Now that this is out of the way, let me proceed. As any acquaintance of mine knows, I'm rarely happy to stick to the surface of anything. Call me inquisitive, curious, contemplating, a tortured soul. They're all accurate.
Today, and for a few weeks now I've been investigating belief and choices. I've come at this from a few different angles, one of which is in whether or not we can choose what we believe.
I'm a big proponent in general of choice and free agency in life. While I realize that very few things in this world are black/white and that a person's choices will always be affected by their experience, I also believe that we are free to make choices outside of what our feelings and experiences tell us is comfortable.
But today, as I said, I'm thinking specifically about choosing what we believe. As in, refusing to be victims of our culture, our circumstances, and our limited experience when determining those ideas that become central to who we are. Some people think choosing our belief is a cop-out, that we have to talk ourselves into something that doesn't make sense. I say that our lives are too multi-faceted to rule out the need for cognizant choice in basically every part of our existence.
Let me give a scaled-back example of what I'm thinking about.
Mind Set Matters
When Billy and I were first married, he got a job waiting tables at a fancy Italian restaurant. This position required that he carry around a significant amount of paraphernalia in his pockets, among which were a table crumber, a wine screw, a nice pen, and a change purse. He came home late each night, often after closing down the restaurant, and unloaded his pockets in the living room. I woke each morning and moved the pile to the desk next to his sleeping face.After several days of this silent back and forth, I told him how frustrating it was that he left his stuff everywhere without considering who was going to have to clean it up.
He replied by telling me that he had been emptying his pockets on the end table every night so that he would have a consistent place to put his things without having to wake me up each night clanking around in the dark. He knew that I was lacking sleep, having a newborn to tend to, and he very considerately made his noise outside of my earshot.
I felt like a loser. I had chosen to believe my husband of a year was acting out of careless self interest, and I allowed resentment to grow. Had I taken a little more initiative to consider other interpretations of his actions, perhaps even to assume the best out of him, I still might have talked to him about the situation, but the frustration I harbored would not have had the grip on me that it did.
The mindset we use when faced with an experience matters in what we believe about the situation. And we get to choose that mindset.
Further, this choice of belief is almost always based on a faith in something.
Faith is everywhere
As a Christian, it can be hard to discuss what exactly my belief system is, since it isn't a religion in the typical sense. A religion tends to have a set of tenets and rituals (or behaviors) that must be done (or avoided) in order to adhere to the religion. Christianity has the set of belief tenets, but there are no required rituals and behaviors. So, I tend to veer away from the term religion.
But when people use the term "spiritual," it is understood to be short-hand to designate people who believe in the spiritual nature of humanity, yet do not believe in any one system of belief to be correct. So, even though I personally resonate most with the word, I veer away from the term "spiritual" because of the cultural assumptions linked to it.
Another common way to speak about people in my situation is to speak about the importance of their faith. Again, this is meaningful to me, and I have no personal problem with saying that my faith is important to me. However, I take issue with the concept of some people being "people of faith" as a way to name people who have a particular belief in the presence of a god and a belief in who or what that god is.
The reason that this bothers me is that nearly everyone is a person of faith. Anyone in a relationship practices their faith when they trust their SO to go out and not cheat on them. We can counter that the SO must have proven themselves to be trustworthy, but this doesn't negate the fact that we still put faith in them based on their past actions.
After all, faith need not be baseless and irrational.
We have faith in a chair that has held us up in the past to hold us up again. And so, we sit. We have evidence that it will support our weight based on our experience and our understanding of how a chair was been manufactured. But we must somewhere also realize that it's impossible for us to have full information about whether that chair has suffered any damage between the last time we sat on it.
These daily life examples are minor, but only go to introduce the concept that what we believe about the spiritual world or lack of is also based on faith. Many an atheist base their unbelief in faith that humans can attain a thorough understanding of the world. Every atheist that I've discussed spiritual things with has used science (i.e. observation and interpretation of empirical evidence) as a major reason they don't believe in God. However, there's no empirical evidence that sensory observation and human interpretation of empirical evidence is the best way to determine if there is a God. So, they are putting their faith in human understanding via science as the determining factor of what is believable.
Science-as-ultimate-explanation advocates also put their faith in science as a tool* to eventually figure out what happened at the origins of the universe. Science has not yet allowed us to observe the universe's beginning. It hasn't allowed us to observe whether carbon has always had a consistent half life, and it hasn't allowed us to observe life coming from non-life**. Yet many people put their faith in science as the best way to understand the totality of existence.
