“My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, ‘Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?’ That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.” (Chapter One, Big Book)
“We needed to ask ourselves but one short question. “Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?” As soon as a man can say that he does believe, or is willing to believe, we emphatically assure him that he is on his way. It has been repeatedly proven among us that upon this simple cornerstone a wonderfully effective spiritual structure can be built. (Chapter Four, Big Book)
To believe something means to accept a proposition because there is sufficient evidence for it.
If there is no evidence, to believe the proposition is insane.
To be willing to believe, on the face of it, suggests the following:
- There is no evidence for the proposition
- Therefore, one does not believe
- Yet one wishes to take the proposition to be true
- This involves abandoning the condition of sufficient evidence
- This involves abandoning the basis for discerning reality at all.
To be willing to believe therefore apparently means being willing to abandon the commitment to reality.
This is obviously not what Bill meant, but this is what the phrase, as it stands, suggests. The problematic wording of this has given rise to no small measure of confusion and difficulty with Step Two. People regularly sense this difficulty, but it is hard to put it into words, and people abandon the question entirely.
What might be meant?
The willingness to believe in Step Two is very specific: it is about the restoration of the individual to sanity, i.e. the restoration of the ability to avoid life-threatening actions (taking a drink). The proposition is that a ‘higher power’ is achieving this.
Now, as an atheist, I did not believe in a higher power. Yet I did, by this point, believe that others in AA, who were ex-drunks, had been restored to sanity. I believed that there was a mechanism that allowed this restoration to sanity. I was therefore in a conflicted position: I did not believe in ‘God’, yet I believed that there was an apparently universal, powerful mechanism in operation beyond the nuts and bolts of material mechanisms and common sense—there was something metaphysical in operation. Once I realised this conflict, I had to unwind my certainty about the non-existence of God and extend the notion of a divine power away from the core sense in Christianity, say, to a more generous and less specified idea: a power that gets drunks sober.
What was required of me was a degree of honesty (that others had indeed been helped in a manner that could not be explained in materialistic terms and therefore apparently had a metaphysical dimension), a degree of open-mindedness (about the nature of the metaphysical realm and the nature of entities within it; in others words I had to reopen the investigation), and a degree of willingness, to take actions to investigate this phenomenon by seeking to undergo it myself (i.e. take the Steps and see if what happened to them—restoration to sanity—would happen to me as well).
In other words, Step Two requires me to recognise I already partly believe something and then to embark on a course of action to complete the investigation and strength and expand the belief, perhaps further specifying what it is I believe.
To be willing to believe can therefore be read as being willing to investigate further what I already believe in broad outline, i.e. being willing to gather evidence to strengthen and broaden my existing belief. This does not involve an abandonment of the commitment to evidence as the basis for belief or discerning reality. I already believed others had been ‘saved’, on the basis of evidence, and reason (an evidential process) suggested what had worked for them would work for me. The willingness was the willingness to proceed towards certainty by gathering more evidence. At no point did need reason be abandoned.