What are some things you have made yourself believe against evidence to the contrary? Why did you do it, if you don’t like it?
This is like the argument my Mom always tells me. There’s three possibilities after death: (1) There’s nothing, (2) You’re reincarnated, or (3) You go to Heaven or Hell depending on whether or not you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.
If (1) is true, then it doesn’t matter what you believe.
If (2) is true, then it doesn’t matter either, because you won’t remember having wasted your previous life believing in God.
If (3) is true, well…you damn better well believe in God, because you’ll go to hell if you don’t!
I keep telling her, if God is so stupid to be fooled by me believing in Him because I want to save my sorry ass from hell, just on the off chance it might be true…well, that’s no God I want to have any part of. In fact, sometimes I wish Christianity WAS true just so I could stand before God on Judgment Day and spit in His face.
We tend to argue religion a lot. Never leads anywhere, but we do it anyway. :rolleyes:
Exactly. What if the path to salvation is not faith based (holding that God exists), but say deed based? IOW, on Judgement Day God says “so just because you erroneously believed some mentally ill Jew 2,000 years ago was my son is enough to get a free pass into heaven?”
To be fair, this argument, great as it is (and I have used it from time to time), only applies to one specific conception of God that originated in the Middle East 4,000 years ago, IIRC. A pre-Christian (or non-Christian) Roman who believed in the standard Pantheon, for example, would probably say that the gods are as fickle and venal as human beings, but a lot more powerful. A Buddhist would say that desires are the root of all suffering and by following the Eight-Fold Path we can achieve an end to our existence. (I also don’t think Buddhists have a ‘God’ in any way similar to the J/C/I version.) My point, and I do have one, is that this isn’t quite an all-purpose response to a conversion attempt.
One of the ideas behind Pascal’s Wager is indeed both true and useful: that when you’re faced with a choice between two (or more) alternatives and you’re trying to decide which is the Right Thing To Do, you have to consider not only the probabilities (which is more likely to be right) but also the “payoffs” or outcomes of the choice (what do I stand to gain/lose if my choice is right/wrong).
For example, in the choice whether or not to leave your keys in the ignition while you dash into the store for just a minute, you should consider not just the probability that someone will come along and steal your car, but the level of inconvenience in taking your keys with you vs. having your car stolen. Or, if you’re faced with the choice of whether to trust a particular person to babysit your children, you have to consider not just how likely you think they are to be trustworthy but also what could go wrong if they’re not. Or, for a more positive example, if you’re deciding whether or not to accept that blind date, consider not only the probability that you’ll really hit it off with that person but also what you have to gain if you do.
I think another thing to consider is what a belief in any god(s) does to us here on earth. People who say they believe in such often do not behave like people who are certain in their beliefs. Challenges to the beliefs are perceived as threats, (which indeed they are), and treated as such by the believers.
People who believe in god like to pretend. Nothing wrong with imagination. If we couldn’t imagine a road going from point A to point B, the building of it would never even be attempted. But most goddies like to pretend in groups. The fantasy works better that way. Remember pretending, say, that your bed was a spaceship? Remember how much more real it could seem if there were one or more other kids joining in?
We possess the capacity to imagine the existence of, for instance, a nice Daddy up there in the sky who is tending to us with ultimate wisdom and benevolence, and who has really, really, good things in store for us after we die if we’ll just believe he’s there while we live. This is, at best, a tenuous hope, and everyone knows it.
If such a belief resulted, consistently, in people behaving in constructive rather than destructive ways toward each other, then great. It would be as advisedly-created and well-implemented a fantasy as could be. But, as history has shown, this is relatively rarely the case. Religious beliefs have been the cause of far more cruelty and strife than contentment in the world.
So, it is certainly not better, across the board, to believe in god. Pascal is wrong. Fantasies such as god require defending at brutish length. Not a good thing, IMO.
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
I’m not sure the argument makes sense anyway, because of the assumption built into the second premise - “If you don’t and he does exist, you’ll regret it.” I, for one, might be surprised to discover myself alive and alert in an afterlife, and I’d be pretty surprised to discover somehow that there is a god, but I would not regret not believing it during my actual life. I’m comfortable with my atheism. I don’t wish I believed in god or that there is one. So, I think the argument fails at that level. The rest, then, becomes meaningless. Surprise, maybe. Regret - nah.
Well, the idea is you’ll regret it because you’ll have an eternity of suffering/bad stuff, and you’ll regret that.
I disagree. If I believe the probability of an event to be zero, I needn’t bother myself with any further consideration of the subject, although I might want to dwell on it further out of intellectual curiosity, etc. Outcomes don’t merit consideration unless you hold the proposition to be possible. To put it in mathematical terms, zero times infinity is still zero… but N times infinity is infinity, provided that N > 0.
I’m an atheist and ascribe zero possibility to the scenario of God as asserted in the Bible. OTOH, just for the heck of it, I do like to muse that if there was a deity of some sort, she’d be reasonable enough to not hold it against us for neither ascertaining nor having blind faith in the accurate metaphysical details of her existence (esp. since she wasn’t sufficiently transparent in her dealings with us for us to know such things). I’m not even sold on the idea that a God who culls souls for permanent membership in the Cummulus Cloud Country Club would necessarily base her selection criteria on either morality or ethics. Wouldn’t it be just as reasonable to suspect that she’d take personality, intelligence, or wit into consideration, if only out of selfish reasons of her own (she doesn’t want to be bored and be surrounded by conformist dullards for an eternity any more than we do)? Just a thought.
A similar argument was brought by William James in The Will to Believe
He mentions Pascal’s Wager, but comes to a slightly different conclusion.