Not directly, but substantially so indirectly. Belief is largely involuntary—it tracks what seems true to you given your evidence, and you cannot simply decide to believe something you take to be false—but you have real indirect control: over what you expose yourself to, where you direct attention, and which inquiries you pursue, all of which shape what you end up believing.
The direct case fails on reflection.
Try to believe, right now, purely by willing it, that it is raining when you can see it is not—you cannot; belief aims at truth and is constrained by how things seem, so it is not under direct voluntary control the way raising your arm is.
This is why offering someone money to believe a falsehood (not to say it, to believe it) sets an impossible task, while paying them to assert it does not.
Belief answers to perceived evidence, not to the will.
But the will governs belief's upstream causes.
You choose what to read, whom to listen to, which sources to trust, and what to investigate—and these choices largely determine your evidence, and thus your beliefs.
You also choose where to direct attention and how hard to scrutinize, and motivated reasoning shows how powerfully wanting a conclusion can bias which evidence you seek and credit.
So over time people substantially cultivate their beliefs, which is why belief carries a kind of responsibility even though it is not directly willed.
This has a sharp ethical edge:
because you control the inputs, you are answerable for the diligence and honesty of your believing—for whether you sought disconfirming evidence or curated a comfortable echo, even though you cannot flip a belief by fiat.
So do not try to believe by willpower, which fails and breeds self-deception; instead choose your inputs and your intellectual honesty well, and let true beliefs form from good evidence. The one thing you can directly choose is how carefully and fairly to inquire. This would need revision if people could believe arbitrary propositions purely at will—the phenomenology and the failure of doxastic voluntarism show they cannot.
Not directly—but yes, indirectly, and more than you'd think. You can't just decide to believe something you take to be false (try believing it's raining right now when you can see it isn't—you can't). But you have real control over the things upstream of belief: what you read, who you listen to, where you point your attention, what you investigate. Those choices largely determine what you end up believing.
Why direct control fails:
Why indirect control is powerful:
This has a real ethical edge: because you control the inputs, you're responsible for the honesty of your believing—whether you went looking for disconfirming evidence or just curated a comfortable echo chamber—even though you can't flip a belief by sheer will.
Practical upshot: don't try to believe things by willpower. It doesn't work and it breeds self-deception. Instead, choose your inputs and your intellectual honesty carefully, and let true beliefs form from good evidence. The one thing you can directly choose is how fairly and carefully you look—and that, over time, shapes almost everything you believe.
Try It Right Now.
Here is a simple experiment: choose, this instant, to believe that you are standing on the surface of the moon. Not to pretend, not to imagine—to genuinely believe it. You will find you cannot. Belief is not a lever the will can pull; it is a response to how things seem, constrained by the evidence in front of you, and no act of decision can install a conviction that your perception flatly contradicts. This is the wall every theory of belief hits: belief aims at truth, and a belief you could simply choose, regardless of evidence, would not really be a belief at all—it would be a wish wearing a belief's clothes. In the most direct sense, the answer is no. You cannot believe by fiat.
Pascal's Side Door.
Pascal understood this perfectly, which is why his famous wager contains a subtle second move. He argued you should believe in God (the potential payoff being infinite), but he knew you cannot just decide to—so he prescribed a back door: act as if you believed. Go to Mass, take the holy water, follow the rituals, keep the company of believers, and belief, he promised, will follow. It is a shrewd and slightly unnerving insight—that while belief cannot be commanded head-on, it can be cultivated sideways, grown from the soil of habit and behavior and repeated exposure. You cannot choose the belief. You can choose the practices that will, over time, produce it.
The Gardener of the Mind.
This is the truer picture: you are not the manufacturer of your beliefs but their gardener. You cannot will a plant to grow, but you choose the seeds, the soil, the light, the water—and then the growing happens on its own. So with the mind: you choose what to read and what to ignore, whom to trust and whom to tune out, which questions to pursue and which to avoid, what company to keep and what conversations to enter. And out of that tended ground, beliefs grow—not chosen directly, but not accidental either, the harvest of a thousand small choices about what to let into the field. Show me a person's information diet and their chosen company, and I can largely predict their convictions. The garden is curated, even when the gardener pretends the flowers grew wild.
The Lie We Choose While Denying We Chose.
But there is a darker mechanism, and it is the will's covert operation on belief. We are extraordinarily good at believing what we want to be true—crediting the evidence that flatters us, dismissing what threatens us, and doing it all while sincerely feeling we are just following the facts. This is motivated reasoning, and it is choice disguised as discovery: the smoker who becomes skeptical of the studies, the partisan who finds every counterargument unpersuasive, the person who cannot see the flaw they have a stake in not seeing. Here belief is being steered by the will—but covertly, with the fingerprints wiped, so that we get to hold the comfortable conviction and the feeling of having reasoned our way to it honestly. Much of what we "conclude" we have quietly chosen, and the choosing hides itself behind the conclusion.
The Responsibility We Cannot Escape.
This is why the Victorian philosopher W. K. Clifford insisted that "it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence"—the startling claim that believing carelessly is a moral failing. If we cannot choose beliefs directly, how can we be blamed for them? Because we choose the process. We are responsible not for the belief that appears but for the honesty of the inquiry that produced it—whether we went looking for the truth or for a comfort, whether we sought out what might prove us wrong or hid from it. And in this lies a strange freedom: you are, slowly and indirectly, the author of your own mind—not by deciding what is true, which is not yours to decree, but by deciding how honestly you will seek it. The discipline of believing well, of following the evidence even when it wounds, of staying open to being wrong, is one of the deepest forms of self-creation available to a human being. You cannot choose your beliefs. But you can choose to be the kind of person who earns them.
You cannot choose your beliefs directly: belief tracks what seems true to you given the evidence, and no act of will can install a conviction your perception flatly contradicts—which is why one could pay you to assert a falsehood but not genuinely to believe one. But you have substantial indirect control, because you choose belief's upstream causes: what you read, whom you trust, where you direct attention, and which inquiries you pursue, all of which shape the evidence you end up with. This gives believing a real ethical dimension—you are answerable for the honesty and diligence of your inquiry, for whether you sought disconfirming evidence or curated a comfortable echo. So the move is not to believe by willpower, which fails and breeds self-deception, but to choose your inputs and your intellectual honesty well and let true beliefs form.