My Own Thoughts on Pascal's Wager
Though nothing I will say here will seem the least bit new or unpredictable to you guys, this one is more for me anyway.
Nietzsche dedicated at least two sections I read through yesterday in Beyond Good and Evil where he both praises and polemicizes Blaise Pascal. Pascal, apart from being famous as a mathematician, was also very religious and experienced a 'miracle' late in life that reinforced his faith. Nietzsche says that only a soul similar to Pascal's could understand such a man, and in the next section he then discusses the tortured intellectualism and 'the continuous suicide of reason' propagated by Pascal and others like him, likening Pascal to those first through third century Christians that decided to do away with the Roman pragmatism of tolerance and establish a Dogma that has virtually destroyed the religion. (The faith of the ancient Greeks and Romans was very open to reason and the faith would change when required, Dogma fixed the teachings of Christianity into stone and forever put a rift between faith and reason.)
Pascal's wager, is that though reason cannot determine the existence or nonexistence of God, then we should err on the side of existence, for we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Now, my take is more personal on this; less formal; more opinion and emotion than anything purely logical--but one could say this statement holds for the whole of religious discourse, because if God cannot be deduced from reason, than everything about God is opinion and nothing is truth, because reason is nothing more than the formalized system of determining truth... and if the existence of God cannot be established using the only means of determining truth, than the entirety of all claims about to God are at best, opinion, at worst, wholly false.
The main reason I have a problem with "The Wager," isn't the traditional 'false dichotomy' that has been appropriately placed upon it by logicians, but in the general principle that I am a person that is wholly incapable of the kind of faith needed to even put this 'light' form of belief into practice. Though my own position could be best called Agnostic, I deliberately shun this label, though this is a topic for a different thread.
Pascal makes the mistake from perspective: For him, believing in God is a very simple thing; its something he's always done, so it comes natural. But being someone who came from the other side of the tracks, it's hard to put faith in something that truly--and I do mean truly--looks so plainly false. And maybe this is why alot of atheists/agnostics, and Christian's don't get along--there is no middle ground, per se.
Lets try this: My mother when young told me that Noah's Ark was a metaphor for a great spaceship sent by God.
Do you see the incredulousness that this statement generates? Even at the age of 8, I could see through this; and to me the idea of Noah's Ark is just is ridiculous as my mother's statement. Yet why choose to believe the traditional tale over the new version? (For the record, even at 8 I found the idea of Noah's ark as potentially wrong: I was the kid that was frustrated when Soundwave from transformers would be 20 feet tall one moment, but when he transformed would be hand-held size, and would arrange my transformers in ascending and descending orders of height, and even disliked adding GI Joe into my transformers play, because there was no way a human and a robot that turned into a car would only be off by a scale height of 2 feet.) Yeah. I was that kid.
Plainly, my upbringing brought with it a very strong sense of detachment from such ideas as God; I never "knew" him strongly as a child, though as I child I was as convinced of his existence as I could be. (And children are not hard to convince on any subject, hence, not 'real' believers.) Maybe Chuck Palahniuk is right... boys raised without fathers are more likely to become atheists. Father is our model for god, and if our father abandons us, then what does that tell us about God?
Nietzsche dedicated at least two sections I read through yesterday in Beyond Good and Evil where he both praises and polemicizes Blaise Pascal. Pascal, apart from being famous as a mathematician, was also very religious and experienced a 'miracle' late in life that reinforced his faith. Nietzsche says that only a soul similar to Pascal's could understand such a man, and in the next section he then discusses the tortured intellectualism and 'the continuous suicide of reason' propagated by Pascal and others like him, likening Pascal to those first through third century Christians that decided to do away with the Roman pragmatism of tolerance and establish a Dogma that has virtually destroyed the religion. (The faith of the ancient Greeks and Romans was very open to reason and the faith would change when required, Dogma fixed the teachings of Christianity into stone and forever put a rift between faith and reason.)
Pascal's wager, is that though reason cannot determine the existence or nonexistence of God, then we should err on the side of existence, for we have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Now, my take is more personal on this; less formal; more opinion and emotion than anything purely logical--but one could say this statement holds for the whole of religious discourse, because if God cannot be deduced from reason, than everything about God is opinion and nothing is truth, because reason is nothing more than the formalized system of determining truth... and if the existence of God cannot be established using the only means of determining truth, than the entirety of all claims about to God are at best, opinion, at worst, wholly false.
The main reason I have a problem with "The Wager," isn't the traditional 'false dichotomy' that has been appropriately placed upon it by logicians, but in the general principle that I am a person that is wholly incapable of the kind of faith needed to even put this 'light' form of belief into practice. Though my own position could be best called Agnostic, I deliberately shun this label, though this is a topic for a different thread.
Pascal makes the mistake from perspective: For him, believing in God is a very simple thing; its something he's always done, so it comes natural. But being someone who came from the other side of the tracks, it's hard to put faith in something that truly--and I do mean truly--looks so plainly false. And maybe this is why alot of atheists/agnostics, and Christian's don't get along--there is no middle ground, per se.
Lets try this: My mother when young told me that Noah's Ark was a metaphor for a great spaceship sent by God.
Do you see the incredulousness that this statement generates? Even at the age of 8, I could see through this; and to me the idea of Noah's Ark is just is ridiculous as my mother's statement. Yet why choose to believe the traditional tale over the new version? (For the record, even at 8 I found the idea of Noah's ark as potentially wrong: I was the kid that was frustrated when Soundwave from transformers would be 20 feet tall one moment, but when he transformed would be hand-held size, and would arrange my transformers in ascending and descending orders of height, and even disliked adding GI Joe into my transformers play, because there was no way a human and a robot that turned into a car would only be off by a scale height of 2 feet.) Yeah. I was that kid.
Plainly, my upbringing brought with it a very strong sense of detachment from such ideas as God; I never "knew" him strongly as a child, though as I child I was as convinced of his existence as I could be. (And children are not hard to convince on any subject, hence, not 'real' believers.) Maybe Chuck Palahniuk is right... boys raised without fathers are more likely to become atheists. Father is our model for god, and if our father abandons us, then what does that tell us about God?