The Express is a free newspaper handed out on the metro in the mornings here in D.C. (I understand they have it in other cities too, right?) On my way into work today I saw a number of people reading it, and I kept catching just the top half of the ad that was on the back page. It read, "Why believe in God?"
I couldn't see the answer since for some reason or other everyone around me managed to have that part covered. As I got off the metro I grabbed one of the papers, just to check the bottom half of the ad. I was hoping it would be some sort of controversial statement that would give me good cause to put up an interesting post, and not something lame like "Because he believes in you."
You'll never guess what it said.
Lame, right?
Anyway, I decided that was still good fodder for a post: why believe in God? The topic has kind of been addressed here and on Zhubin and Ben's blogs, and maybe a couple of others, but I figure it's certainly a question worth taking up again.
Unfortunately it's late, and I'm tired, and I really don't have the energy to handle this topic right now, so instead I'm going to take up just one reason why you should believe in God: Pascal's Wager. Frankly, it's a somewhat compelling risk/reward game theory, and I think it's a point that's always worth making in any theism/atheism discussion. So if this were the longer version of "why believe in God", Pascal's Wager would probably have been point number one, just to lay it on the table.
I'm going to assume everyone is familiar with argument itself, and instead move into my question: are there any really good critiques or counter-arguments to Pascal's Wager? I know I took this topic up in philosophy 101, and probably a couple other places, but I honestly don't recall any substantial counter-arguments, and certainly none that were compelling.
So anyone out there, whether you're a theist or an atheist, are there any arguments against Pascal's Wager that you find compelling, or that at least make some good points?
Also, this raises the perfect song quote. Patric, I expect you to get this. If anyone beats him to it, double points.
And it's not that I believe in your almight
But I might as well as insurance or bail
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29 comments:
I'll chime in only because that song came up on my iTunes just a few minutes ago...
But seriously, Pascal's Wager? Here's a bet I will make: I'm not going to enjoy another long conversation about why I should repent and worship the one true God. So, take it away Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager#Criticisms
Jacob -
I didn't mean to suggest any particular god as material for worship, just some sort of theistic belief. In fact, along the lines of the final response to the first criticism presented in that link, I'd say that "if the wager can simply bring one to believe in 'generic theism' it has done its job." Moreover, the point of Pascal's wager is to get a person into some sort of theistic belief, at which point they can consider other factors that could direct them to any "one true faith."
I think the Dawkins criticisms are both pretty ridiculous because he suggests that other good goals are mutually exclusive from theistic belief. Even if he's right about positing that there's a god who rewards only honest attempted reasoning (and he doesn't believe that, he's just positing it as a possibility), there's nothing about that that precludes also going along w/ Pascal's Wager. So his point falls moot.
As for his anti-Pascal wager, he makes another fundamentally flawed assumption. Dawkins writes, "it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshiping him." But what about that is true? Why do you live a fuller life if you don't believe in God than if you do? There's no logic to that statement. Heck, I'd even suggest that history more-often-than-not bears out the opposite: those who lived the fullest, happiest lives were those who believed in a god.
If you don't think you'll enjoy a long conversation on this topic, that's fine. But I really don't find these critiques compelling. Dawkins has already made the [very wrong] conclusion that life as a theist is, per se, unreasoned and unfulfilling. And I don't see the wager as a reason to accept Christ or Allah or Kali or Odin or anyone. Just as reason for theistic belief. Does that affect your response?
Oh, good to know you've got that song too. It's a pretty solid album, though, to be perfectly honest, I don't like the title track at all.
What is "The Charging Sky" by Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins?
I'll take Rockin' Out for 400 please.
Okay i'm going to throw a monkey wrench into the discussion. What does "believe" entail?
If I believe in a person, that means I trust them to succeed and do well and do the right thing. Essentially, I trust them.
So, does belief in a god mean you believe they exist, like Santa Claus, or does it mean you believe they exist and will do what is best?
oh and i have no idea what a Pascal Wager is. and i'm too lazy to google / wiki it.
