To the OP, belief is a dependent variable. One is either persuaded by evidence (even if that persuasion comes about from faulty thinking) or one is not. One of my questions to those who use the Wager is "Can you force yourself to believe in the Easter Bunny? What if your life depended on it? What if someone had you hooked up to a polygraph and said they would kill you unless you could say you believed in the Easter Bunny and pass the polygraph (for the sake of the hypothetical, let’s say it’s a perfect, super high tech polygraph which can’ be fooled).
That’s what the Wager attempts to do. Believe in an invisible, magic sky God or burn in Hell.
That’s only one problm with the Wager, of course. It also uses unsupported assumptions and a false dichotomy.
You’re severely misinterpreting that passage, as usual. Jesus did NOT say that that they should believe for no reason whatsoever. In fact, it’s worth noting that he had no words of condemnation for Thomas, despite the apostle’s skepticism.
Rather, he said that people who believed Jesus despite not saying him personally would be blessed. These people could have any number of other reasons for believing that Jesus rose from the dead – trust in the Apostles and their character, for example, or perhaps the personal impact that Jesus had during his lifetime. Heck, there are millions of believers across the world right now who never personally saw Jesus, and who believe for a variety of reasons.
I knew that you would say such a thing, which is EXACTLY why I said,
“It’s common for both scoffers and immature believers to say that Christianity means that Christianity commands us to believe for no reason whatsoever. That’s not the example that’s been set by Jesus or the Apostles, though. One might disagree with their claims or conclusions, but the point remains – blind belief is not what they command people to do.” (Emphasis added.)
Predictably, Dio, you insist that Jesus did not fulfill any prophecies. That’s your prerogative; however, it does nothing to prove that Christianity teaches blind faith. At best, it would simply mean that Jesus and/or the Apostles were incorrect in their claims of prophetic fulfillment. This is not logically equivalent to demonstrating that they ran around saying, “We won’t offer you any reasons for believing us, but you should believe anyway.”
OK, my statement about apologists not believing their own shtick was overstated. I’m also aware that Francis Collins was persuaded by Lewis’s “moral argument.” They’re all such lame excuses that I guess I have a hard time believing people could actually be convinced by the arguments themselves as opposed to accepting theism for some other non-rational reason and then rationalizing their belief with crappy apologetics. I mean, Lewis’s moral argument as laid out in Mere Christianity is so embarrassingly pathetic that I have a hard time accepting these guys’ stories as real.
Back to the OP, I think people can choose to be open-minded. And that open-mindedness can lead to a change in beliefs. I think that’s exactly how I arrived at my beliefs.
Well, remember that Pascal’s Wager is only a small part of the Pensees. He goes on later to explain why Christianity (and “uncorrupted” Judaism) is the only true religion, which largely comes down to “the bible says so”, and is much less neat than his Wager.
The point is, you can’t just look at Pascal’s wager in isolation. It’s part of a greater philosophical work, which was in fact, never finished.
I think there is a certain volitional component to some belief. I was a lackadaisical believer until I married an atheist and it was almost as if I realized I didn’t have to believe any longer, so I could drop my guards about fighting off atheism. Now, I was someone who was borderline to start with, but there was an element of belief that I had some control over.
I would suggest that it was more about being willing to examine assumptions than truly volitional belief. I think most people begin by passively accepting religious ideas in childhood, not by reasoning themselves into it. The “choice” in later life is not so much in what to believe but in being willing to examine what we believe.
I think something more subtle is going on here. It is not as important to truly believe (tough to do) but to act as if you believe. There are two reasons for this:
First, some evangelists say that if we scoffers just try accepting Jesus, we will see we should. If for some reason we are convinced we should believe, even if we don’t, cognitive dissonance will kick in and before we know it we will find that we actually do.
Second, think of the children. Christianity spread not by convincing a nation to believe but by convincing the monarch, who then ordered the people to act as if they believed or else. Sure they might have snuck off to worship in the old way, but their kids would grow up thinking the belief was genuine, and would become true believers. In Will in the World there is an interesting chapter discussing the case for Shakespeare being a secret Catholic. Whether or not he was, his children would have grown up CofE, since they wouldn’t have been trusted with the secret.
