Can Our Wills Be Severed From Our Beliefs?

See below for Michael Bolton's rendition of "Silent Night."

Bill Gnade has said of my post, Do Non-Believers Willfully Refuse to Believe?, that it “is probably the best post I've ever read by anyone here at DC.” I’m not sure exactly why he said that, but I’d have to say he has offered a very thought provoking response to it here. Let me respond…

Bill, thank you for your kind words at what I wrote. I do have a deeper understanding of things than you have given me credit for, and I suspect you do too. I found myself thinking about you and I when you wrote:

Surely we have all known someone who has refused to concede he has lost a debate, or has denied compelling evidence, solely to maintain his claim to superiority or certitude.

Well, I thought of you more you than I, okay? ;-)

Yet I don’t think we entirely disagree here. I agree with you that our wills cannot be severed from our beliefs. I think it’s part of who we are as human beings, given our “passional nature,” as William James described it.

That recognition doesn’t make me a disciple of Schopenhauer however, like I think you are. Every major philosopher has a good point, otherwise he wouldn’t be considered a major philosopher, and I suppose Schopenhauer is a marginally major one (although very few of the introductory college textbooks even deal with him, much less provide an excerpt of his writings, and some don’t mention him at all). I honestly don’t know that much about his views, but it seems to me he places too much of an emphasis on “will,” that’s all; just like Freud placed too much emphasis on sex, and Marx placed too much emphasis on capital. According to Bertrand Russell, Schopenhauer is “not very consistent and not very sincere.”

But Schopenhauer’s point probably cannot be denied in that what we believe to be true is influenced by our wills, since we all have wills. Some people do in fact “will to believe,” while some others “will to disbelieve.” When this happens we’d have to attribute what they believe to irrational fears, psychological guilt, superiority complexes, or the need for power, sex, or capital. That’s why there is what Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” where we should be suspicious of the motives behind someone’s arguments because she may have an ulterior motive. There is some truth to that. If an argument doesn't look sound to us we should ask ourselves, “what is this person getting out of arguing for what she does?”

However, there are two things to say by way of your response to what I wrote. In the first place, I don’t see the will to disbelieve as an over-riding factor in what all nonbelievers reject, which is what many, if not most Christians claim. I was listening to some Christmas music recently. Michael Bolton’s “Silent Night” is the best rendition of that song I’ve ever heard. As I was listening to it I thought to myself, “the Christian message is absolutely wonderful if you ignore all of the superstitious ignorance and barbarisms in the Bible, like genocide, witch, heretic and honor killings. Absent from these things there is no story that tops it in the world. It beats the competition hands down, and plays into our need for significance and forgiveness and hope.”

If anyone is willing to believe what she does it's the Christian, for most every Christian will ask me “what’s left if it isn’t true?” Christians will harp on the fact that unless it is true they have no hope, no meaning, and no purpose in their lives. I demur, of course, because I have hope, purpose, and meaning in my life. But for them unless one has some kind of ultimate hope, meaning, and purpose, then there is none at all. The benefits to believing are multitudinous in American society almost everywhere, whereas the benefits to not believing are both experientially (without such a hope and significance) and socially slim. No wonder several of our team members here at DC won’t divulge their real names for social repercussions.

In the second place, Christian believers typically argue that willing one's beliefs is something they themselves do not do. According to them, only nonbelievers are the ones doing the willing, and they "will to disbelieve." Christians think they follow the evidence and nonbelievers do not. So if it’s true that all of us will our beliefs, then Christians must defend why they think only nonbelievers do this. If Christians cannot show they are different based on this, then they also "will to believe." But once they admit this, Christians should become agnostic about what they claim to believe, since they have recognized that how they see the evidence is based upon their wills. This makes agnosticism the default position, as I’ve argued here before.