FWIW, I agree that Dawkins' anti-Pascal's wager basically misses the point. But his first objection makes sense: Pascal's wager doesn't just demand belief in God, but belief in a god that rewards faith, even if that faith is spurred by self-interest. It's certainly possible to imagine a god that rewards honest reasoning and punishes calculated faith. And if we can imagine that alternative, that's all the reason we need to ignore the wager.
Jacob -
Let's go ahead and posit "a god that rewards honest reasoning and punishes calculated faith." Is there any reason not to believe in this God? No. Unless, I suppose you accept that "belief" and "honest reasonining" are be nature exclusive. They aren't. I agree that this posited god doesn't make accepting Pascal's wager a good idea in the traditional sense (because you'd then be punished), but it doesn't offer an argument against belief, only against calculated faith.
You'd have to posit a god who punishes belief itself, in order to undercut Pascal's Wager as Dawkins tries to do here. To be honest, I have a lot of trouble conceiving of a god who punishes belief (because that god wants to be both known (by his punishments) and unknown (by his requirements)).
Yes, but that's the point. Pascal himself knew that it makes no sense to argue that just because it would be nice if something is true, therefore it is true. It has nothing to do with belief.
His goal is to spur people toward trying to have a belief, to overcome whatever rational or emotional roadblocks they put in the way of their own faith. The argument assumes that, at least for some people, belief and honest reasoning are in conflict.
I'm a little unclear... are you saying:
1. That [for some people] belief and honest reasoning are themselves in conflict, or
2. That [for some people] belief and the conclusion (of disbelief) arrived at by their process of honest reasoning are in conflict.
Because there's a big difference. The former is a position that says "you can not rationally think God exists" and the later says "some people think rationally and come to the conclusion that God doesn't exist".
I take it Dawkins' argument is based on the former, and that's why he thinks his "belief-punishing god" is a refutation of Pascal. The later isn't a refutation of Pascal so much as it is a re-assertion that some people have the barriers that Pascal is encouraging them to overcome (whether those be emotional or rational or whatever).
I'm not sure that it matters or that I see the difference. The bottom line is that, for some people, honest reasoning does not lead to belief, and some hypothetical god might be inclined to punish them infinitely if they tried to make a self-interested bargain and violate their intellectual integrity.
And it's worth repeating again that at best the wager suggests non-believers should make an effort to believe; it's not actually evidence of a god's existence. Non-believers might very well find that however much they want to believe, they can't stop thinking that the whole idea is ridiculous.
Oh, there's a huge difference, and I think it's entirely relevant. To say that belief and honest reasoning are themselves in conflict is an objective statement (even if you're limiting it to select individuals, it is an objective statement about them) that says it is impossible to believe in a god and be rational. It's a position that the right result is disagreement between belief and reason.
To say that belief and the conclusion (of disbelief) arrived at by their process of honest reasoning are in conflict is quite different. This leaves open the question of whether that person's honest reasoning was effective/good/accurate. This leaves open the possibility that the person could attempt such reasoning again and get a different result, or that they've overlooked something, or that some barrier influenced their conclusions.
In the former case belief and intellectual integrity are set against each other per se. In the later case belief isn't set against intellectual integrity but is instead set against the particular subjective result that each individual managed to reach at a discrete point in their lives. This result may or may not have been correctly reasoned. Of course, if it's correctly reasoned, then there is no God, so no worries. And if it isn't correctly reasoned, then changing your answer (and concluding there is a God) is consistent with both belief and intellectual integrity.
That's why it's relevant which you mean. One actually sets belief in opposition to intellectual integrity, the other doesn't.
I think your second point is probably the best argument I've heard yet. I suppose there's two responses: 1. to posit a God who rewards not belief but effort to believe, and 2. that effort is the first step towards belief.
Here is my 'wager'
I don't believe in God.
If I'm right, I've lived this current life in the fullest manner I can, not counting on any extra time after it's over. I will never get to say 'I told you so' to all the people who did believe, but hey, that's sort of petty anyway.
