I suppose, Blaise, if you see heaven, the ideal plane, the spiritual world, the world of the afterlife, the world of angels and possibly demons, the world of God, or whatever combination of these things you want to include in your religion, as not separate from but the best parts of this world, the material world, from which they are usually separated and placed above, that’s fine. I don’t think that’s the way most Christians (to take one religion) see it, nor is it the way it is generally seen by Christian theologians, but you’re free to create your own version. And if you see them all as one and the same, then what I’ve said doesn’t apply to your individual religion.
Religion isn't trying to create another world; it is creating another world, separate from this one, or at the very least above it, and that's all that matters, for me. You can see it differently. It is a value judgment, or a meta-value judgment, and one that we can certainly disagree on. For me, the fundamental value, the one on which all others built, is an affirmation of life in and of itself. If I needed something to justify life, it wouldn't be much of a foundation. Fortunately, I don't.
By the way, for Buddhists, evil is inherent in the very nature of life (in the form of suffering). That's the first tenet of Buddhism. This I find abhorrent, as I'm sure you can imagine, since Buddhism is all about denying life as an illusion that creates suffering through desire. Bleh.
Blaise, I was playing the part of Bob's mirror image: all hat and no cattle, with the hat being a particularly condescending one, but from the nonreligious perspective.
That said, my own view is that if one has to create another world, another life, on top of this one in order to give this one meaning or to justify it, then one has already denigrated this one far too much.
Eh, I think this is mostly a way of avoiding the question by making something that is, admittedly complex and problematic, seem hopelessly vague and perhaps even a bit, dare I say it, relative. It's not, of course, in keeping with basically everything you've ever written about the religious vs. the secular, or the founding, etc., and for that reason it feels a bit disingenuous to me.
There's 2400+ years of literature on what morality is, both in the abstract and the particular, and that to me seems like plenty of ground on which to build a discussion. And while I think the post that Jason linked to is pretty devoid of content, it at least has the potential to spark a discussion on what it means for morality, again building on that millenia-old foundation, to evolve. That is, what does it mean for morality in the abstract and the particular?
In short, if you don't know what "moral" means, in this context, perhaps it's better either to consult that 2400 years or just listen to Wittgenstein's ol' number 7. However, I'm pretty sure, given your talk of self-evidence and the like in the past, that you have a pretty strong representation of that word, and are just exercising a bit of sophistry to paint the "opposition" as naive or worse.
It's too bad, Bob, that you're so trapped inside your infantile neurosis. The religious world view has nothing to offer but a denial of this life and this world, and a repression of the body, largely in the service of the powerful.
See, I can play this silly game too: your world view is a pernicious disease, and mine rocks. I don't even have to back it up. I can cite Freud or Marx or Nietzsche or whomever I please, and leave it at that. I might even use their language to make my point, without showing any real connection to their reasoning. Like someone might do with Voegelin.
Tom, this is something that the scientists and the scientific-minded have had to deal with from creationists, as well. I bring this up not to tar religion, but to point out that the bloggers at RealClimate were largely using the model of blogging/promoting a field that came from sites like Pandas Thumb, and using their experience as well. I don't find those emails either disturbing or all that odd, for that reason. We're talking about a scientific discipline that is under attack largely not by scientists, or even people who know the science (witness Ward), but by politicians and businesses who have attempted to win the argument by having a better PR campaign. And in many ways, they've succeeded, because it's hard to imagine another area, aside from evolutionary biology, that has this many deniers in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. And people like Ward treat the scientists as the politically motivated ones, which would be amusing if it weren't so depressing.
Now his being banned, even if you don't agree with banning, or even if you (and I mean don't mean you in particular) agree with his position, looks pretty understandable, eh?
As someone who has some experience with the peer review process, I can say with certainty that it is something that is incredibly difficult to hijack. It's a system built around rejecting papers. It just is, and this isn't me hiding behind the peer review system generally: I've yet to find a discipline where that's not the case. I'm not sure what it would take for it to be so. At the very least, it would require a radically different culture among junior faculty, who make their names, in most cases, by creating conflict, and who as a rule tend to be the harshest reviewers (and who do a good portion of the reviewing, since reviewing sucks, and they give all the sucky jobs to junior members of a discipline). And that seems highly unlikely in such a multidisciplinary field.
