its literally so funny to me that mulder believes in everything but god and Scully believes in god but nothing else

okay like on one hand i’d like to reply to this with some funny one-liner bc on a surface level it is funny... but due to the amount of time i’ve devoted to thinking about mulder and scully and what they believe and how they believe in it, i just can’t read this ask without wanting to argue with it.

mulder doesn’t believe in everything but god. he believes in many things that he thinks would make the world a more tolerable place, by sheer force of will. by trying incredibly hard, even though it doesn’t come naturally. he wants to believe in everything but god, because the concept of god doesn’t give him any feasible answers at all. the concept of god simply demands yet more blind faith, as well as acceptance of the things that have happened to you as fated to be so by god’s will.

he wants to believe in folklore, because that means that people before him have looked past the obvious successfully, that there’s a lineage of secret knowledge waiting to be uncovered. he wants to believe in monsters, because he’s spent years studying the very worst in man and holding out hope that there are things too evil for any man to do. he wants to believe in aliens, because that means a greater mystery behind what’s happened to him and countless others than monstrous men. but mulder doesn’t want to believe in god, because believing in god would mean that rebelling against the whims of fate is futile, because fate is all god’s plan.

scully doesn’t believe in god and nothing else. on the contrary, scully’s very nature is to believe, and to trust. i would say that it is her instinct to believe in everything, and i think that it’s very evident in the way she reacts when caught off guard. unlike mulder, believing isn’t a struggle for her: it’s her default state of being. she is trained in believing. she practices it, faith in god and belief in the methodology of medicine, of science. she has been raised to trust the process, trust the wheels of fate.

but that doesn’t mean she does trust in those things. she’s too smart for that. she understands the fallibility of the human mind, especially her own. because of her implicit ability to believe, she can move past the believing almost immediately and into the questioning, the explaining. she believes in a thing, and then she proceeds quickly through the scientific method of trying to disprove her own theory, trying to explain it in every other possible way. she believes from the start, but belief means nothing on its own. she needs proof to admit her belief out loud. she needs it to be fact, not just faith. and the surest way to prove something, she’s learned, is by ruling out every other possibility. and she does this with god, too, i know she does. she did it for years, and that’s why we see her cut off from her faith for awhile at the start of the show — because she couldn’t find a way to rule out other explanations for any given miracle. because there was no proof.

mulder wants to believe in things that make the world he lives in a kinder place, that make someone other than men the monsters. scully believes in everything, good or evil, but gives those beliefs no weight if she can’t prove them. once she eases up on that practice of needing to prove, she can trust her belief in god again. but mulder never has any space for that belief, useless as it is, until he wants to believe for her. relights her candle and extends her prayers through his own.