Elwenil

I hate religion simply because of threads like this and other similar things in existence. It's an endless debate about what something means to you personally and no one agrees with you so you argue until everyone is angry, then someone kills someone and "BANG", we have the Middle East.

And you guys want a real kicker? Check out this article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/israelreligionoffbeat

I think I'll go drink some Drano and get all messed up and create a whole new religion around worshipping my toilet brush.

BWAHAHAHAHA!

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|TG|Elwenil

Switch

Arguing god is very difficult because very few people have even been presented with or considered an idea outside of the standard western philosophical tradition. The notion that a 'higher power' can exist outside the form of an omnipotent sentient being who makes decisions and willingly alters the outcome of events is unheard of in many parts of the world. I've never even met anyone else who has considered that an afterlife may exist whether or not there is a traditional 'god'.

It is very possible that 'god', the higher power, is nothing more than a set of rules that must be obeyed within certain physical/time dimensions. IE laws of physics.

Things behave in certain ways because they cannot behave in any other way. God is the set of rules by which all physical and energetic things behave --- most of these rules remain undiscovered.

What I said may seem a bit limiting, but you must consider the emergent properties that exist when you build rule sets. Chemistry, for example, is filled with amazing emergent properties that don't seem apparent but exist nonetheless.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but I'm just trying to point out that when people argue the existence of god they seldom stop to even define god or consider alternate definitions that would be just as valid as the christian/jewish/muslim interpretation.

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|TG|Switch

Better known as:
That noob who crashed the chopper.
That noob who ran over the mine.
That noob who TK'd me with a sniper rifle.
That noob who hit that APC at 300m with light AT! Our APC...

chris934

GOD DOES IS NOT REAL....... sorry to break it to you. Religion is over.Its in its death throws.Deal with it.Religion was a way for the educated to control simple ignorant people.Ditch it.

Elwenil

While I may agree with your opinion, chris934, you may want to edit your post so it at least makes more sense.

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|TG|Elwenil

chris934

Sorry I will try to pay more attention to how I word my posts.But at least someone agrees with me.


The main point is still pretty clear though.

Elwenil

HA! Figures when I lecture someone about a post I would not proofread my own, lol. Ah, such is life...

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|TG|Elwenil

ScratchMonkey

This thread proves that you can talk about religion without debate. My interest is the topic is a desire to understand how people continue to stick to theism. I was a born skeptic, and never really bought the Christianity of my parents. But I stayed with it loosely until some fundamentalists "held my feet to the fire" and convinced me that a liberal interpretation of the Bible isn't being a proper Christian. It forced me to look closely at what I was being asked to believe, and I finally rejected the whole thing.

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El_Gringo_Grande

Because it makes them feel safer, cared for and understood. It makes them feel good.

That is what it comes down to. You can overlook many things when you feel good.

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I’m not racists, I have republican friends. Radio show host.
- "The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity". -Jacob Burkhardt
- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" - Emerson
- "People should not be afraid of it's government, government should be afraid of it's People." - Line from V for Vendetta
- If software were as unreliable as economic theory, there wouldn't be a plane made of anything other than paper that could get off the ground. Jim Fawcette

ScratchMonkey

What's your opinion of the Wikipedia page on the wager? It has some interesting counter-arguments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager

For example, if you believe in the wrong god, and the real one is vengeful, you get punished.

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sordavie

Pascal's wager, or some variation of it, is probably the only philosophical argument that actually convinces a lot of lay people in the US, who were agnostic, unsure, or apathetic, to convert to Christianity. This is especially so in college campus settings. In that context, the N values in the decision matrix (see the wiki article) under ~G will be different. Support groups like campus crusade for Christ are attractive for lots of entering college freshmen, who may be far from home or not know many others on campus. For these people, even if it turns out that God doesn't exist, living as if he did may turn out to be better than living as if he didn't. So, the top row under ~G will have a +N and the bottom row will have a -N. So, it's even more apparent to them that there's nothing to lose by becoming Christian.

In this regard the argument, or variants of it, are quite successful.

But, by Pascal's own lights, the argument doesn't give us any evidence at all that God exists. Other philosophical arguments for God's existence purport to show that there's strong evidence of God's existence. Not the Wager. If Pascal's Wager works, it only tells us that given two possible actions, believe or refrain from believing/believe there is no God, the most practical one to choose is the former. I think the best criticism of the argument is that whether one should believe in a proposition or not has to do with one's evidence for it, not whether one has anything to gain or lose by it.

The criticism attacks the assumption that all of our choices should be made in a decision theoretic way--by calculating the expected gains and losses of possible actions. On almost any plausible theory of ethics, there will be some class actions which the decision theoretic method tells us that those actions are in our best practical interest but the ethical theory tells us they are morally impermissible. I believe that morality wins out in these situations. What you should do is what's morally obligatory, even if it's not in your best practical interest. I assume most of us believe that. I'm sure even Pascal believes that.

So, here's a question: is choosing to hold a belief an action that is within the class of actions described above? I think think the answer is yes. I think it is morally obligatory for one to refrain from believing a proposition without some adequate evidence. (What constitutes adequate evidence? I don't know. That's a hard question. But, it doesn't make my criticism of the Wager any weaker.) If that's right, then Pascal's Wager even if Pascal's wager tells us that believing is in our best practical interest, it doesn't follow that we should believe.

My argument that the answer to the above question is yes, is fairly intricate. So, instead, here's a fairly clear example regarding wishful thinking:
While it may be that believing the speaker could contact your dead relatives is in your best practical interest (for it may provide you a great amount of psychological comfort and relief) it's surely wrong to believe the that the guy. If there's one clear example of choosing to hold a belief that falls into the class described above, then Pascal's assumption is false; and Pascal's Wager collapses.

I think this is the correct objection to make regarding Pascal's wager. I'm generally not convinced that the Wager is bad by the sorts of criticisms that appear on the wiki article. I think a defender of the Wager can respond to most of them adequately.

There is another criticism which I think is also very strong: the many god's objection. This isn't described in the wiki article, but it has been much discussed in professional philosophical journals. Pascal assumes that the only possible choices are to believe in the Christian god or else refrain from belief/deny the Christian God. The basic objection is that the Christian god isn't the only possible god. There are many infinitely many possible Gods. (So long as they are conceptually possible and distinct, they count as a separate possible Gods.) So, your decision matrix ought to have an infinite number of rows and an infinite number of columns. Without going in to details, this screws up the numbers and it fails to tell you what the best practical choice is. Someone who really wanted to defend the wager would have to reformulate the argument to take these other possible gods into account.

I think that, in the end, the many gods objection is fatal to the Wager or any variation of it. In other words, the Wager doesn't even tell you that believing in the Christian God is in your best interests. But, that's a highly technical objection. I think my criticism gets at what's really wrong with the Wager.

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