Skip to main content

the value of Pascal's Wager

It's value lies  -- not in showing that it is prudent to believe in God -- but that a prudent person must take the question of God's existence seriously.
Labels:

Comments

Tim D said…
Interesting. My problem with Pascal's wager is the part - if God isn't real, then you still wouldn't lose anything by pursuing Him.
10:26 PM
Leo White said…
Uh, maybe. But I think even mentioning "if God isn't real" is to open the door to the suspicion that one is more interesting in generating one's own belief in God than in whether God exists.

Maybe an alternative version of what you propose would be to say that before one considers whether God exists, one must recognize that the very act of seeking to know the answer is an act that is demanded by the very structure of human desire, and especially by that form of desire called wonder.

Instead of saying "even if God doesn't exists" it says "before we attempt to answer the question of whether..."
5:46 PM
Tim D said…
Interesting. But doesn't Pascal go down the "If God isn't real..." road? Isn't that part of the argument?
12:36 PM
Leo White said…
I think that's Dostoyevsky you're thinking of if you mean the quote, "If there is no God then everything is permitted"
11:31 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature.  But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole.  It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon.   It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).
Post a Comment
Read more