Does the head follow the heart in matters of truth?

[Angrboda]

In general, people believe or don't due to matters of the heart. They then use their head to justify their desired conclusion.

I quote alpha here not because I wish to attack his position, but rather because I found his candor refreshing and his view to be one that I largely share. It seems to me a psychological truth that we come to beliefs (or inclinations) for reasons that aren't fully rational and then, once we are possessed of a belief, we proceed to develop rational justifications for that belief through a process which is plagued by confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and other errors or infirmities of reason which ultimately do little to shore up our belief so much as to selectively choose the evidence for our belief with an eye toward affirming what we already believe (originally for non-rational reasons). So we come to belief through non-rational reasons, and we develop certainty in our beliefs through a process which is not rationally sound. It would seem that this undermines our certainty about our beliefs and effectively renders them epistemically unreliable.

Typically the charges of bias and irrational confirmation of belief are leveled against the theist by the atheist with the implication being that the atheist has been more rational in their acquisition of their beliefs and in their justification of the things they believe. Perhaps that's true, perhaps it's not. My suspicion is that the atheist is likely every bit as irrational in their acquisition and development of beliefs as the theist, they simply claim they are not, perhaps because it is one of their bedrock beliefs that they aren't (with all the attendant epistemic unreliability of that certainty that I described above).

In a way, this reminds me of a similar topic that I considered starting which asks the question of how we go about choosing the axioms we subscribe to. Axioms typically are assumptions which aren't themselves justified. Typically we choose our axioms either because they seem to us self-evident or because the implications of them, their consequences, accord with what we believe the actual nature of the world to be. One could limit oneself to a priori truths, but that set of axioms won't take you very far, and the demands of actual worldviews seem to necessitate that we go beyond a priori truths. Yet if we choose our axioms based on how they accord with what we believe about the world, and then reason from those axioms towards conclusions about the world, we've simply engaged in a vicious circle in which our beliefs justify our assumptions which then turn around and justify our beliefs. So how do we avoid this circle? How do we choose our axioms so that they aren't little more than self fulfilling prophecies?

Well, perhaps the axiom question is best left for another day. The question I'd like to ask today is, if we form beliefs initially for non-rational reasons (as a consequence of the feelings of the heart, or whatever), and we then develop rationalizations based upon our initial belief, selective appraisal of the evidence, confirmation bias and so on (methods which undermine the rationality of our conclusions), are then our beliefs not ultimately lacking in rational justification and thereby inherently unreliable? If the head follows the heart in matters of belief, instead of unbiased reason, is our certainty in our conclusions undermined? I suppose a related question is, given we follow the same psychological limits in acquiring and shoring up our beliefs as theists, are we in any sense justified in believing that our positions are rationally better justified than theirs?