What's more, since not only global warming, but anthropogenic global warming, is not just the consensus among climate scientists, but the overwhelming consensus, it would mean that all of the people involved in the conspiracy (and being charitable, we'll just assume that WardSmith doesn't think most climate scientists are in on it, just a few prominent climate change researchers) would have been fooled by fraudulent data and modeling, fraudulent in such an obvious way that people who know shit about climate science, like our Ward here, can spot it easily.
Even more odd is the conviction that these scientists are all politically motivated. What obvious political conclusion does AGW lead to? Sure, some climate scientists and some policy makers, particularly on the left, see a need for much stricter environmental regulations for both businesses and individuals. However, AGW doesn't necessarily lead to that conclusion; there are other ideas about how to deal with it (e.g., education, creating incentives for entrepreneurs to produce climate-friendly products, etc.) which aren't particularly left wing. What's more, people on the left don't want to create broad environmental legislation just for the hell of it, and if they have to make up a reason for such legislation, then you have to assume that they do, in fact, want such legislation for the hell of it. I know there are some people on the right here, and therefore we can assume in the general population, who think that the only guiding principle of the left is more regulation, more power to the state, and that's it, but that's just silly. It's particularly silly when we're not talking about politicians, or people who would gain in political or economic power from increased state power, but talking about academics. Are they just screwing with us to screw with us? I can't think of any other plausible motivation for their lying so prominently, as the conspiracy theorist would have us believe.
It makes sense to be skeptical about scientific conclusions because they're always provisional, to the extent that at any moment new data could become available that shows them to be false, but when all of the data points to a conclusion, and there is no data to suggest otherwise (there's no cooling, as Ward pretends: 2010's average global surface temperature was the hottest on record, with 2005 being the second hottest, and the intervening years being among the hottest; if that's cooling, then I didn't until now know the meaning of that word), nor any alternative explanation that holds up under scrutiny, then more than the usual skepticism of any scientific conclusion is just stupid.
Blaise, your questions are good ones, and as a general critique of Christian philosophy, they work quite well, but they don't apply to the wager any more than they apply to the religious writings of virtually all of Europeans philosophers and intellectuals in general, from Augustine to Newton and beyond.
Yeah, I wrote a bit about Ramachandran and neuroaesthetics a few years ago. I think the moral psychology version of this general idea (it's broadly Chomskyan ala universal grammar) is further along, empirically, than the aesthetics version, simply because the aesthetics version is really, really hard to test, and so there hasn't been a lot of research done to date. But there's almost certainly something to it.
OK, remember again to whom Pascal is giving the wager (in a dialogue!): an agnostic, who, according to Pascal, a.) must choose, and b.) has not chosen because of an emotional prejudice that says that faith is irrational. Pascal's only purpose in the wager is to show that faith is, in fact, rational, even if its object isn't (and he readily admits, in the passage that you quote, that the object of faith, in this case, is not rational). If this is what we use the wager for, and this is what Pascal used the wager for, then there's nothing in your objection that speaks to Pascal's wager.
Your objection, it seems, is to later versions and uses of the wager. Nothing in Pascal's version suggests that one should believe simply because the expected utility is higher, or even for practical purposes (like avoiding potential punishment, say; remember that Pascal doesn't even use hell in his version). Instead, it says, "faith is rational, see? Now since that is your only real stumbling block, choose real faith." Again, that's not question begging, it's not artificial or selfish or half-assed faith (it doesn't run afoul of Matthew 21), and it seems like a pretty nifty little argument to me.
I'll put it slightly differently: Pascal isn't saying, "You should believe because if you don't and you're wrong the consequences are much worse than if you do and you're wrong," he's saying, "Because the consequences are much worse for the nonbeliever if she's wrong than for the believer if she is, faith is perfectly rational, so let go of the prejudice that faith is irrational, and choose faith." It's the prejudice he's addressing with the wager, not nonbelief itself. It's not a reason to believe, it's a reason to see believing as rational.