So, if the Wager convinced people to accept Christianity even without believing in it, it would be considered a success.
I’m going to say here that I do believe people can sometimes convince themselves of something. I think this is what a lot of religious people do. It mainly consists of concentrating unobjectively on evidence in favor of what you want to believe. I don’t think this is choosing what you believe though. For one, sometimes the evidence is so strongly against what you want to believe that you simply can’t believe it. For instance, I want to believe in Santa Claus, but the idea is so ridiculous I can’t bring myself to do it. If it’s a choice, it should be totally up to me. I just don’t view it as such. It’s more of a preference, which may or may not become true.
Mind you, I don’t doubt that many people – whether religious or atheist – do that sort of thing. In my younger days, there were many times when I wanted to believe that there was no god, and so I was tempted to tell myself that there wasn’t.
Very often though, choosing to believe something means convincing yourself of something that you’d rather NOT believe. In an earlier posting, for example, I mentioned that I wanted to believe that a certain acquaintance of mine was a dirty rotten liar and a scumbag. Instead, I consciously chose to remind myself that this was probably a gross oversimplification, and that such vitriol – however satisfying it may be – was probably unfair. In other words, I choose to believe something, even though I wanted to believe the opposite.
Ditto for religious belief. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve chosen to believe a Christian tenet, even though life would be so much simpler if I were not encumbered by such restrictions.
It’s not always a matter of choosing what you want to believe, friends. Jesus described the Christian life as picking up one’s cross and following him (Mark 8:34), and Paul described it as being a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2). Very often, Christian obedience requires believing things that one would, for the sake of convenience, rather not accept.
Speaking as another person with an anxiety disorder, I disagree (at least, I think I do). Certainly it’s possible to convince oneself of something, but that just pushes the motivation back one step. To be able to convince yourself of something you have to be a person who would do that. Instead of being a question of choosing the belief, it becomes a question of choosing to change a belief, which itself I would argue is out of our hands.
Wouldn’t it be fair to characterize you as still choosing to believe the thing you most wanted to believe? Being able to choose something that goes against some of your motivations doesn’t imply free choice if you consistently choose that which you have the strongest (or largest amount of) motivations for, as I would say all people do. It’s impossible for someone to choose an option when they have one that they, in comparison, would prefer - and good thing, too.
This still entails accepting things on the basis of an already accepted assumption that the Bible is authoritative, that it accurately conveys the word of Jesus and that Jesus was God. You aren’t choosing to believe anything in a vaccuum. You’re being obedient to an already presumed authority.
Absolutely not. I wanted to believe that this guy was a dirty rat. He wasn’t a close friend by any means, and life would have been so much easier if I were to convince myself that he was scum. Instead, I chose the more difficult path – the path that required greater patience and sacrifice. It required me to constantly keep my emotional reactions in check, avoid lashing out at the guy, and repeatedly remind myself to be gracious and understanding. This is NOT the sort of thing that people want to do.
Incidentally, I think this underscores the lopsided nature of this thread. A great many posters have focused on the way people can convince themselves to believe in God or religion, on the grounds that they must WANT to believe such things. Yet none of these folks remind themselves that people can just as easily choose to REJECT God and religion for the same reasons.
True, faithful Christianity is certainly no picnic. The Apostle Paul, for example, was jailed, persecuted, shipwrecked, chased out of Thessalonica, and ultimately martyred for the faith. His experiences are not much different from those of many Christian missionaries who serve in hostile nations. On a lesser scale, people know that they could be unencumbered by various moral rules and obligations if they would simply reject God and religion. Nevertheless, people remain motivated to believe in Christianity, even though life would often be much easier if they were to reject it.
As I said, I don’t deny that some people do embrace God and religion due to the need for emotional succor. It’s disappointing, however, to see so many posters focusing on this while ignoring the notion that people could choose to reject God because his non-existence is what they’d rather believe.
