How Must I Believe?
In my teen years, I decided, I didn't know how or what to believe. Despite being reared in the truth of the Gospel, I found myself in a perpetual cycle of excuses. I wanted little to do with God. Of course I would profess His name, of course I understood the Gospel; but I wanted to experience the excitement of sin. I didn't want to align with Christ if it meant that I'd have to walk away from the freedom found in being a newly minted adult. Of course I came around, the Lord has a way of protecting His own. It was as an adult I found peace and solace in the work of the Lord. It was as an adult I explored the myriad of religions and objections. My, less than humble, teen grumblings about "not knowing how to believe" had me stuck in a dark place for longer than I'd like to admit.
Today, quite often, I see this objection raised by various forms of pagans, Satanists, and atheists. It comes in the form of "it is unconvincing" or "my life lead me to believe this way." A couple of weeks ago, in a podcast, Alex O'Conner stated that "how do you even begin to...you can choose to do things which will knowingly affect your belief." He goes on to explain how you may alter your beliefs by making lifestyle choices and "surrounding yourself" in specific settings. He chalks it up to emotional states and left brain/right brain discontinuity, etc. I don't think he's entirely wrong on this, as our setting will influence how we see the world, however, it cannot be discounted how much influence we have on this mental state. I believe this is mostly born of Alex's rejection of freewill in his worldview that results in this rejection of freedom of belief.
I've been thinking on this for a bit now, and I'm convinced you can absolutely change your beliefs at will. Maybe not as simply as some may suggest, but you are in control of what your head believes. As a matter of fact, I think it is rather immature to think that you are unable to alter your beliefs or that you lack the freedom to decide what is true or untrue. I think it works something like this: we encounter new information, as an automatic response, we hold it against similar information in our mind, and decide if it aligns with what we already know is truth or aligns with what we already know as false. It will linger there for a bit until we are convinced or otherwise. The more rational among us may even have a category of "unknowable" things to compare this to as well. The basic premise of truth is that it generally aligns with other true things, while there are many patterns of falseness, it is a different sort of calculation. Given the infinite amount of falsehoods each truth is capable of conjuring, it must directly contradict a known truth or match some other sort of falseness pattern we have encountered before. Much like magic, its only deceiving if one knows not the mechanics of the act.
This all sounds a bit deterministic, I know, but it doesn't end there. That is the automatic response. There is a response that you choose to employ, that makes use of the autonomic response in congruity with will.
There is a great deal about the brain that is unknown, but in more recent research on neuroplasticity we are lead to believe that the brain is capable of changing itself, and the choices we make have a profound impact on the brain's future functioning. We've known for some time how repetitive motions become automatic, via strengthening of neural pathways in the more basal functions of the brain. It is also true for behaviors, thoughts, sensation, exposure, nearly everything the brain encounters, it processes. The processing leaves a sort of phantom trail across the neurons in the brain, and repeated activation builds shorter more precise, more automatic pathways.
This can be for good or bad. Take, for example, the case of at least some anxiety disorders. Some event created trauma in the brain, where the amygdala reacts in an autonomic response, stress hormones are released, adrenaline is elevated, all of the details associated with that trauma are now linked to the autonomic fear response. Whenever the amygdala processes a situation that is congruous to the initial trauma, no matter how benign, it will illicit the same autonomic fear response1. The remedy to this is to re-experience the states of the initial trauma, minus the trauma, and re-train the amygdala to disassociate these from the initial trauma. This is the basis of exposure therapy. Say you were in a car wreck that caused immense pain. You brain may now associate the car itself with the immense pain. Overwhelming fear can overtake you when you go to sit down in any vehicle. The way to remedy this, is to engage with the fear response and train the brain that there is no harm here by repeatedly entering a vehicle without the "accident" part of the experience. All of this is plastic training of neural pathways.
Where does that leave us in regard to belief? Well, when the autonomic response concludes and an idea lands securely in one of two camps, truth or not truth, you can exercise your will to challenge that newly formed belief, or you can let it sit where it lies and develop more and more connections in the nexus of the mind without your input. You can play that forward to conclusions, you can hold it against other truth beliefs and see if it still holds, you can seek more external information to further define it, we can devise tests to obtain its veracity, etc, defining how exactly the newly formed belief should lie in your broader worldview. There are endless possibilities when it comes to how we play with ideas.
The real change comprises of modifying your worldview. Any idea that fits nicely into your worldview is not sufficiently challenged to change it. Your world view is a network of beliefs that support one another, underpinned by towers of lower beliefs that give nuance and complexity to those more basic beliefs. Challenging your worldview is really the only way to adopt new beliefs. If you refuse to challenge them, rejecting ideas whole cloth that challenge your worldview, then you will never change your beliefs. Allowing ideas to percolate up the chain to the most a priori basic beliefs will either strengthen or weaken your worldview. It is an uncomfortable thing to do though, to change how you see the world. Most people will not even try without extreme circumstances. It can feel as if everything solid in your life is suddenly put in jeopardy. People fight tooth and nail to preserve this in order to avoid the pain. But those with the strongest worldviews have done just this, challenged them over and over, landing firmly on what they believe today. But if you refuse to engage with ideas, then you cannot say that your are not convinced, or that you are unable to change your beliefs, only that you refuse to.