What you have to do is let go of what others do with the wager and stick only to Pascal, if you're going to criticize Pascal specifically for it. In fact, while we call it Pascal's wager, the abused versions are more like, and more likely derived from, Locke's wager, which he came up with through reading (most likely) Arnauld, not Pascal. So stick it to Locke and/or Arnauld, 'cause with the wager, they seem much more deserving.
Have you ever noticed how denialists end up looking a lot like conspiracy theorists? In fact, exactly like them, since it takes a conspiracy of the vast majority of climate scientists -- a vast global conspiracy. Apparently their conferences are conspiracy-planning sessions, all because they're dirty hippies who vote for Democrats or whatever the equivalent is in their country.
You know, there’s a growing body of evidence that, at some level, our moral “principles,” or at least the moral “intuitions” that form the basis of moral principles are innate. It’s long been thought that, for example, reciprocity is an innate social principle in humans, but more recently, other moral intuitions have been posited to be part of an innate moral vocabulary, or perhaps grammar (a bunch of researchers have recently become moral Chomskyans). But since whatever it is that is innate has to be filled in with real world content, culture will do most of the work in determining the actual content of moral judgments. And since culture evolves, it’s not surprising that moral judgments evolve (I think this has really been the dominant view in empirical psychology since at least Piaget, though often only tacitly).
The market analogy is probably only so useful, as are other analogies in this domain, but if it gets people thinking about it, that’s a good thing. As an analogy (and it’s just that), it reminds me a lot of the analogy behind the concept of memes: it’s a nice place to start, but you have to leave it behind pretty quickly to understand the nuances of cultural, and by extension moral, evolution.
Mike, it's a strange mindset that coopts a pre-Christian world view (that of the Greeks, particularly Plato), one that largely shaped Christianity, not the other way around, and decides that it shows that Christianity is not only true, but the only non-pathological conclusion at which one could possibly arrive from philosophy. It's sort of like saying that the Shakespearean style proves that the only true, uncorrupted literature is the Victorian novel.
Bob, I’m going to just start calling religion, and your religion in particular, an infantile neurosis, and use a few other Freudian terms not so much in argument for that position, because it’s not like you ever argue for your position that we’re suffering from some sort of psychopathology, but to make it sound serious. It’s a good way to avoid having to deal with ideas you, or I, don’t like: call it a pathology, and a fundamental one at that. You take your Voegelin, I’ll take my Freud, and we’ll just lob psychoanalysis at each other. Other than that, I don’t see how it’s possible to engage you on this subject.
Civilization is always collapsing to the generation that's no longer in control of it. When we reach Bob's age (assuming we haven't already), there's a good chance we'll be convinced that civilization is collapsing too. It almost seems like it's hard wired into us.
OK, that was dismissive, for which I apologize. I recommend reading the full text of the wager passages <a href="http://www.reformed.org/master/index.html?mainframe=/apologetics/classical/pascals_wager.html"here. What you'll find is a discussion that is, from the outset, taking place "according to natural light," which is to say, Reason, or Natural Reason, or the Natural point of view. The wager takes you, the nonbeliever (and I don't mean you specifically, Blaise -- and this is getting strange now, calling you Blaise), through a few versions, ultimately to get you (the nonbeliever) to the realization that it is not reason that keeps you from believing, but “the passions” (“But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks”). The whole point is that it is reasonable to have faith, even if that faith is in the existence of something the nature of which one cannot know. For Pascal, faith is precisely the means of knowing the existence of that the nature of which is unknowable. That’s where the passage you quote comes in.
Anyway, despite the fact that I am a nonbeliever, I find Pascal’s version of the wager to be a powerful outline of an argument: it says, in essence, that if all that is blocking your way to faith is the misguided belief that faith is irrational – a misguided belief that has dominated popular atheism for the last few years, it must be noted – then this perspective, the one in the wager, gives a fairly strong counter. Granted, it doesn’t stand alone, but there’s no reason to believe Pascal meant for it to, since a.) it’s not an argument for the existence of God, b.) it is part of a larger apologetics of faith in his fragments, and c.) it’s only aimed at someone who is, in essence, an agnostic. It has no real force for an atheist. If you take it for what it is, it is anything but stupid, which is why it’s not surprising that it was carried on by people like Arnauld or Locke, who weren’t exactly idiots (even if Arnauld and Locke’s versions are a bit more facile, and much less weighty).
