Saturday, 21 March 2009
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The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
By Bart D. Ehrman
see relatedPascal's Wager
Pascal's Wager can be summarized as the following:
"If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing -- but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you will go to hell. Therefore it is foolish to be an atheist."
Issues with Pascal's Wager:
1) It doesn't point to which god to believe in. There are many mutually exclusive religions out there. This leads to the "avoiding the wrong hell" dilemma. Even if we're just counting the number of religions that exist or have existed in known history, we still have thousands of options. Assuming, of course, that somebody had it right. If we count all the unknown religions out there, there are literally infinite gods to follow.
2) There are religions (if we can call them that) which may make it very disadvantageous to believe in god. For example, if Buddhism is correct, we must enlighten ourselves to cease the cycle of reincarnations and reach nirvana. Part of enlightenment could very well be understanding that there are no deities. And I'm quite certain that tricking yourself into believing in one is on the wrong path to enlightenment.
3) The statement "If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing" isn't true. What if you believe in the wrong god, and the real god punishes you for being a heathen? And what about the religions that substitute medicine with prayer? You have also wasted a good portion of your life attending religious rituals, praying, working to tithe your church, and annoying people who don't want to hear the "good word".
4) The argument seems to suggest that the "two" possibilities are of equal likelihood. If the probability of god is much smaller, the argument becomes much less persuasive.
5) No atheist I know disbelieves by choice. It's not like we know that there is a god, but choose to ignore the fact. Most atheists disbelieve simply because they know of no compelling evidence to suggest that any sort of god exists.
6) If we are unsure as to what god exists, should we take the implied statement of "being an atheist is bad for your eternal soul if god exists" as a given truth? What weight does it carry over any similar assumption? Isn't it just as likely that god will be angry with people who believe for personal gain? If god really is omniscient, then it'll know who is believing on a wager. Assuming, of course, that god cares who believes at all.
7) This hypothetical god may require more than simple belief. Almost all Christians believe that the Christian god requires an element of trust and obedience from his followers. That destroys the assertion that if you believe but are wrong, you lose nothing.
8) It amounts to a thinly-veiled threat. "Believe in my god or he'll send you to hell!"
9) The biggest flaw in Pascal's Wager (to me) is that it does nothing whatsoever to show that god actually exists. The wager leads the atheist to say "I sincerely wish I believed in god on the off-chance that he exists and it will give me a cushier spot in the afterlife." For most intellectually honest people, belief is based upon evidence and intuition, not cost-benefit analysis. For example, please try to convince yourself - sincerely convince yourself - that 2 + 2 = 7. Can you do it? Pascal's Wager does not garner sincere belief, only the wish of belief.
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Comments (61)
My only regret is that I did not subscribe to you earlier.
Being thrust with religion for a good portion of my life, this blog will definitely help me defend myself against believers.
Outstanding writing, mate. Judging by the relative non-bias of your posts, are you agnostic, rather than atheist?
- John
Good points. I hope my rec will direct some Christians here and get some thought flowing.
2+2=7 because by "+" I mean for all numerals a and b, a+b is "the sucessor of 3 b's". Therefore 2+2=s(3*2)=7 (i..e, "(3*2)+1"). I have sincerely convinced myself that 2+2=7 ;) Of course, now 3+8=25 and n+b=s(3b) for all b, and n is irrelevant to this algorithm.
Anyway, (4) doesn't seem to refute Pascal's wager because the risk is in the consequences, not in the conditions of satisfaction. The problem is the infinite risk value associated with the probabilities. Even if you're 99.999% that God existing is false, if it just so happens to be true on that 0.0001 chance, then you'll have an infinity of punishment. On the other hand, if you believe, you get no risk at all. Of course, "no risk" is bullshit, because you have to give up your entire life you might have valued, and as you've aptly demonstrated we have no idea which God we should be believing in. According to the wager, it would stick iff God's existence also predicated an infinity of punishment. Which then you can just tack on "not believing in X implies infinity of punishment" and you can fill X with wtf-ever you want! "If you do not believe in magical pirates whose death increases global warming, then you'll go to hell for all eternity." Thus, by Pascal's argument, we should all believe in magical pirates whose death increases global warming. And we should all become pirates to lower global warming. It's as silly as the ontological argument. We can refute it by almost the exact same extensional quality (i.e., you can substitute anything while tacking on the given property to make it true). While the ontological argument allowed us to just say "X is the greatest conceivable..." we're just saying "disbelieving X sends you to hell forever." Same absurdity, just trying to sound "scientific" with probabilities!