Each belief system has its gaps and its evidence
Of course, science (and its close counterpart math) haven't truly allowed us to observe the grandeur and scope of the universe. They are often only used to estimate. These estimations are then used to justify near impossibilities by relying on what Richard Dawkins calls the "magic of large numbers." Given enough time, any statistical impossibility will become possible. And so, we end up with estimations of how many planets there are in order to allow for the presumed evolution of life on some of them. And we end up with an age of the universe based on human calculations, the assumption of consistency, and the question of how long it would have taken for the statistically impossible events to finally happen. And now, just as theists might choose to hide behind the god of the gaps by claiming anything we don't understand can be explained by the idea that God is beyond our understanding, atheists also choose to hide behind the magic of large numbers.Likewise, most actual belief systems have evidence, as well. Scientists carefully conduct experiments to see if their hypotheses are on the right track. A result will either confirm an idea or take the scientist back to the drawing board looking for a new explanation that fits their sensory observation, set of assumptions, and human understanding. Often, there are explanations that fit. Often, there are explanations that cause scientists to stretch what they previously believed. People with a spiritual creed also have evidence. It is based on science***, as well as reason. For example, we use reason to say that scientists are able to use the assumption of consistency (i.e. a ball dropped on earth will always fall to the ground) because there is something as yet unmeasured that brings consistency into nature. If nature is consistent, this is evidence that there is something bigger than nature putting that limitation on nature. Similarly, we see that humanity has a general desire for love and justice. Since "people of faith"/spiritual people don't start with the assumptions of science, we can open our minds to the possibility that the desire for love and justice come from somewhere outside of humanity.
Everyone is agnostic
Going back to Richard Dawkins... He put out a pretty helpful little system of identifying where we fall on the continuum of theist to atheist. Dawkins himself is not an atheist, but rather what he calls a "de facto atheist," which he defines as not knowing for sure, but thinking God is improbable and living under the assumption that God doesn't exist.
I, on the other hand, fall anywhere from de facto theist to just above a weak atheist, depending on the day's circumstances, including whether I've been able to meet my physical needs, whether I've felt emotionally or intellectually threatened, and whether it's raining. I found the quotes below the chart to be helpful and relate to all of them from Jesus down through Thomas Jefferson.
So, how is it that I can fall on such a large part of the spectrum, including "pure agnostic" and "weak atheist" yet still call myself a Christian and have that belief system affect so deeply my life?
It's because of choice. I have looked at evidence and reasoned that I need not limit my interpretation of the evidence to nature. When I start to limit myself, I make the choice not to. I use my rationale and my free agent status to make a decision for myself rather than be a victim to my circumstances.
Our choices have consequences
I've also weighed the consequences that the beliefs bring with them.
There's no lasting negative consequence to me choosing to believe and living my life as a Christian. The worst that will be is that narrow-minded people will assume I hate the trans community and think women are less valuable than men, simply because of stereotyping. Those people have their own issues, and what they think of me is actually of very little consequence to me, as I find my worth in something higher than them, anyway. Perhaps my moral code will keep me from having sex with as many partners as someone else might, but I fortunately have found so much more purpose to life than collecting sex partners, that this seems more of a positive consequence than a negative one. However, the worst consequence of not believing is significantly deeper and potentially longer lasting.
I often choose based on consequences. I don't speed because accidents and tickets cost too much. I don't drink excessively because I have alcoholism in my family and that is some really serious stuff. So why wouldn't I put the real question of the mysteries of life up against the consequences of the answer?
Can't we all just be a little more generous?
Here's the thing. The TL;DR, if you will.
There are some of us out there that will point fingers and make statements about who the logical people are or aren't. If we want to be honest about it, we all come to our beliefs based on a combination of experience, faith, and choice.
To pit people in one camp as the rational ones and people in the other camp as the blind faith ones is uncharitable. (I hear this division from people all along the theist/atheist spectrum.) To further insist that one side has all the evidence and there's no choice involved regarding what assumptions we start with, how we interpret evidence, and which belief we ultimately end up at is disingenuous.
*Science is a tool. It is not a cause for anything or an explanation for anything. This is a pet peeve of mine, as there's a meme going around that goes like this: "Why? Because... science!" It's a joke, of course, mocking that people actually try to use science as a reason for things being the way they are, when in reality, science is a tool that helps us understand nature and nothing else.
**It's important to read articles about science with a critical eye and not just read the headline. Many articles will claim a scientific discovery has been made only to explain that no such discovery has actually been made. In reality, it was only an experiment that was performed producing a result that was about 3,000 degrees removed from the claim in the headline.
***In my 38 years of knowing Christians and other people with a spiritual creed, I have only met 1 person that saw a problem with belief in God and science working together. My experience has shown that people use science as a reason to not believe in God but that people do not use God as a reason to not study science. It's important to note that Christian science lovers will come to empirical evidence with a different assumption, which is namely that we do not believe that we must limit all explanations to those of an empirical nature. But Christians don't, in general, run away from science as if it were a threat to their faith.