Blaise, as I'm sure you're aware, there's little evidence that Pascal's wager is as a proof of God's existence, or as a conversion tool even (at least not from atheism to theism), and it has naught of hell in it. It's not really even an argument, since it's a fragment of a note of what, we can assume, was to be an argument (in dialogue form, probably). It's not even the fragment of one argument; it's the fragment of three.
What it points to, at least, is an argument for the reasonableness, from the perspective of Natural Reason, of faith in God, and for the notion that rejection of faith as irrational is not, thereby, a product of Reason but of feelings, emotion, whatever (we'd probably call it bias, these days).
I fail to see how it's a dumb thing, much less the dumbest thing that he wrote. Even in its fragmentary form, it's really quite powerful.
With the exception of my transition, and it was a years long transition, from Catholicism to atheism, I can't think of any time when I've awakened, or even transitioned slowly, from one belief to a blatantly conflicting one. For the most part, my belief change has been the filling of holes where beliefs were missing.
I suppose there have been cases in which I've learned new facts that have caused me to reevaluate something I believed. Hell, much of grad school was that, and much to my chagrin, doing research has been as well (argh, embodied cognition). But similar to what Jaybird said about calculus, this feels different from waking up with beliefs that have less to do with obvious empirical facts than with values or more amorphous foundations.
On “Moral Evolution”
I suppose, Blaise, if you see heaven, the ideal plane, the spiritual world, the world of the afterlife, the world of angels and possibly demons, the world of God, or whatever combination of these things you want to include in your religion, as not separate from but the best parts of this world, the material world, from which they are usually separated and placed above, that’s fine. I don’t think that’s the way most Christians (to take one religion) see it, nor is it the way it is generally seen by Christian theologians, but you’re free to create your own version. And if you see them all as one and the same, then what I’ve said doesn’t apply to your individual religion.
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Religion isn't trying to create another world; it is creating another world, separate from this one, or at the very least above it, and that's all that matters, for me. You can see it differently. It is a value judgment, or a meta-value judgment, and one that we can certainly disagree on. For me, the fundamental value, the one on which all others built, is an affirmation of life in and of itself. If I needed something to justify life, it wouldn't be much of a foundation. Fortunately, I don't.
By the way, for Buddhists, evil is inherent in the very nature of life (in the form of suffering). That's the first tenet of Buddhism. This I find abhorrent, as I'm sure you can imagine, since Buddhism is all about denying life as an illusion that creates suffering through desire. Bleh.
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Blaise, I was playing the part of Bob's mirror image: all hat and no cattle, with the hat being a particularly condescending one, but from the nonreligious perspective.
That said, my own view is that if one has to create another world, another life, on top of this one in order to give this one meaning or to justify it, then one has already denigrated this one far too much.
"
Eh, I think this is mostly a way of avoiding the question by making something that is, admittedly complex and problematic, seem hopelessly vague and perhaps even a bit, dare I say it, relative. It's not, of course, in keeping with basically everything you've ever written about the religious vs. the secular, or the founding, etc., and for that reason it feels a bit disingenuous to me.
There's 2400+ years of literature on what morality is, both in the abstract and the particular, and that to me seems like plenty of ground on which to build a discussion. And while I think the post that Jason linked to is pretty devoid of content, it at least has the potential to spark a discussion on what it means for morality, again building on that millenia-old foundation, to evolve. That is, what does it mean for morality in the abstract and the particular?
In short, if you don't know what "moral" means, in this context, perhaps it's better either to consult that 2400 years or just listen to Wittgenstein's ol' number 7. However, I'm pretty sure, given your talk of self-evidence and the like in the past, that you have a pretty strong representation of that word, and are just exercising a bit of sophistry to paint the "opposition" as naive or worse.