Oh well, I am breaking my own vow and commenting on an atheist's site.
I agree that Pascal's wager has many flaws. Many people believe in God or a God...scriptures even read in James 2:19. Demons believe in God ...so does that mean they are going to heaven? Of course not.
There are others that proclaim to be Christians, but even Christ will say to them:
Matthew Chapter 7
22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord,
Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out
devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
I am curious what Pascal says about Jesus Christ. Many can believe in God, but NOT Christ and his redemptive work on the cross. But according to the scriptures, the only way TO God is by Jesus Christ. And that is the flaw in Pascal's wager.
ummm... Pascal's wager is indeed to the Judeo-Christian God sorry to say... you must preface the wage with this one line from his Pensees, "Before entering the proofs of the Christian religion..." which we can safely assume that it is the Judeo-Christian God with which he puts forth his wager...
Pascal's goal in the wager isn't to make innane threats towards someone who doesn't acknowledge the Judeo-Christian God... Pascal appeals to the notion of your intellect by looking at the very least possibility that there could be a Creator and such that you exist in 1 of 3 catagories: those who found God and are serving Him, those who have not but are seeking Him, and those who have not found God and are living life without seeking Him.
He goes on to note that it is pathetic to live life in doubt and such for the duty of the human soul to seek when we are in doubt... obviously i'm paraphrasing his Pensees...
again... Pascal's goal is just to appeal to your intellect and give you a dialouge in which you at least, acknowledge the possibility... remember the preface the wager... and thus gain context of said wager... and the wagers premise is this; If indeed there is this God who offers to those who seek Him and live for Him, eternal, abundant, infinitely beautiful happiness in Him... would you recieve it?
Plus, I do have to ask... if someone is not on your team? Would you embrace that person? If he/she is your enemy in fact and repeatedly desires nothing more than maliciously harming you and everyone you care about... isn't it plain that you would reject him/her? So why is God any different? If someone is completely and solely diametrically opposed to God (the Judeo-Christian God) and they repeatedly spit at His offers of peace and restored relationship... why should God be any different? Shouldn't He be more so on the notion of rejecting His enemies?
Good post. There are reasons why I'm not a big fan of using Pascal's Wager to justify my beliefs, and you've done a good job of explaining some of those reasons. Granted, I think it has some merit, but not enough to justify using it as an argument for the existence of God.
Awesome post... although some of these comments are pretty idiotic. Clearly, reading comprehension is something people don't have... Anyway. As always, well done =)
I love point number 5. That is one of my favorites for a lot of arguments similar to Pascal's wager
I'm not a fan of Pascal's wager. I don't believe that God would appreciate a "faith" that was only hedging one's bets. And as you noted, it does not actually prove anything, much like Russell's celestial teapot.
Great post! I especially enjoy numbers 5 and 6, though all of them are very good points.
@LifeNeedsProtection - Then just replace the word "God" with "Jesus Christ" and you have the same basic argument.
@leadworshipper82@revelife - I guess my argument isn't necessarily with the works of Pascal as it is with using "Pascal's Wager" as an argument for belief.
[ If he/she is your enemy in fact and
repeatedly desires nothing more than maliciously harming you and
everyone you care about... isn't it plain that you would reject
him/her? So why is God any different? If someone is completely and
solely diametrically opposed to God (the Judeo-Christian God) and they
repeatedly spit at His offers of peace and restored relationship... why
should God be any different? Shouldn't He be more so on the notion of
rejecting His enemies?]
I'm confused as to the argument you're trying to make here, so I'll rebut in a few manners:
a) Disbelief in a concept is different from waging a war on it. I don't believe in god, it doesn't mean I'm burning down churches.
b) What "offers of peace and restored relationship" would you say that I am spitting at?
c) Doesn't Jesus talk about loving your enemies?