If I'm wrong, then I've lived this life in the fullest manner I could, and I get to explore whatever comes after. Maybe I'll have to listen to a couple 'told you so' comments from my religious friends and family.
I see no risk in non-belief.
I see a risk in belief, because when people expect something more over the horizon, it may cause them to shortchange themselves in the life they KNOW they do get.
Finally, IF there is a God, it's ridiculous to think that we could know his mind, that we could determine what would make somebody 'good' enough to be worthy of an afterlife, or heaven, or whatever metaphysical experience believers think will occur. Every human being I have met is (morally) a shade of gray. Some lighter, some darker--but any being who thinks they could draw a line in the sand and be an arbiter over all of us--well, I think he might be more capricious than some seem to expect.
Anyway, I know I've intentionally missed the point of the wager argument, but I got into that one on Eric's blog a while back.
I should explain the capricious comment:
If an omnipotent being was to judge us, they would need to understand us. (Or at least if they were to judge us correctly, I suppose that could be an amusing irony in the afterlife, if God was some emotionless, objective, arbiter who was judging us without understand our actions in any way.) This implies that the omnipotent being would be possessed of emotions, and complexities in motivation, possibly BEYOND what human beings are even capable of. That being the case, for all we know, his criteria could be left-handed vs. right-handed.
I guess what I'm struggling badly to say is that assuming the motivations of an omnipotent being who we don't understand seems like a very dangerous path.
Sure, if you subscribe literally to the bible, he handed Moses the 10 Commandments, and he had Jesus sacrifice himself for our sins...so maybe that gives us a clue as to what he wants.
On the other hand, maybe he did those things, created religion itself, to test us. To see who would accept the guidance of an invisible hand--and who would strike out on their own.
How could we know which people he would prefer?
Why not take the wager? How about this: God is a bastard. He allows millions of millions of people to suffer who have done nothing wrong. Little children. Why not show a little moral courage and say: I refuse to be bullied into believing something that I don't really believe because I might get some goodies if I do. Isn't that what normal people call cowardice.
God's proposition: Believe in me or I will kick your ass into hell where you will suffer forever. How about responding with: "Fuck you." Isn't that the only morally courageous response? How about: Even if you do exist, I want no part of it. Non Serviam. Pardon my Latin.
R.W. -
Of course the question of what a god would be like is a very different question of whether there is a god. But I will address your claim that it's ridiculous for us to think we could know the mind of a god:
I don't completely disagree, since people wouldn't be well-equipped to really understand with any fullness the mind of God. But that doesn't mean we couldn't understand something of god.
There's two possible ways that we could understand a piece of god. First, if a god chose to reveal it to us. Second, if we had a tool (like reason) which directed us towards certain conclusions (or probably more accurately away from certain conclusions (e.g., logical contradictions)). Is it limited? Yeah. But there are at least those ways that we can know something.
Beason -
Your response is your Christmas gift. Plus, you know you believe in God. You're just mad at him. Big difference.
I will accept your first point; although with the caveat that our only 'missives from God' are all undeniably crafted by man (such as the bible) and thus loose interpretations at best.
"if we had a tool (like reason) which directed us towards certain conclusions (or probably more accurately away from certain conclusions (e.g., logical contradictions)). Is it limited? Yeah. But there are at least those ways that we can know something."
Isn't it reason and science that generally directs people away from God? I have found that, no matter how complicated the 'God' vs. 'No God' argument becomes, it always boils down to the believer saying they have faith...and the non-believer saying they prefer to rely on reason and the knowable.
I don't see how reason directs us toward knowledge of a God.
Reason may tell me that the belief was most strongly promulgated during a time when most people lived hard short lives and wanted something better after they died.
Reason may tell me that the hierarchy of religion up until the modern era generally dovetailed nicely with the ruling class of any given society, imbuing the head worshipers with a great deal of temporal power.
Reason can give me lots of ideas about how the worship of a God, and the formation of organized religions came about, but I don't see that it points in any concrete way to a God existing.
