real, orderly and knowable. I.e. I act as if reality is real, but I don't know that.
For you as an atheist in effect, I just let you be that as a non-belief and concentrate on your positive belief that you know what reality is.

So here it is for something I have not written, but is about science as you believe in it.
"... According to Robert Priddy, all scientific study inescapably builds on at least some essential assumptions that cannot be tested by scientific processes;[43] that is, that scientists must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions would then be justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly by their success in representing the observed facts with a certain generality, devoid of ad hoc suppositions."[44] Kuhn also claims that all science is based on assumptions about the character of the universe, rather than merely on empirical facts. These assumptions – a paradigm – comprise a collection of beliefs, values and techniques that are held by a given scientific community, which legitimize their systems and set the limitations to their investigation.[45] For naturalists, nature is the only reality, the "correct" paradigm, and there is no such thing as supernatural, i.e. anything above, beyond, or outside of nature. The scientific method is to be used to investigate all reality, including the human spirit.[46] ..."

Philosophy of science - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That is it. Methodological naturalism is a belief system, that starts with the beliefs that the universe is real, orderly, knowable and natural. You would know that if you had learned to check your own beliefs and not just those of the religious people.
I were trained by your kind of in effect scientific skeptics to doubt any claim. I just then did something, you don't do. I doubted, if we know that reality is natural. And as it turns out, we don't.

I'm not getting into a mess over this. You know that the base reality that exists affects all, humans and all other life, and regardless of any beliefs they might have or will not have, the rules of existence as we know it here on Earth applies to all - in this area of reality. If you can't accept that this is a baseline of existence regardless of how any experience their own lives and as to such affects them then we are done. No point in any further discussion on this - since you aren't getting through to me.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I'm not getting into a mess over this. You know that the base reality that exists affects all, humans and all other life, and regardless of any beliefs they might have or will not have, the rules of existence as we know it here on Earth applies to all - in this area of reality. If you can't accept that this is a baseline of existence regardless of how any experience their own lives and as to such affects them then we are done. No point in any further discussion on this - since you aren't getting through to me.

Correct, as a case of what is. Now we just have to figure what we ought to do.