The question: Can we choose what we believe?

Choice is rarely black and white | Julian Baggini | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Imagine that I hooked you up to an infallible lie detector and asked you to say that you believed the moon was made of cheese. If the machine said you were being honest, I would give you £1m. Could you do it?

It certainly wouldn't be easy. You can pretend to believe whatever you want, but real belief requires some conviction, and this cannot be turned on or off at will. I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have wilfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.

But that does not mean belief involves no significant element of choice. No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch, today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date. You may have tried to overcome an aversion to beetroot and grown to like it, which would make your liking of beetroot in part a choice. Your genuine preference for a healthy option may have resulted from a decision to get into certain habits, so that healthier choices have come to be more natural and appealing than others. So even though, at the moment of decision, you cannot change what you actually prefer, those preferences are themselves cultivated by other choices you have made.

Belief is very similar. You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe. That's why, given time, you could pass that lie detector test. For instance, you could decide that all language is metaphorical, and so understand the statement that the moon is made of cheese in such a way that you could sincerely believe it. Or, like Humpty Dumpty, you might decide that words can mean what you want them to mean, and pull off a similar trick.

But how could you choose to believe those things about language in the first place? The answer to that is that there are arguments for any belief that at least some intelligent people find compelling, and we come to accept the ones we do because of a combination of our powers of reasoning and our motivations. Unfortunately for those who value reason, it seems very clear that in a straight fight between the two, motivation usually wins. The desire for £1m could easily make the argument that all language is metaphorical seem more compelling than it should.

So, you do have a choice about what to believe in one very important respect. You could choose to strive to overcome distorting desires to believe what it suits you to believe, and cultivate the desire to want your beliefs to be well-grounded. The beliefs you would then come to hold would be chosen in the sense that they would be the result of choices you had made about what kinds of reasons to value and how far you were willing to question and challenge your motivations.

It should be obvious that this process can never be traced back to a pure, unconditioned choice. If you ask why we decide to value reason or to challenge self-serving justification, the answer will always involve facts about ourselves that are not the product of own choices. It is difficult to see what it would even mean to say that who we are and what we believe is wholly down to ourselves. A power a pure will, unconditioned by heredity or environment, makes no sense.

The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments. Beliefs based on ignorance or whim are thus less freely chosen than those held in full knowledge and on reflection. So to take one of the biggest belief choices of all, we do not choose to believe in God or not, but we can choose how much we attend to inconvenient facts, distorting self-motivations, and the rationality of arguments. In that sense, we are responsible for what we freely believe.