R.W. -
What I meant by the reason issue wasn't that we can know of God by use of reason (though I think there are certainly arguments to be made in favor of this too, I'm not taking them up here). I meant that we can use reason to know about God. Your earlier point was that, if there's a God, then it's ridiculous for us to think we can know his mind.
My counter to that is, if there's a god, then reason is one of the tools we can use to come to know what that god is like.
Does that make sense?
I see what you're saying. Ok, let's start with a concept simpler than God.
Let's take the 'infinite'
If you stare up into outer-space at night, you can see far out into the milky way cluster, especially if you are somewhere with no light pollution. But that's the tip of the iceberg of our universe. Beyond that, is somewhere else...and beyond that, somewhere else...and even if beyond that there is nothing...that nothing must extend until it hit's something again, and so on and so forth.
I can't wrap my mind around even that basic concept with reason. How could my reason help me understand a being who could?
Or, let's approach this from a different angle. Take an ant on a sidewalk. We can choose to step on it or not. We hold the power of life or death over it...we exist in a realm of ideas that the ant could never possibly imagine. As our technology advances, we could perhaps create ants...as we can already clone them.
But with all this knowledge, do we understand ants? Can we talk to them? Do we have any right to judge them morally?
What if God, for all his omnipotence in our eyes, does not understand us?
Before you made a wager, wouldn't you want to know what you were playing for? Until I could answer that question, I think I will choose not to play.
Well, I think reason allows us to eliminate logical inconsistencies about God. That is, we know a god can't both want us to believe in him and not want us to believe in him. There are all sorts of other logical tools that allow us to make deductions about God, both in the absence of any other knowledge about God and in light of whatever knowledge we do glean from God revealing himself (whether that's through scripture or directly to us as individuals or through the way the world operates).
Also, the point of Pascal's wager is, we do kind of know what we're playing for: infinite reward. If belief means infinite reward, and there's no chance of being punished for belief, then doesn't it make sense to believe?
leaving aside the first point of your post, although there are some interesting topics in it...I am attacking the assumptions of the wager.
Why should we assume that belief means infinite reward? (And who judges what belief is the right kind...a serial killer might steadfastly believe that he is doing God's work, or stepping back a few hundred years, an Inquisitioner, but both are murderers taking God's name. Is their belief in their actions more important then the actions themselves?)
And then, using either of those examples, how can we assume that we won't be punished for belief? It is possible to believe and do wrong, is it not?
The whole wager operates under a series of assumptions that have no concrete underpinning at all. I reject the wager 'in toto'.
R.W. -
First, the question of whether we should accept a god or not presupposes nothing about the dictates of that god. Thus, all of your points about people doing certain things because of their beliefs is besides the point. The wager isn't concerned with what god dictates, only that there is a god.
So, to answer your ultimate question: why assume that belief means infinte reward? The answer is: we don't. But we can prove logically that belief in God means a chance of infinite reward.
If you ask the question, "is there a god who rewards belief?" there are 3 possible answers. 1. There is no god. 2. There is a god but there is no reward for belief, and 3. There is a god who rewards belief.
Now, in reality, one of these possibilities is true, and the other two are false. We'll say we have no idea which is the true one. But we have to make a guess (you either have belief or you don't, even the position of "I don't know" is an absence of belief). So what are the possible outcomes of our guesses? There are 6 (two for each of our 3 possibilities).
1. If there is no god, and we believe in god, then we don't gain anything by our belief, but we don't lose anything either.
2. If there is no god, and we don't believe, we gain nothing by our disbelief, but we don't lose anything either.
3. If there is a god but he doesn't reward belief, then we don't gain anything by our belief, but we don't lose anything either.
4. If there is a god but he doesn't reward belief, then we don't gain anything by our disbelief, but we don't lose anything either.
5. If there is a god and he rewards belief, then we gain a reward by our belief.
6. If there is a god and he rewards belief, then we lose out on a reward by our disbelief.
The only one of the 6 of these that could possibly result in a reward requires both believing in god, and there actually being a god who rewards belief. The only one of these that could possibly result in losing out on a reward requires both a god who rewards belief and being a person who doesn't believe.
