Choosing to/not to Believe? Not Possible?

[Angrboda]

Belief in something you cannot feel or see or hear is NOT something that we evolved to "believe" in for our survival. Hence blind faith.

I disagree. We evolved to believe that other people have minds, filled with beliefs and emotions like our own, yet we cannot see, hear, or feel them.

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Belief doesn't seem as simple as people make it out to be. There certainly does appear to be an element of will to it, in that people can want to change, and that desire is often followed by concrete change. And people can consciously commit to behaviors, such as immersing themselves in a religious belief, which leads to change in the direction of the commitment. So I think to say that will is totally uninvolved is incorrect.

Then, also, instinct plays a role. It's a well known psychological fact that it's easier to continue believing something, once that belief has been formed, than to change and embrace a different belief. We have biases which affect the way that we interpret information such that our pre-existing beliefs are most times confirmed, independent of what the evidence shows. So in some sense, believing is an autonomous process which doesn't follow the facts. So saying our belief is a determinate outcome of consideration of the facts is, I think, too much a simplification. Any fact can be interpreted as in favor of or against a belief, depending upon how we interpret it, so there's more to our evaluation than just a blunt, facts in, belief out, kind of process.

But then it is also true that in some way, perhaps not entirely determinate, our beliefs are related to the facts. We could come to a belief in the absence of facts, and perhaps that's how people originally do form beliefs. However, facts can change the course of belief, or at least, our opinion of those facts. A religious person who discovers that most of the claims of their religion are based on lies is unlikely to simply ignore that fact and continue to believe without some reconsideration. And whether it's confabulatory or not, we all construct a narrative of reasons and justification for what we believe out of what we consider the facts. Without facts, we couldn't construct that narrative, even if that narrative is a selective cross-section of the things we know, geared toward the existing belief, that narrative is ultimately constructed out of supposed facts.

And it's well known that people change beliefs for reasons that aren't rational, such as emotion. This is usually highlighted in terms of when people make dramatic changes in belief based upon emotion, but it's probably always active in the background, influencing our belief.

Atheists frequently say that they lack belief, but at the same time, most would deny the existence of God if forced to take a stand one way or the other. So, I think there is a description of belief that may be more or less true, but there are also a lot of other factors going on in belief that are not as explicit.

People also want to think of belief as binary, either you do or you don't. I suspect it's not so simple. First, we compartmentalize, so we have strong beliefs in one area and weaker in others. Then there's the whole idea of 'strength' of belief; what is that but an indication that there is some kind of loading going on beyond simply being on or off?

So I think belief is a complex process, and as a mental object, it's far from binary. So I don't believe it's as simple a matter as "facts in, belief out."