Woodsy writes:
In this and other forums, when athiesm is discussed, theists often use the phrase "choose to believe" or "choose not to believe", usually with reference to their god.
To be fair, it is not only theists who do this. We theists are also accused of 'choosing to believe in a lie or falsehood' etc.
If there is such a thing as choosing to believe, none of us are exempt from the possibility that we are doing so.
Woodsy writes:
Suppose you are standing by a marsh, and you see a moose (it's hard to mistake a moose!). Could you disbelieve in the presence of the moose by any effort of will whatever?
That's not belief. That is knowledge.
Suppose you are sitting in a bar in town and your friend tells you there is a moose in that swamp right then. You know that neither you nor your friend have any way of knowing if a moose is there or not. How could you believe that either it is there, or not, by any effort of will?
You can't. You need something. Tracks, dung, a moosey noise.
Something one can decide to do is to profess a belief, regardless of whether one holds the belief or not. Do some religious people confuse holding a belief and professing one?
Absopositively! All the time. I daresay some atheists do as well. Maybe not here, but there are definitely folks who feel that atheism is the way to go simply because they have not put their beliefs into coherence yet, or have not found that the particular God of their upbringing speaks to them.
You CAN choose to believe to some extent.
If we both saw tracks and the evidence for the species which left them was inconclusive, we could both choose to believe that they were made by two different animals.
The situation with theists and atheists is similar. We are looking at tracks left by nature or by God, or by both. The more there are purely natural answers the more we feel all is by nature. We still have those who believe that nature and God are One and The Same. There are then, other factors that must be present for a person to believe in God. We obviously don't need to. The 'gaps' are getting smaller every day. Looking at two sets of tracks and having different asnwers is an intuitive process I suppose. The physical evidence is the same in both cases. The individual has to dig into their own memory to pull out 'clues'. Not scientific, no. Just belief. If you tell me your thoughts and I tell you mine, and we weigh them. I can still 'choose' to believe one or the other when the evidence for either is the same.
Edited by anastasia, : No reason given.
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