belief, epistemology, freewill, dawkinsThis is a concept I’ve been spending a lot of time (too much?) thinking about recently.
It all started while I was reading the transcript of an online debate, involving Richard Dawkins and … well, someone else who doesn’t play into the question.
The transcript read:
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**15:06 Hannah Devlin (moderator):
We’ve got a lot of questions coming in on why it is possible to “choose” to believe. …
15:06 Richard Dawkins: (quoting someone else in the chat)
“How can you ‘choose to believe’?”
RD: Yes indeed, how can you? Either the evidence supports something or it does not. Choice shouldn’t come into belief” *** Wow… this is counter to everything I’ve chosen to believe… and from a prominent, “leading” atheist, no less. Richard implies there is no choice when deciding whether or not to accept a given piece of evidence, or a given truth claim. Really? Is there no “choice” involved in deciding whether one will accept evidence? I think this is really thorny.
How did I “choose” to stop believing that the Bible was the inerrant “Word of God,” and allow myself to consider other propositions? Do I “choose” to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow? Or has that choice been stolen by the 45 years of it actually rising every day?
I have an answer substantially formed… but I want to see if this very simple question nags others the way it did me, or if anyone brings up angles I haven’t considered.
It’s obviously flawed logic to put beliefs into the category of “things that you can consciously choose to have”. Specifically, it’s the Fallacy of Irrelevant Association. This is obvious if you stop and consider it for an instant: I challenge you to choose believe in god (or to not believe in god, if you’re a theist and somehow wandered in here.) Right now. Did it work? No. How about believing that the sun is cold. No? Beliefs just don’t work that way.
Even in the scientific world, people refuse to accept evidence, even long after the majority has accepted it. And humanity in general is notorious for believing things with no evidence at all, and then holding on to those beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary!
Clearly it’s not a wholly rational process. New evidence is presented to us. Do we trust the source? Does it agree with our experience of the world? Do we subconsiously want to believe it (e.g. does it conform to our confirmation bias?) All these things come into play.
You could point to evolution, but my favorite example is the American rejection of the Theory of Continental Drift, which persisted until we could actually measure the rate of drift using satellites. Many many people held to the belief that the continents did not move despite massive evidence to the contrary, and that’s a relatively inoffensive theory, which doesn’t require much alteration of the world view.
I know a lot of people in the atheist community associate Dawkins as the face of atheism, but everything I’ve ever read (aside from his excellent books on biology and evolution) has been too heavily anti-theistic for me to take it seriously. He’s got an obvious bias, which leads to theist-bashing statements like this one (Sky fairy believers have made a conscious choice to believe nonsense. Therefore they’re dumb.)
Dawkins is rather ineloquently saying that you are not free to choose reality. That what someone decides to hide from or not has no bearing on the existence of that thing. That evidence is evidence and you can decide if evidence is valid or not, but once it is established as valid, it cannot then be ignored.
For example, I might see what looks like a black ball. I have evidence now that this ball is black, because it looks black. I can’t, without new evidence, just deny that it is black. I must seek out additional information. So I may look at the lighting in the room. Ah, it is all red! I now have new evidence, or at least a new requirement. The ball looks black under red light. So I move it outside, into yellow-white sunlight. Ah, the ball looks green!
I now can no longer call the ball a black ball. The evidence suggests it is green. Occam’s Razor says that it is simpler that green objects look black under a red light, than that green objects transform into black ones.
I cannot choose to ignore this evidence without abandoning science and reason. I cannot ignore it, or my arguments become invalid.
Perhaps I believed that the ball was black. But now I have NO CHOICE but to believe it is green. Else what I am really choosing is to be ignorant.
I often wish that Dawkins wasn’t one of our biggest spokespeople.
This statement, in my view, is considered “thorny” simply because it uses the word “choose”. Whether we’re choosing what we believe or we’re choosing anything else, we’re really having the same “freewill” discussion.
In these sorts of discussions I find that all too often everything but what choice actually is is the subject of the discussion. This may be just me, but once choice is elucidated a little, the rest seems to melt away as noise.
When we make a “choice” here’s what I think is actually going on:
There is a set S of perceived outcomes. When we make a “choice”, we select exactly one element from S.
