Fair enough arendt. Sorry oreso, I initially interpreted your comment as patronizing – telling us that we “should” do something without explaining what exactly it was or why we should do it. My response was meant to puncture an arrogance which apparently was not really there. Let’s just say, then, that my sarcasm wasn’t intended for you.
I understand, but without further development the proposition is devoid of material to attack or defend. What assumptions should be reconsidered? Why should we not accept an answer that makes us feel “comfortable” (whether or not those answers are “made up” is obviously a matter of dispute)?
By contrast, my initial statement apparently had something to attack. Am I being silly? I would suggest not.
William James proposed that two desires guide man when he makes judgments: the desire to find truth and the desire to avoid error. In my heart (by which I mean merely the seat of desires) I seek to strike a balance between these two desires when I consider the question of god. If it is true that there is a god, intelligent and loving like us, who created the universe, I see that as a good and beautiful thing. My desire to believe it is therefore high. If there is no such god and the universe simply is the way it is without explanation, I don’t think I’ve lost much by believing. So my fear of error is low. My desire for truth outweighs my fear of error in this case, so I believe.
In short, I stand to gain an important truth (and perhaps more) if I believe, while I stand to lose little to nothing if I’m wrong. So I believe.
NOTE: This sounds like Pascal’s wager, but it isn’t. Pascal’s wager is about getting people to believe in the Christian god. My wager is just about believing in an intelligent loving creator. Pascal’s wager weighs bliss in heaven against suffering in hell. My wager merely weighs the possibility of discovering a god behind the universe against the possibility of making such a search in vain. My wager seeks to establish much less than Pascal’s but I feel that philosophically it is on stronger ground.
Now that I’ve explained what I mean by “satisfying my heart” in more detail, you may still feel that it’s silly to seek truth by weighing desires. I submit, however, that you do this every moment of your life. For example, suppose I were to tell you that there is a man eating tiger behind you right now, and your only chance is to run for your life right this moment. You would not believe me, right? But why not?
Certainly the tiger attack is possible, so you can’t discount it on logical grounds. Perhaps you’d discount it on probabilistic grounds – since man eating tigers have never attacked you before, it’s “unlikely” to happen now, so you won’t worry about it. If you make this argument, I first ask: what do you mean by “unlikely”? and what gives you the knowledge that said event is in fact unlikely? Second, why does unlikelihood imply that you shouldn’t worry about something? I submit that in general that implication does not hold, and here is a counterexample.
Suppose that you are shopping in a store and a store employee stops to talk to you. She says that she thought she saw you leaving a car with a baby inside. It’s a hot summer day and recently you’ve heard terrible stories of parents who accidentally leave their children in their cars where they die of heat stroke (note: this really does happen). But you’re quite confident you did not leave your child in the car, because you always drop your baby off at home before you go grocery shopping. At least you’re pretty sure – it was a few hours ago and you’ve been very busy with errands in the mean time. You ask the employee if she’s sure and she says no, but she saw someone do this and is very concerned. Clearly here the probability of you breaking your routine here and not remembering is pretty low. In addition, the frequency of such deaths is probably very low relative to the number of parents who accidentally leave children in the car, so overall from both considerations the probability that your child is dying in the car right now is very low. But I submit that, regardless of probability, you will probably call home on the cellphone, abandoning your shopping cart and quickly making your way out of the store to check. Why? Because your desire for truth and fear of error in this situation overwhelm all cool objective considerations of probability. Therefore you tentatively judge, for practical purposes, that your baby is in danger and act accordingly.
This is how humans operate: not under cool considerations of logic and probability, but continually guided in their judgments by the desire for truth and the fear of error. You may object that such considerations apply only to what we will act (for example, whether or not we will run out of the supermarket in the above example) and not to what we will believe. But if you “believe” one thing and continually act in a way contrary to that belief, I submit that you do not really believe what you say you believe. Action is the measure of a man. A man may say he believes he is a chicken, but if he goes about his daily business like an ordinary man, he does not (in any practical sense) believe he is a chicken.
In summary: action is the measure of a man’s beliefs and judgments, not what he says he believes and judges true and false. But we act on the basis of weighing the desire for truth against the fear of error, wagering against ourselves and the universe in the hopes of coming out ultimately happy and satisfied with the life we’ve led. Therefore, we SHOULD decide the question of a god’s existence by weighing the desires to “satisfy one’s heart”; in fact we are incapable of doing otherwise.