On choosing to believe

I've been thinking a lot about where belief comes from, not the least because what I believe about the world happens to be a mishmash of many things. One of the things I think I believe is that you can choose what you believe. I don't think you necessarily have to choose, because there's a number of ways belief can come to you, but I do think choice is one of them. How? To be honest I'm less convinced of how but I do think I have a strong argument for why. To believe something is to have conviction that it's true. One way you could develop this conviction is by seeking evidence, but you might not find it. People believe all sorts of things that are not supported by evidence or cannot be supported by evidence. For example, the existence of God, who may be considered to transcend physical reality, cannot be supported by wholly physical evidence (in my humble non-theologian opinion). The other obvious way is that some people have simply believed their whole lives; they were introduced to…