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It's too bad, Bob, that you're so trapped inside your infantile neurosis. The religious world view has nothing to offer but a denial of this life and this world, and a repression of the body, largely in the service of the powerful.
See, I can play this silly game too: your world view is a pernicious disease, and mine rocks. I don't even have to back it up. I can cite Freud or Marx or Nietzsche or whomever I please, and leave it at that. I might even use their language to make my point, without showing any real connection to their reasoning. Like someone might do with Voegelin.
On “Changing Minds”
Tom, this is something that the scientists and the scientific-minded have had to deal with from creationists, as well. I bring this up not to tar religion, but to point out that the bloggers at RealClimate were largely using the model of blogging/promoting a field that came from sites like Pandas Thumb, and using their experience as well. I don't find those emails either disturbing or all that odd, for that reason. We're talking about a scientific discipline that is under attack largely not by scientists, or even people who know the science (witness Ward), but by politicians and businesses who have attempted to win the argument by having a better PR campaign. And in many ways, they've succeeded, because it's hard to imagine another area, aside from evolutionary biology, that has this many deniers in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. And people like Ward treat the scientists as the politically motivated ones, which would be amusing if it weren't so depressing.
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Now his being banned, even if you don't agree with banning, or even if you (and I mean don't mean you in particular) agree with his position, looks pretty understandable, eh?
As someone who has some experience with the peer review process, I can say with certainty that it is something that is incredibly difficult to hijack. It's a system built around rejecting papers. It just is, and this isn't me hiding behind the peer review system generally: I've yet to find a discipline where that's not the case. I'm not sure what it would take for it to be so. At the very least, it would require a radically different culture among junior faculty, who make their names, in most cases, by creating conflict, and who as a rule tend to be the harshest reviewers (and who do a good portion of the reviewing, since reviewing sucks, and they give all the sucky jobs to junior members of a discipline). And that seems highly unlikely in such a multidisciplinary field.
What's more, since not only global warming, but anthropogenic global warming, is not just the consensus among climate scientists, but the overwhelming consensus, it would mean that all of the people involved in the conspiracy (and being charitable, we'll just assume that WardSmith doesn't think most climate scientists are in on it, just a few prominent climate change researchers) would have been fooled by fraudulent data and modeling, fraudulent in such an obvious way that people who know shit about climate science, like our Ward here, can spot it easily.
Even more odd is the conviction that these scientists are all politically motivated. What obvious political conclusion does AGW lead to? Sure, some climate scientists and some policy makers, particularly on the left, see a need for much stricter environmental regulations for both businesses and individuals. However, AGW doesn't necessarily lead to that conclusion; there are other ideas about how to deal with it (e.g., education, creating incentives for entrepreneurs to produce climate-friendly products, etc.) which aren't particularly left wing. What's more, people on the left don't want to create broad environmental legislation just for the hell of it, and if they have to make up a reason for such legislation, then you have to assume that they do, in fact, want such legislation for the hell of it. I know there are some people on the right here, and therefore we can assume in the general population, who think that the only guiding principle of the left is more regulation, more power to the state, and that's it, but that's just silly. It's particularly silly when we're not talking about politicians, or people who would gain in political or economic power from increased state power, but talking about academics. Are they just screwing with us to screw with us? I can't think of any other plausible motivation for their lying so prominently, as the conspiracy theorist would have us believe.
It makes sense to be skeptical about scientific conclusions because they're always provisional, to the extent that at any moment new data could become available that shows them to be false, but when all of the data points to a conclusion, and there is no data to suggest otherwise (there's no cooling, as Ward pretends: 2010's average global surface temperature was the hottest on record, with 2005 being the second hottest, and the intervening years being among the hottest; if that's cooling, then I didn't until now know the meaning of that word), nor any alternative explanation that holds up under scrutiny, then more than the usual skepticism of any scientific conclusion is just stupid.
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Blaise, your questions are good ones, and as a general critique of Christian philosophy, they work quite well, but they don't apply to the wager any more than they apply to the religious writings of virtually all of Europeans philosophers and intellectuals in general, from Augustine to Newton and beyond.
