NM
Regarding your first point, I strongly disagree that there is zero evidence that God would rather you worship no gods than worship false gods. The Old Testament equates worshiping false gods to murder and theft, and it is the very most important law handed down to Moses. It’s right there, the very first commandment. I would think that, as a Jew, you might understand that.
Regarding your third point, far more people believe that faith is more important than works than the reverse. The “going through the motions” part of your religion was pretty much tossed aside by Christ. (Yes, I know, if you have faith, it will show up in your works, not all Christians agree, yadda yadda)
Here’s me stating that God would rather have you worship no Gods than false Gods. There. Now, I’m tied with Joseph Smith and the Mormons as far as evidence goes.
Are you 100% sure that your next-door neighbor doesn’t intend on murdering you in your sleep? How much time do you intend on spending worrying about the matter?
Yea, I agree…which is why I changed the wager so that everyone can partake. See what a nice guy I am?
Yes…which is exactly what skald tried to point out, and would make sense, if I was arguing in favor of argumentum ad populum. Though, again, thats really not what I was saying…maybe read my OP again eh?
Ha no I got it, but thanks anyway. I tried to make the fact that I know the wager is moot apparent, but I guess it somehow wasn’t so crystal clear.
Well, that’s mainly because people fail to take air resistance into account. (Example)
I don’t see how it helps let everyone participate, but I do see it waters it changes it drastically to the point where it is no longer in the real world.
I don’t see how anything in the OP relates to this.
You did say:
Which very clearly states the odds of no spiritual power not existing being very slim based on the numbers of believers.
Logically speaking, if this passage is to be taken literally, I as an athiest am a wicked man. Indeed, all atheists are wicked men (and women). Is this so?
Even assuming that theologically Pascals wager is sound, it’s not even right mathematically.
Pascal assumes that the proper decision is the one that produces the maximum expected value. But there is no reason why maximizing expected value is necessarily the right course of action. For multiple repeats of the same game maximizing expected value leads to maximal gain in the long run, but for the short term this is not necessarily the case.
If someone offered me the choice of $1,000 or a 1 in 10^100 chance at an infinite reward, I’ll take the $1000 and run.
Make that 100%. (Not to mention the whole “golden plates” nonsense…)
There’s not even any circumstantial evidence that Joseph Smith wasn’t lying…unless one claims that God “could have made it so, if he wanted to.” (The default logic nearly all religions rely on when faced with incontrovertible evidence against them.)
What about Exodus 20:2-3?
Except the argument isn’t about an infinite reward; it’s about infinite punishment. That changes the game quite a bit.
The only thing which needs to be said about Pascal’s wager: Who’s to say one of the possibilities in the game isn’t the existence of a force that infinitely punishes theists and infinitely rewards atheists? I mean, so long as we’re just looking at the unconstrained space of mere conceptual possibilities. Once you consider that, the game no longer clearly compels any particular strategy.
(I suppose that’s what people are getting at when they say “Which god?”, in which case, the point has already been raised…)
Logically speaking, isn’t that the fallacy of the converse?
The counter argument to that is that all “gods” are just minor variations in worship of the same deity, so you can pick the one you like.
The counter to that is if any one of those is jealous of the other interpretations, we’re back to Square One, and we’re just making Him mad.
Dude…c’mon.
The core of what I was saying doesn’t apply to what your arguing against because of the fact that I stated that this 70% of people would have claimed (maybe I should have emphasized this beforehand) to have had some spiritual interaction with another spiritual, and non-human personage. That was what I had stated earlier, and is why the wager changed quite palpably. I specifically expressed that the wager Pascal presented is rubbish, for the very reasons your presenting, which is, again, the reason why I changed it. To boil it down *even further *–either a spiritual world exists out there that interacts with humans or there doesn’t. With 70% of humans, and probably much more, claiming to have had an interaction and awarness of this world, the **odds ** that it exists shoot way up, as does the worth of considering the modified version of the wager which I presented.
Which argument? Pascal himself mentioned infinite reward, not infinite punishment.
There is a massive difference between 70% of the people who have ever lived have claimed to have a religion and 70% claiming to have had interaction and awareness of this world. I suggest that a very small minority of people who are religious have had anything they would have defined as interaction or awareness of anything spiritual, they simply believe what people around them believe. And of that minority their interpretation could simply be wrong.
I can see no way that a deity whom created everything and will send you to hell if you are not up to snuff is going to be fooled by this bluff.
Argumentum ad populum is a fallacy, in case you didn’t know.
Haha, yea thanks, some dopers have been trying to tell me that for the past hour or so. If you’d be so kind as to scroll up a bit and check out the extent of the current argument we’ve been having, It’ll save me and you from having to engage in one of our own.
Well thats something you would learn talking to an athiest, or perhaps more likely a religious type-turned atheist. Try talking to some people who actually believe in this sort of thing…your not gonna find one who says they actually believe it, but just believes so because others do. Of course your next step is simply to say that they don’t all believe what they say do, in which case you’d be self-fulfilling your own prophecy.
Actually learned it talking to religious people mostly Christians with a few others (Hindu, Muslim…) the believe as that was the faith they were raised with. I was raised a Christian ad it was this very fact that shifted me towards atheism.
As for a self-fulfilling prophecies, well that is what you would say. I am more than open to them being spiritual in nature if there was other evidence to back them up and if so many were not caused in ways that can be duplicated by mechanical or chemical means.