Awesome! 5 & 9 ftw!
@GodlessLiberal - I disagree. Are you one of those people who refuse to believe Jesus even existed?
I can be wrong, but I don't think your interpretation of the Buddhist enlightenment is correct.
@bryangoodrich - Actually, there's a good counterargument to that one as well.
In Bayesian terms, it makes sense to say that the a priori probability of an event is inversely proportional to the degree to which that event differs from the norm. (Specifically, based on entropy considerations, the least-biased prior distribution would be a normal distribution.)
Then, an infinitely good reward is, a priori, infinitely improbable---a priori probability zero. And so, it can be safely ignored from the calculations.
@LifeNeedsProtection - Well, there might well have been some guy in Rome who called himself Jesus...
But the properties attributed to Jesus seem far too much like mythology. We meet Jesus as a baby in this ridiculous story, and then we see him as an adult---no childhood of any kind. And then, the parallels to Krishna, Mithra, Horace, Deionysus, Appollonius of Tyana, and others are just too strong to ignore: Born of a virgin, son of a God, rose from the dead, "eat my body and drink my blood," walking on water, healing the sick... it's a classic mythology, found in numerous cultures over millenia. It seems far more like a Jungian archetype of "the savior" than a historical account of an actual person.
@pnrj - That only works if you accept the Bayesian notion of priors. It rather begs the question to just presume a priori probabilities that make the result come out how you want it. Bayesian methods are only useful for conditional probabilities, which require that we actually get more information to make the probability converge on the true (asymptotic) probability. Since the event described has no information about it, and no conditional probabilities, it is no less than saying "I presume the probabilities to be X, therefore they are X" without any basis that has anything to do with probabilities. So when you say "it makes sense to say ..." I'm not seeing where it makes sense at all. Why presume the inverse proportionality? What is the norm and how is that decided?
@GodlessLiberal - as far as the works of Pascal... in order to understand the wager, context is required which is why i had to comment starting off w/ the Pensees... the wager has to be placed in context of the whole is what I was attempting to elude to... though I don't know if it worked... but that was my intent...
a) Disbelief in a concept is different from waging a war on it. I don't believe in god, it doesn't mean I'm burning down churches.
- but what if the disbelief is towards the very God in which these churches are proponents of? In a sense then, if you're not for the person, wouldn't it be by definition, be against them?
b) What "offers of peace and restored relationship" would you say that I am spitting at?
- The Christian message of peace and restored relationship is simple... humanity has been created with intent, purpose, value, and love by a Creator Who defines Himself as God (Hebrew Yahweh) and thus through a choice of rebellion, humanity basically gave God the middle finger and went about their ways, ideals, perspectives, beliefs, and philosophies. But thoughout the ages, God persistantly pursued humanity's affection until ultimately Jesus Christ came to earth as God to pave the way for man to receive a legal pardon because once humanity rebelled, God instanteously switched roles from Father to Judge and therefore where in the Christian Bible it states that ALL have sinned and there is noone that does good at heart and it's become to the point where we as human have become rebellious not only in deed but in nature as well. But the same Scriptures goes on to say that while we were in our rebellion against this God, He decided to send His only Son Jesus Christ to come and die. This death was the payment for humanity's crime and rebellion against God. A legal transaction is made between God and man through Jesus, the same way when someone pays for an extremely large fine for a broken civil law, Jesus paid humanity's fine for broken Divine Laws where in turn God offers again peace and restored relationship back with Him where He becomes Father to those who accept this gift of grace found in Jesus Christ. I didn't say YOU per se were spitting at it, but many are...
c) Doesn't Jesus talk about loving your enemies?
- which is where I say, that at the end, Jesus becomes basically sick and tired of it all and out of justice He will deal out basically Justice.
You are correct that Pascal didn't consider any other options besides Christianity or atheism. So, there are some hidden assumptions in the wager which render it incoherent to reality.
"It amounts to a thinly-veiled threat. "Believe in my god or he'll send you to hell!""
I don't think it's thinly veiled at all. It's of the same sort of force as "Don't break the law or you'll go to jail." I don't see anything inherently unethical about the threat.
