(June 26, 2018 at 10:24 pm)JairCrawford Wrote: Hey guys! First of all I apologize for not hanging around much since I first joined. Life has been hectic.
This is an honest question as I'm genuinely curious what perspectives you all have on this. I recently read an article where a Christian apologist used the argument to atheists that they "choose not to believe in God". This claim was promptly met by much backlash in the comments, with many athiests claiming that such a thing was impossible.
In fact many of them went on to assert that we do not, and cannot by definition, choose to believe something.
Now this is very interesting to me because I have heard this argument from certain Christian denominations before (namely Calvinism, which I am not of that camp) but from the inverse idea that one cannot choose to believe God because only God can choose us. Now I am a Christian but fall under the Arminianism camp that believes in free will and the ability to choose. This was the first time I had heard a similar argument from the athiest viewpoint.
I'm puzzled by the notion though, because to assert that we do not or cannot choose what to believe is essentially akin to saying that we are incapable of willfully embracing faith (and by proxy, incapable of willfully rejecting a religious belief we've grown up into), no?
This isn't meant to be a challenge or apologetic. I'm honestly intrigued as to what the consensus is here on this.
Belief is defined by cognitive scientists and contemporary analytic philosophers as, the psychological state in which one accepts a premise or proposition as being true.
People accept premises and propositions as being true because they are convinced that they are.
How can I choose to believe something as being true, if I am not convinced that it is? I can not choose to be convinced of something, unless it is supported by demonstrable evidence, reasoned argument, and valid and sound logic.
I can not choose to believe gods exist, unless the claim is supported by the above criteria.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