On “Moral Evolution”
Yeah, I wrote a bit about Ramachandran and neuroaesthetics a few years ago. I think the moral psychology version of this general idea (it's broadly Chomskyan ala universal grammar) is further along, empirically, than the aesthetics version, simply because the aesthetics version is really, really hard to test, and so there hasn't been a lot of research done to date. But there's almost certainly something to it.
On “Changing Minds”
OK, remember again to whom Pascal is giving the wager (in a dialogue!): an agnostic, who, according to Pascal, a.) must choose, and b.) has not chosen because of an emotional prejudice that says that faith is irrational. Pascal's only purpose in the wager is to show that faith is, in fact, rational, even if its object isn't (and he readily admits, in the passage that you quote, that the object of faith, in this case, is not rational). If this is what we use the wager for, and this is what Pascal used the wager for, then there's nothing in your objection that speaks to Pascal's wager.
Your objection, it seems, is to later versions and uses of the wager. Nothing in Pascal's version suggests that one should believe simply because the expected utility is higher, or even for practical purposes (like avoiding potential punishment, say; remember that Pascal doesn't even use hell in his version). Instead, it says, "faith is rational, see? Now since that is your only real stumbling block, choose real faith." Again, that's not question begging, it's not artificial or selfish or half-assed faith (it doesn't run afoul of Matthew 21), and it seems like a pretty nifty little argument to me.
I'll put it slightly differently: Pascal isn't saying, "You should believe because if you don't and you're wrong the consequences are much worse than if you do and you're wrong," he's saying, "Because the consequences are much worse for the nonbeliever if she's wrong than for the believer if she is, faith is perfectly rational, so let go of the prejudice that faith is irrational, and choose faith." It's the prejudice he's addressing with the wager, not nonbelief itself. It's not a reason to believe, it's a reason to see believing as rational.
What you have to do is let go of what others do with the wager and stick only to Pascal, if you're going to criticize Pascal specifically for it. In fact, while we call it Pascal's wager, the abused versions are more like, and more likely derived from, Locke's wager, which he came up with through reading (most likely) Arnauld, not Pascal. So stick it to Locke and/or Arnauld, 'cause with the wager, they seem much more deserving.
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Have you ever noticed how denialists end up looking a lot like conspiracy theorists? In fact, exactly like them, since it takes a conspiracy of the vast majority of climate scientists -- a vast global conspiracy. Apparently their conferences are conspiracy-planning sessions, all because they're dirty hippies who vote for Democrats or whatever the equivalent is in their country.
On “Moral Evolution”
You know, there’s a growing body of evidence that, at some level, our moral “principles,” or at least the moral “intuitions” that form the basis of moral principles are innate. It’s long been thought that, for example, reciprocity is an innate social principle in humans, but more recently, other moral intuitions have been posited to be part of an innate moral vocabulary, or perhaps grammar (a bunch of researchers have recently become moral Chomskyans). But since whatever it is that is innate has to be filled in with real world content, culture will do most of the work in determining the actual content of moral judgments. And since culture evolves, it’s not surprising that moral judgments evolve (I think this has really been the dominant view in empirical psychology since at least Piaget, though often only tacitly).
The market analogy is probably only so useful, as are other analogies in this domain, but if it gets people thinking about it, that’s a good thing. As an analogy (and it’s just that), it reminds me a lot of the analogy behind the concept of memes: it’s a nice place to start, but you have to leave it behind pretty quickly to understand the nuances of cultural, and by extension moral, evolution.
On “Changing Minds”
By the way, I wonder what sort of algorithm you use(d) for the wager. Some sort of expected utility calculation?
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Which questions, in your opinion, does the wager beg?
On “Moral Evolution”
In case it's not obvious, "infantile neurosis" was one of Freud's descriptions of religion.
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Eh, that's just Bob's infantile neurosis speaking.
See, Bob?
On “Changing Minds”
Mike, it's a strange mindset that coopts a pre-Christian world view (that of the Greeks, particularly Plato), one that largely shaped Christianity, not the other way around, and decides that it shows that Christianity is not only true, but the only non-pathological conclusion at which one could possibly arrive from philosophy. It's sort of like saying that the Shakespearean style proves that the only true, uncorrupted literature is the Victorian novel.