Thus, not-believing opens you up to missing out on a reward, but believing opens you up to recieving a reward.
There's no assumption that there is a god, or that god rewards belief. In fact, the wager makes no assumptions at all.
There's just a grid of possible choices, 4 of which are neutral, 1 of which is bad, and 1 of which is good. So it makes sense to pick the good one, right?
absolutely. That logic is flawless. What if there is a God that rewards disbelief, though?
Let's call it option 7.
R.W. - This point came up earlier in the conversation. I wrote there, "To be honest, I have a lot of trouble conceiving of a god who punishes belief (because that god wants to be both known (by his punishments) and unknown (by his requirements))."
The point is, such a god is essentially a logical contradiction. If he rewards people for disbelief his actions bespeak a desire to be unknown, but the very fact that he takes actions to reward people is an interaction with people by which he becomes known. You can't be both known and unknown. A belief-punishing god is one of those qualities we can eliminate with reason. So there is no option 7.
I disagree, his becoming known does not occur until after the person is dead in either case.
I find it no more illogical than a God who gives absolutely no hint of his existence but rewards belief. (case 5)
Also, I tend to agree with Jacob that you can either believe something on faith, or through a process of honest reasoning, but generally not both. If you arrive at a conclusion through a method of honest reasoning, than belief based on faith is not required, you can believe based on facts.
If something must be believed on faith alone, than honest reasoning can have no part in it.
Why does it matter that God becomes known only after you're dead? The logical inconsistency comes when you consider the nature of god, not our perception thereof. Thus, if a god punishes beliefe, it is his nature to desire to be unknown. If it is his desire to be unknown then he wouldn't step in, at any point (pre-death, post-death) and make himself known. That would be contrary to his nature of being unknown. Does that make sense to you? If god doesn't want us to believe in him the best way for him to do that is for him to entirely shut himself off from us. A reward for disbelief is entirely inconsistent with god shutting himself off from us.
Secondly, and maybe more important, I don't think I've ever said something needs to be accepted on faith alone. You can certainly come to know God through both faith and reasoning. The two are in no way mutually exclusive. I know lots of things through multiple channels. For example, I know it's cold outside because I experience feeling cold, but I also know it's cold outside because other people tell me it's cold outside, but I also know it's cold outside because I looked at the thermometer. There you've got knowledge by measurement, knowledge by experience, and, essentially, knowledge by faith (I believe the other people). Nothing inconsistent at all about that, right? Knowing about God can be the same way. I can observe the world and see evidence of God, I can experience God in my own life, and I can believe in the things God tells us. Thus, by both honest reasoning and faith I can know that God exists.
This is an interesting conversation, and I have more to say, especially on the subject of what constitutes belief vs. honest reasoning...but I'm off to Boston for the holidays.
Merry Christmas, and maybe this can be picked up again later =)
Guess I'm kind of late to the party here, but I'll throw this out anyway...
*Our reasoning processes are based on our first principles, which are different for each person because they're often set by our socialization (and possibly by our genes). So some rational people can believe in God and some can't.
*Anyway, reason basically nukes the premise of Pascal's Wager, at least from Christian perspectives...
1) Assume God punishes those who sin.
2) God says it is a sin to be arrogant (Proverbs 8:13, among others).
3) Making it a sin to not believe in you and then punishing it is the very definition of arrogance.
4) God must therefore punish himself.
So either a) God is in Hell, or b) God does not punish disbelief. b) is the only option that makes sense.
(Indeed, I'm not sure what bit of the Bible suggests that God punishes disbelief. Belief in other Gods, perhaps, or treating other things as Gods, but disbelief itself?)
*Any God that punishes someone for not believing in God is a giant douchebag that doesn't deserve to be worshipped. I think Beason made this point, but I'll make it again.
Chew on these morsels, spit them out, whatever.
Any God that punishes someone for not believing in God is a giant douchebag that doesn't deserve to be worshipped.
basically, yes.
Well, the Wager doesn't advocate worship, only belief. Even if you think God is a douchebag, that doesn't mean you shouldn't believe in him.
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