Sunday, June 20, 2010

Can an Atheist “Choose”
to Believe in God?
Shane Hayes

In a June 16th comment to my posting Empirical Theism: A Thought Experiment P. Coyle said:

“Hmmmm. Can one actually ‘choose’ to believe in God? Speaking for myself, I would find it quite difficult to wake up tomorrow, sit up on the bed, and think to myself, ‘I guess I'll try believing in God today and see how it works out.

“What do you think, Shane? To what extent can a person ‘choose’ to believe in God?”

My reply

Missionary efforts for the last two thousand years have all been based on the proposition that a person can choose to believe in God. Their notable success indicates that the proposition is true. There were a handful of Christians when Jesus died. Three-thousand were converted on Pentecost. Many times that number have been converted to atheism by the books and lectures of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and Stenger. The New Atheists wouldn’t argue so vigorously if people could not change their minds on the question of God’s existence. And I wouldn’t be writing this blog if I didn’t think so.

A Key to Inward Change

Perhaps the real thrust of your question is: Can a sophisticated widely read atheist in this era choose to believe in God? My answer is an emphatic yes -- but with a qualifier appended: If he wants to. In my essay Is God’s Existence Improbable? I said:

“In our talks about the existence of God my atheist friends nearly always say something to this effect: ‘My feelings have nothing to do with this. Yours clearly do, and you admit it. But mine don’t. I just weigh the evidence and seek the truth.’

“Among several important things I can’t prove but am convinced of is this: In deciding whether or not to believe in God, no one, on either side of the issue, is completely objective. Nor should one be, since the arguments are weighty on both sides, and neither proves its case. Evidence and logic leave us dangling. In forming an opinion on what is unknowable, personal considerations become relevant, even determinative.”

The Role of Desire in Belief

On the question of God’s existence most people end up believing what they want to believe. There is much weighing of evidence and pondering of argument, but these don’t produce a conclusive yes or no. So a subtle – often complex – form of personal preference carries the day. I am a Pure Theist (and a Christian) because I want to be, and you are an atheist because you want to be. Until the wanting changes neither of us is likely to budge. But if the wanting did change, we could change too.

I don’t mean we can push a mental button and transmute in an instant. It might take months or years of intense grappling with evidence, argument, and our inner life. But evidence and argument depend so much on the light in which we view them, and that is so determined by our psyches (which is what I mean by our inner life), that an atheist can, ultimately, choose to believe in God if he wants to.

A theist, too, can go the other way. Every year a great many convert to the opposite view. The New Atheists pull them toward No God. Writers like me in our way – and organized religions in theirs -- try to pull them toward God. Self-determination in such matters is the rule, not the exception.

Three Factors that Make Choosing Possible

To illustrate the difficulty of the change, its possibility, and an essential element in it, let me cite an incident from the New Testament. A father pleading with Jesus to heal his ailing son said, “… if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus echoed his doubting phrase, “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.” (Emphasis added.) Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Jesus healed the child.

The dramatic episode highlights three principles: (1) The starting point is a desire to believe; the father wanted to think help was there; (2) Belief can be mingled with unbelief; (3) Conscious effort may be needed to acquire faith.

The incident is not presented here as an argument for Christianity, but to show the elements of transition from atheism to Pure Theism. The man in the story needed help. An atheist who contemplates a change of mind (and heart) may – or may not – do so because he feels a need for strength beyond what human resources provide. Someone said, “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” I have found that to be so. Those who feel weak are probably more open to faith than those who feel strong. But this doesn’t mean the strong are right and the weak are wrong.

Humility and Truth

In an earlier posting How the Improbable God Probably Works I laid out my God hypothesis. It ended with these two paragraphs:

The ancient mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing said: “By love he may be gotten and holden, but by thought, never.” John said, “God is love.” The atheist Bertrand Russell said, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,” to justify his unbelief. Believing requires not only an act of faith but an act of humility. The prouder we are of our intellect, of its superiority to lesser minds, and of the dazzling science it produced, the harder it is to humble ourselves and believe. Yet the Designer of the Universe arranged it so that he, his ultimate truth, and life’s shining Sequel can be found only by the humble and believing.

We cannot accept his love unless we acknowledge his existence. We can brush aside the outstretched hand. He will neither compel faith, nor make it unnecessary. On those terms, we can take him or leave him. Receive his embrace or turn away. Our decision is our fate. [End of quoted paragraphs.]

The Bold Crossing

A skeptic who acknowledges there may be a God, and would like to connect with Him if it’s possible, must take a bold step. He must move from abstract thought to a new kind of consciousness that is both outreaching and receptive. In Empirical Theism: A Thought Experiment I describe a bridge from the mental to the spiritual, and try to walk the reader across it, as I crossed it decades ago. It shows how an atheist who wants to, can begin moving toward belief in God and a relationship with Him.

5 comments:

  1. Shane said: "The New Atheists wouldn’t argue so vigorously if people could not change their minds on the question of God’s existence."