@bryangoodrich - There's an implicit assumption in the wager that everything is viewed from life's end, so that mundane considerations are irrelevant. We're all worm food and go bankrupt in the end.
@la_faerie_joyeuse - So you're saying that without Christians here there's no thought flowing? I couldn't resist that softball.
Sounds like you're assuming maybe that all Christians are stupid? If so, that is quite inane. Hopefully, I've misunderstood you. Maybe you meant that you wanted some discussion flowing or that you needed some polemic arguments to sharpen your wits on.
@pnrj - "And then, the parallels to Krishna, Mithra, Horace, Deionysus, Appollonius of Tyana, and others are just too strong to ignore: Born of a virgin, son of a God, rose from the dead, "eat my body and drink my blood," walking on water, healing the sick... it's a classic mythology, found in numerous cultures over millenia. It seems far more like a Jungian archetype of "the savior" than a historical account of an actual person."
The same sort of argument could be used to support skepticism about most any historical personage. It's a version of the fool's gold fallacy. I find a box of rocks 99% of which look like gold but aren't, hence I conclude that real gold doesn't exist.
The evidential, epistemological argument for Christ's resurrection is still very powerful, especially considering the Jewish context. This goes back to my discussion about witnesses on your blog, where I asserted that when witnesses are carefully examined and the empirical statements in their testimony corroborates one another, an epistemic credential regarding JTB is attached to those corroborated empirical statements. In the first century, this practice of relying upon witnesses in this particular way was the Jewish religio-legal epistemological method regarding phenomena.
@bryangoodrich - You got it. Bayes is irrelevant here.
I recently mentioned Pascal's Wager in a post I made about theism and atheism, though I think most people glossed over it. Admittedly, the post was more about the interaction between theists and atheists and why I don't believe in God ... I only mentioned PW as a counterpoint.
The argument is not a logical one (in the philosophical sense). You won't be able to prove necessary that God exists with it but what Pascal was arguing is that it makes pragmatic sense to believe in God because of a numbers game.
- If you believe in God and you are right you will have led a pretty boring life but you will spend eternity in heaven. Happiness = ∞ - n (where n is the fun you could have had in the finite existence you had on Earth)
- If you believe in God and you are wrong you will have led a pretty boring life for nothing. Happiness = -n
- If you don't believe in God and you are right you will have had a great life and suffer no consequences. Happiness = n
- If you don't believe in God and you are wrong you will have had a great life but you will spend eternity in hell. Happiness = -∞ + n.
(I think I got those numbers right).
So what he's saying is that in terms of numbers, it's best to be a theist and live a pure life free from sin because the consequences for being atheist are greater than the ones for being an atheist.
The problem with all 'proofs' for God's existence is that they are not very convincing when you can't find a problem with them. Your objections don't really deal with Pascal's Wager - really you can't find a problem with his argument. The implications of it, however, are great and you are right about those (e.g. "what God do I choose?") but Pascal isn't mentioning those.
It's my belief that 'proofs' for God are really only there for other theists, in order to reinforce their belief. They are trying to 'rationalise' their beliefs, comfort themselves so that they feel like they have made the right choice. I don't think I've met anyone who has earnestly felt swayed by one of these 'proofs'.
@soccerdadforlife - Well to presume the afterlife weighs more than matters of the here and now isn't supported by Pascal's wager. The presuppositions of the Wager keep on growing!
@bryangoodrich - I disagree. I think that it's fairly implicit in the wager since the wager primarily concerns the impact on the afterlife. I'd be curious to know if others also saw it as implicit.
@BergerWasTaken - I don't know of any who have been swayed by any of the philosophical proofs except for Paley's Watchmaker (Flew is the latest convert to deism resulting from a version of it). The historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ has been enormously powerful, by contrast. In my case, I abandoned Christianity after asking a Sunday School teacher how do we know that the the resurrection of Christ really happened (a request for evidence) and he replied that we just believe it. Later, I looked at the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ and found it to be convincing.
@soccerdadforlife - If there are only atheists discussing a religious matter, there's usually not much true disagreement, which tends to make it uninteresting. I know what other non-religious individuals think: I want to hear some controversy.