Even if we grant that to be true, none of what you said is relevant to the discussion at hand.
Nobody here – certainly not me – has said that beliefs occur in a vacuum. Quite the contrary; I explicitly emphasized that they do not. I took great pains to emphasize that when somebody chooses to believe something, it frequently means ignoring what is convenient – choosing to reject what seems emotionally compelling, while reminding themselves of reasons to accept the opposite view.
That’s why it’s a choice. You can take the easy approach, or you can choose to remind yourself why the easy belief is not necessarily the correct one, no matter how satisfying it may be.
Incidentally, I also note that in your dismissal of Pascal’s wager, you skipped over the explanations offered by other posters in this thread. Contrary to what you say, it is not equivalent to saying, “Believe in an invisible, magic sky God or burn in Hell.” As others have said, the wager is just a part of Pascal’s philosophical argument, and it was never meant to stand by itself. Pascal’s point is not that the wager is sufficient reason to believe in God; rather, it’s an appeal to explore the possibility of his existence in light of the weighty and eternal stakes at hand.
I agree it’s not the sort of thing people want to do, but it is something that people will do if they’re going to get something greater out of it. That’s the key - a comparitive benefit. The unpleasant aspects of a choice can be as horrible as you can imagine, but as long as the pleasant aspects outweigh them, and there is no other choice that gives greater overall benefit, that’s what’s going to be chosen. We thankfully just can’t elect to do other than what we, overall, want to do most. In your example, the negatives to your choice certainly sound unpleasant, but I would strongly wager that your positive motivations for acting as you did outweighed those negatives.
I don’t see how *my *post underscores that. I haven’t argued one way or the other so far as gods or religion go. If I agree with you on the ability to choose your beliefs, then I would agree with you that it’s quite possible for people to choose to reject those things because they wanted to than to accept them because they wanted to. Could you clue me in?
I guess I see those things as pretty much equivalent. You’re just changing when in the cycle the choices happen, not that they are made.
If I had never decided that it was okay to abandon my barely-held religious beliefs, I would still be a believer. That would be a choice that I made.
And if I had chosen to marry someone religious, I imagine that I would still be muddling through with an ill-fitting religious belief, mainly because that would have been the easier option and I’m lazy!
Iain M. Banks presents an interesting mirror image of Pascal’s Wager, called ‘The Truth’, in his book The Algebraist.
A religion is founded on what is essentially the Simulation Argument, that we all live in a ‘Matrix’, and if enough people believed - I mean really, really believed - that they inhabited a simulation, the simulators would reveal themselves and provide some kind of reward.
As I’ve said before, I don’t believe this because I consider that such a simulation might violate the Lloyd Limit. However, the nonzero probability that such a truth is impossible compels me to believe it just in case. Try that on your Jesus salesmen.
Incidentally, believing something not because of cold, rigorous assessment of actual facts and probabilities, but because of how you would feel if it were true, is the very definition of Wishful Thinking.
Suppose I have an advanced EKG that will allow me to determine if you really believe what you say, so that you can’t deceive me. I offer you a choice. If you continue to believe that the light in the fridge goes out when you close the door, I will shoot you in the head with a large calibre pistol. If you “choose” to believe that the light comes back on when the door is closed, only it becomes a flashing disco ball and the gnomes jump out and party until you open the fridge again, then I will not shoot you. The cost-benefit analysis is far more straightforward than in Pascal’s case - we don’t have to make any arbitrary assumptions about the nature of God. My nature is well-known. I shoot people who believe the light goes out in the fridge, and I don’t shoot people who believe in the gnome discotheque. It doesn’t cost you anything to believe in the gnome discotheque, and the penalty for not believing is your life. And, I can actually tell if you are sincere in your belief.
But if it’s a widely-held belief and I had twenty years or so to immerse myself in the culture of the belief and especially if I have friends whom I admire and trust who have the belief, after twenty years I might have a chance to win it.