Suppose S has two elements: A and B. What is the process by which we decide whether to select A or B? I contend that the process is complex but can be described simply: We measure both A and B according to which we find the most desirable. If desire(X) is a function of how much we desire outcome X, then if desire(A) > desire(B), then we select A from S. That’s it. The complexity of the desire() function is something for another discussion (perhaps).
Now maybe this is something we feel is intuitively true, but I think actually writing it out is important, at least to me. It reveals a couple of things:
So bringing this back into focus with regard to choosing what we believe. What do we really mean when we’re asking: “Can you choose what you believe?” Are we asking the same question we would ask about any other kind of choice – in which case, we need only look at what it actually means to “choose” – or do we mean something different in this case?
If it’s the former, then evidence really has nothing to do with it – at least directly. If you want to believe what is true, and you believe that the best way to do that is to trust the evidence, then you will inexorably believe what the evidence tells you. Change what you want and you’ll get a different belief system. The real question is: “How did you come to have the set of desires that you do – and how does that set change?”
I think the “choice” filter comes in when it’s down to accepting or ignoring a peice of evidence which contradicts the beleifs you already hold. I do think many people have emotional reasons for clinging to their beleifs in the face of evidence/absence of evidence - things to do with fear of death, hope for ultimate justice, wanting some kind of protection against the stark cruelty of random chance, or just being so tied in socially to an avowed beleif system. That is why you get some otherwise intelligent people, even scientists, who cling to their religious beleifs.
For me, my atheism doesn’t feel like a choice. I have tried, any time these past 50 years, to “choose” to beleive in a god, for several of the reasons cited above. I just can’t do it. Every time, all the rational arguements against beleif come crowding in, and I can no more choose to beleive in a god than I can choose to love spiders, or fly, or watch Eastenders (OK, maybe that last one isn’t a very good example.)
Believe it or not – how’s that for a lead-in? :-) – this argument that Dawkins makes has a parallel in Christian doctrine. It’s one that’s been argued for hundreds of years: the idea of predestination vs. “free will.” It boils down to whether we have any power within ourselves to believe in God or not. There is evidence within the Bible for both, and the conclusion I (and others) have reached on the issue is that it’s two sides of the same coin, and we aren’t able to see both at the same time. But in the meantime, entire denominations of Christianity rise based on the answer to this question one way or the other, and churches have been torn apart because of differences on this issue (including one I attended).
Similarly, my take would be that Dawkins is taking sides on an intractable question, and that you can either believe he’s right, or not.
(Oh, wait … shoot …)
It’s fairly simple. “Belief” does not require facts, so you can choose to believe whatever unproven assertion you like. Belief is, literally, having faith in something you can’t prove.
Once facts and reality enter the situation, it’s no longer a question of “belief.” It’s a question of “accepting or denying facts.”
If you are presented with evidence which contradicts a belief, you are no longer “choosing to believe.” You are “choosing to deny reality.”
You choose not to believe in [deity].
There is no evidence that satisfied you, for the existence of god. You choose not to believe in it, because there is nothing so compelling that it exist, and well, you can still choose to believe in something that is not quite true (as in true love).
You, however, cannot choose to believe in [deity].
If [deity] exist, and you are pretty sure about it, do you have a choice, seriously? (When you believe in [deity], you simply have no choice other than to believe in it, and receive the so-called salvation.)
Only in the face of no, or equally weighted evidence. Anything less is self-delusion. In the case of theism vs. atheism, it all depends on how you weigh your evidence.
Rob: Yes, I have struggled with that - a bit. I think the answer comes in the balance of evidence, and the nature of the evidence I am relying on - ie evidence that can be tested out, or which fits closely with evidence I can test (eg, I know if I drop something heavy out of the window it’s going to hit the ground with a crash - I don’t need to test it further by throwing myself out.)
Evolution makes sense to me, it all hangs together - I can see the similarity in body plans, I’ve been to places where fossil layers are there to be seen, I can (just) follow the stuff about DNA. The religion stuff makes no sense to me at all - there are too many contradictions, and ultimately I just cannot get away from the idea that things really ought to make sense. So in the end, for the religious stuff, the supernatural stuff, to be true, that would mean that everything else about the way I understand the world would have to be false.
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