Can you believe what you don't believe?

I’ve been wanting to write on this topic for awhile now but haven’t found the words. Then a few weeks ago I saw this article which stated ideas very similar to what I’ve been thinking and motivated me to give it a try.

When I think about how the churches I grew up in talked about evangelism and about being saved, it seems to me that belief is viewed as a choice. You can choose to believe in Jesus or you can choose not to and face the consequences.

But since I’ve walked away from faith, I’m not sure any more that that is actually the case. Given that the main reason I walked away was that the various doctrines and edicts and so forth of the church just no longer made sense and no longer seemed to fit with historical and scientific evidence, I don’t think I could re-believe if I tried.

Can you as an adult truly believe in Santa Claus anymore? Can you believe that the world is flat? Or that unicorns exist?

So then, what is happening during conversion? I know Christians talk about the spirit of God moving in a person’s heart and bringing conviction, but they also talk about people choosing to believe. I was pondering the conversion experience awhile back and mentally cataloguing the reasons people choose to believe in Jesus (this type of conversion and my discussion about belief here apply more to strongly evangelical approaches to faith than perhaps to those in more mainstream churches who are there for the tradition and mythical meaning inherent in the Christian religion – discussed in another post here).

In my experience (which given my 30 years in the church is considerable), people convert during times of emotional crisis. It could be an internal crisis of conscience or an external event that has led to pain or need. I think in many cases, the draw is more the community of the church – they are lonely, they need support – than about the actual tenets of the faith. There are exceptions such as the journalist Lee Strobel who wrote the book, The Case for Christ. He apparently set out to investigate the claims about Jesus and became convinced that Christianity was true. But if you examine his writings closely, he too had emotional reasons for converting. Even altar calls are emotional appeals – sometimes hope based, sometimes fear based. Oh, evangelists sometimes try to address more rational concerns with apologetic arguments, but if the person isn’t convinced, the explanation isn’t that the argument wasn’t convincing, instead, it’s that the person is choosing not to believe. Or they are choosing to live in sin because they don’t want to give up their pleasures.

For me personally, as I walked away from faith, there was this cry in my heart for many months that I wanted to believe. Oh how I wanted to believe. I didn’t want to break with my past, with my family, with all I’d ever known. I wanted God to be real and the promises preached from the pulpit to be true. And when I tried to express my questions, my doubts, my uncertainties…I was accused of choosing not to believe. Apparently, if my questions were leading me away from Christianity, I was supposed to stop asking them.

Part of what makes us human seems to be this need to find explanations, to understand why, to be able to fit our experiences into a big picture that makes sense. For me, growing up in the faith, my beliefs made sense out of my experience – until they didn’t. And if one’s beliefs don’t make sense, I think human cognition is set up to justify them…but one can only do so much justification before the worldview shatters and one can no longer believe.

In developmental psychology, we find that children learn either by assimilation or accommodation. In assimilation, children adjust their views of the outside world to fit what they already know. For example, a child who has experience with horses and meets a dog for the first time might try to ride it, assimilating the dog into his/her concept of a horse. But in accommodation, children change their internal view to match what’s in the outside world. For example, when the dog reacts badly to being ridden, the child may have to adjust their concept and create a separate category.

In essence, I’ve been trying very hard to assimilate all the things I’ve been learning about psychology, about history, about how the Bible was written, about the different beliefs of various denominations, about the variety of people who don’t fit the stereotypical ‘sinner’ category, etc. and failing. I can no longer assimilate the knowledge and thus I must accommodate it by adjusting my worldview. I’m not choosing not to believe. It’s just that the lack of fit between the real world and my internal views have become disparate enough that my natural, psychological need for equilibrium has caused a recalibration. It’s how we humans learn.