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Well said.
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Bob, I’m going to just start calling religion, and your religion in particular, an infantile neurosis, and use a few other Freudian terms not so much in argument for that position, because it’s not like you ever argue for your position that we’re suffering from some sort of psychopathology, but to make it sound serious. It’s a good way to avoid having to deal with ideas you, or I, don’t like: call it a pathology, and a fundamental one at that. You take your Voegelin, I’ll take my Freud, and we’ll just lob psychoanalysis at each other. Other than that, I don’t see how it’s possible to engage you on this subject.
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Civilization is always collapsing to the generation that's no longer in control of it. When we reach Bob's age (assuming we haven't already), there's a good chance we'll be convinced that civilization is collapsing too. It almost seems like it's hard wired into us.
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OK, that was dismissive, for which I apologize. I recommend reading the full text of the wager passages <a href="http://www.reformed.org/master/index.html?mainframe=/apologetics/classical/pascals_wager.html"here. What you'll find is a discussion that is, from the outset, taking place "according to natural light," which is to say, Reason, or Natural Reason, or the Natural point of view. The wager takes you, the nonbeliever (and I don't mean you specifically, Blaise -- and this is getting strange now, calling you Blaise), through a few versions, ultimately to get you (the nonbeliever) to the realization that it is not reason that keeps you from believing, but “the passions” (“But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks”). The whole point is that it is reasonable to have faith, even if that faith is in the existence of something the nature of which one cannot know. For Pascal, faith is precisely the means of knowing the existence of that the nature of which is unknowable. That’s where the passage you quote comes in.
Anyway, despite the fact that I am a nonbeliever, I find Pascal’s version of the wager to be a powerful outline of an argument: it says, in essence, that if all that is blocking your way to faith is the misguided belief that faith is irrational – a misguided belief that has dominated popular atheism for the last few years, it must be noted – then this perspective, the one in the wager, gives a fairly strong counter. Granted, it doesn’t stand alone, but there’s no reason to believe Pascal meant for it to, since a.) it’s not an argument for the existence of God, b.) it is part of a larger apologetics of faith in his fragments, and c.) it’s only aimed at someone who is, in essence, an agnostic. It has no real force for an atheist. If you take it for what it is, it is anything but stupid, which is why it’s not surprising that it was carried on by people like Arnauld or Locke, who weren’t exactly idiots (even if Arnauld and Locke’s versions are a bit more facile, and much less weighty).
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Yeah, I said hell's not in the wager. It ain't. And you missed so much in the wager that I honestly think yoy read it for the first time today.
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Blaise, as I'm sure you're aware, there's little evidence that Pascal's wager is as a proof of God's existence, or as a conversion tool even (at least not from atheism to theism), and it has naught of hell in it. It's not really even an argument, since it's a fragment of a note of what, we can assume, was to be an argument (in dialogue form, probably). It's not even the fragment of one argument; it's the fragment of three.
What it points to, at least, is an argument for the reasonableness, from the perspective of Natural Reason, of faith in God, and for the notion that rejection of faith as irrational is not, thereby, a product of Reason but of feelings, emotion, whatever (we'd probably call it bias, these days).
I fail to see how it's a dumb thing, much less the dumbest thing that he wrote. Even in its fragmentary form, it's really quite powerful.
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With the exception of my transition, and it was a years long transition, from Catholicism to atheism, I can't think of any time when I've awakened, or even transitioned slowly, from one belief to a blatantly conflicting one. For the most part, my belief change has been the filling of holes where beliefs were missing.
I suppose there have been cases in which I've learned new facts that have caused me to reevaluate something I believed. Hell, much of grad school was that, and much to my chagrin, doing research has been as well (argh, embodied cognition). But similar to what Jaybird said about calculus, this feels different from waking up with beliefs that have less to do with obvious empirical facts than with values or more amorphous foundations.
On “How to Think About John Demjanjuk”
Ugh, sorry about the link. I've always had trouble with Google Books links. Just Google "Life and Fate," look in Google Books, and go to page 80.
That review is wonderful as well. Thank you for posting it.
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