    I believe that the real reason The New Atheists are arguing so vigorously is because they realize the danger of Creationists causing the science of evolution to be replaced by the teaching that the universe was created approximately 5000 years ago and to teach that everything began as described in Genesis or, at least having this taught as an alternative theory when it is nothing but religion disguised as Intelligent Design. I really don't think they care what religion teaches so long as it doesn't try to force it beliefs in the science class room, beliefs which are based on faith rather than the scientific principle which thoroughly tests its hypothesis before they become a theory.

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  2. Shane:

    You wrote, “Perhaps the real thrust of your question is: Can a sophisticated widely read atheist in this era choose to believe in God?”

    The thrust of my question was actually somewhat broader: Can a person believe something simply by choosing to believe it? The implications of your reply for this broader question are somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, you seem to be saying yes, this is possible. In order to believe something, one simply has to want to believe it – and then, maybe, invest some “conscious effort.”

    It seems to me that we can test the hypothesis that one can choose to believe something without having good reasons to believe it by (dare I say it?) a thought experiment. Could you choose to believe that you can fly by flapping your arms? If you think you could or couldn’t do it, that ends the thought experiment. What were your results? But you could move beyond the realm of thought experiment into the realm of real experiment by actually attempting to choose to believe that you could fly by flapping your arms. Let’s say that it would be a test of whether you have successfully chosen such a belief that you start flapping your arms, not to determine whether your belief is true, but in the expectation that you can actually fly. Can you do this? (Safety warning: If it turns out that you can do it, please do not attempt to fly from the roof of a building).

    I confess that I could not choose to believe I could fly by flapping my arms. I don’t think I could do so even if I wanted to believe it. Is that part of my problem? You claim that the initial requirement would be that I would have to want to believe it, and I’m not sure I could meet that requirement. How do I go about wanting to believe something? Is that something I also have to choose, before I go about choosing to believe? If so, how do I choose it?

    On the other hand, your post seems at times to acknowledge that there is an additional requirement for “choosing” to believe: maybe one needs to think that one has good reasons for believing something (at least something that is not intuitively obvious or readily apparent) before one can believe it. I would certainly agree with that, at least to the extent of acknowledging that if one thinks there are good reasons for believing something, and no good reasons for not believing it, one will likely believe it. Where we part company is over the question of whether there are good reasons on both sides of the “Does God exist?” argument. You think there are, I think there aren’t. I have yet to see any argument in your exposition of “Pure Theism” that I consider to be a good one.

    But even if I thought you had offered good reasons to believe, we both agree that there are good reasons not to believe. It seems to me that if there were equally compelling reasons on both sides of the case, I would still not be able to believe that God existed. All I could believe is what I have just state ex hypothesi: that there are equally compelling arguments on both sides. If I thought that there were slightly stronger arguments for the existence of God than against, I might, I suppose, “believe” that God existed, but the depth of the belief would be shallow and in rough proportion to what I considered the superiority of the one side of the case over the other. However, in such a circumstance, I don’t think I would have CHOSEN to believe in God. I would simply have CONCLUDED that the reasons for believing that God exists are stronger than the reasons for believing that God does not exist.

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  3. Shane, one additional comment. You quoted one of your earflier posts: "The ancient mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing said: 'By love he may be gotten and holden, but by thought, never.' John said, 'God is love.' The atheist Bertrand Russell said, 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,' to justify his unbelief. Believing requires not only an act of faith but an act of humility. The prouder we are of our intellect, of its superiority to lesser minds, and of the dazzling science it produced, the harder it is to humble ourselves and believe. Yet the Designer of the Universe arranged it so that he, his ultimate truth, and life’s shining Sequel can be found only by the humble and believing."

    If you are hoping to convince an atheist audience that "it is both reasonable and intellectually respectable to believe in God,"
    you might want to avoid this kind of language. It could easily be regarded as an admission that in fact it is NOT reasonable and intellectually respectable to believe in God.

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  4. Shane, I have been over on randi.org blog defending the possibility that a creator is required. I must say that the arguments against a creator has been very good. Essentially, they say that just because you can't explain something is not a reason to use the "god of the gaps" argument because this simply does not provide an answer but just throw in more questions like where did this god come from? Where does this god exist? How can such a god who had billions of years to work with do such a shoddy job with creation such as creating us to be prone to bad backs, creating dolphins and whales that live in the water to have lungs when gills would make more sense, etc, etc. I'm afraid that they make some very good arguments against the existence of a god. Also, evidence shows that the various religions are man-made and that the various gods throughout history, such as the Greek god drawing a chariot of fire across the sky to explain the sun moving across the sky all the way up to the current gods have pretty much been disproved as inventions by man. This is at least pulling me back to dead center as an agnostic. I hate to say it, but I get a feeling that you are using wishful thinking, now that you are getting older, that there will be life after death and a trip to heaven.

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