Topics Religion

Question Recently I read an article in a newspaper about belief in God. The author was quite disparaging about atheists, maintaining that they have some essential flaw in their make-up. The author could not understand how anyone would chose to not believe in God. I am a Catholic and was always taught that "you must believe in God" and that "disbelievers would be punished". I was frightened by this and by the story of Doubting Thomas who didn't believe that Christ had risen from the dead as I knew that I wouldn't have believed that purported fact either. My question is can you choose to believe? I would think not.

Accepted:
August 27, 2009

Comments

An interesting question. On the one hand, we can't simply choose to believe or not believe things. I couldn't simply decide to believe that Paraguay is in Africa, for example. But there are things we can do that make it more or less likely that we'll end up with certain beliefs. Pascal famously suggested that one might be able to become a religious believer by going to mass, hanging out with believers, and so on. To some extent and for some people, this strategy probably works. We can also go out of our way to avoid hearing about evidence that counts against what we want to believe, and to hear only things that count in favor of the belief. To whatever extent strategies like this work, they amount to indirect ways of "choosing" our beliefs, though I'd be reluctant to drop the shudder quotes.

On the specific question, however, many people become atheists because belief in God becomes hard to sustain. They don't decide to become atheists; they simply find that at some point, their theism gives out. Belief in God simply comes to seem implausible to them. People who can't imagine that possibility may well have led rather sheltered lives or worse, may have done something of the sort described above: gone out of their way to avoid having their beliefs disturbed.

I'd add, however, that rather similar things can be said about the way in which some people come to be believers. Whether like Saul on the road to Damascus or as the result of a more gradual process, they may find that non-belief no longer seems viable; they simply can't look at the world in that way any longer. The larger point is neither for or against belief in God. The point is that people can fall in and out of belief in various things in many ways -- sometimes by means that smack of self-manipulation, sometimes as the end result of careful reflection, and sometimes because as evidence and experience accumulate, things just start to seem different to them.