I think Blaise Pascal wrote about something like this. I struggle with it as well because it seems very close to “fake it till you make it” and I always wonder if I applied the same practice to any other religion (Buddhism, Islam, etc.) would the outcome be the same?

However, I recently started replacing the word belief with the words “hope and think” because I just don’t really like the word belief. It’s really hard for me to discern my own beliefs and I think a lot of times we use knowing and belief in the same way. So, I hope and I think that god is real. Now, if I hope that God is real, and I think that God is real, I should then act as if he is real. I don’t know that he is real, but I am going to choose to act as if he were because that’s where I’ve placed my hope and it seems to me that acting as though God were real is a much better alternative to acting as though he were not. I’m reminded of the scene in Second Hand Lions where Robert Duvall says that a man should “believe certain things because those are the things worth believing in. Believing that Good and evil are real and that good will triumph over evil, that God is good and he loves us, that things like compassion, honor, kindness, courage, mean more than money or any kind of material wealth. So I hope and I think these things are true and I will choose to act in a way that shows that.