Quote:
You are talking of Pascal’s wager. He thought the same things that you do however there are some things inherently wrong with his argument.
God allegedly rewards belief however he rewards true belief and not ‘I’m just pretending to believe in you because I want to get into heaven’, wouldn’t go down too well. You cannot simply decide to believe one day, you can decide to act as a believer but you cannot decide to believe.
God is also allegedly omniscient so you have no hope tricking him into getting into heaven either. There are further arguments against this however I think what I have said here is enough to show its fallacy.
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uh...no. that's not the problem with pascal's wager.
pascal was smarter than that....
the problem is more that everyone is in a position of having to play at all. the wager only works if you accept the argument that you have to play.
within that, there is a question about faith, obviously--but pascal deals with that....when at the end of the probabilities section, the voice of the bettor says basically "i have been convinced to wager, but am so constituted that i still cannot believe. what do i do?"
the response is to act as though you believe--perform the rituals, etc.--and you discipline your body with the result that eventually you will become stupid (literally you will become like an animal) and will forget that you don't believe.
so in general (now backing out of the wager section a bit) for pascal there are two ways to reach faith: either you simply jump into it, or you condition yourself physically into it.
the reason for this situation follows directly from pascal's nominalist assumptions. so there's strictly speaking no way--NO way--to
know
anything about this god character, and it's a matter of definition: human understanding is finite, god infinite and that's all there is to it.
strangely these options dovetail with the thread as a whole: once you believe, once you perform your own belief, you see reinforcement for it everywhere. this because you enter into a circular relation between the frame/premises that shape your worldview and the information that is organized by that worldview (in shorthand). but this is not particular to believers--such a circular relation always obtains in the ordering of/performance of the ordering of infotainment about the world. what varies are degrees of open-endedness, which may or may not translate into falsifiability.
for many believers, the objects of belief function as a priori.
and there is no way for anyone from an outside perspective to disrupt the circuit.
most theists (the-ist? those who believer in the article "the"?) are not nominalists as pascal was--most operate with a much looser understanding. you could explain this by reading pascal---the pensees are scary, there is nothing reassuring about them---you dont pull the world down around you like a sweater, you dont feel more like there is control in the world and that you benefit somehow from that divine control---nope--you float about an infinite space on a tiny rock from one viewpoint, and you twitch about like a reed over the infinite spaces of the small/microscopic. you are nothing, lodged nowhere. on the other hand, if more theists were nominalist, epistemology questions (which are actually ontological questions because they are not about knowledge of the world, but about what conditions knowledge of the world) would be simpler to sort out because agency of a radically unknowable god couldnt be integrated into data sets as an a priori.
but most theists prefer the nice, teddybear god who is close, comprehensible, like dad but bigger and dressed in white robes, who tinkers with things in the world directly. but even this is not problematic in itself.
the problem really is a naive faith in "science" or scientific method, which sits on an even more naive theory of what situation obtains when you map an embodied subject onto a general social space and try to generate an account of that mapping. most of the defenses of "science" here seem to sit on such a naive theory: that the world is an accumulation of objects, that these objects are complete within themselves and so are stable and so are therefore knowable, that scientific investigation involves a kind of unconditioned subject, a pure observer who uses mechanical devices to extend the pure gaze over a world of things. this relation extends to descriptions of phenomena via formal languages (mathematics) to the extent that the statements are understood as topological (descriptions of surfaces or features). what makes it naive is that questions of the "constructedness" of the observed are displaced from the relation of observer to what is observed onto the object itself, its situation (say, its scale...) what this means is that the arguments/images that are the basis for these constructions (in other words, which function as templates that are projected onto fields of infotainment and which order those fields) are not themselves problems----if "science" knows the world, then philosophy is simply ancillary. if "science" knows something of the world but that something is mediated in the strongest possible sense by the nature and quality of the arguments that enframe that knowing, then philosophy can operate as a recursion mechanism.
seems to me that the naive faith in "science" generates an image of the "scientist" as littlegod. and the quaint professions of faith in "science" are basically no different from those quaint professions of faith in the big-god.