This is unrelated, but your paranthetical “which is what faith is, a choice to believe” got me thinking. I’ve strugged for a long time with what faith actually is, and how it relates to the concept of belief.

I like to define belief as simply being convinced that an idea is true. A person may have many reasons for being convinced of something - emotional, philisophical, scientific, etc. And it might be tempting to add faith to that list, but I’m not so sure. In my experience people of faith, when pressed, will give rational (however ill-informed they may be) reasons as to why they believe.

They may believe because they can’t conceive of a universe capable of evolving intelligent life, or because they’ve benefited spiritually from truths found in religion, or because they were indoctrinated at such a young age that anything else runs contrary to everything they know.

Our brains are excellent at rationalizing newly aquired information to fit existing, long-held patterns of belief. We’re wired to eliminate cognitive dissonance whenever possible, which makes it difficult to fairly consider new evidence. I’m reading Robert Burton’s book “On Being Certain,” which discusses cognition and how the feeling of certainty is the same regardless of whether you’re objectively right or wrong.

So are there people who believe simply because they want to? Or are these people using the same rational faculties as the agnostic or athiest, but against a vastly different set of knowledge and experience, resulting in different answers to the same questions?