Another version of Pascal's Wager...

Pascal wrote that life is like a game that humans are embarked on.

Pascal wrote how we MUST wager our lives on God, it’s not optional. Atheism is a wager, too, so is staying agnostic.

In a few decades, life will end forever. The way to win is to get to Heaven and avoid Hell. The way to do that is to study the various religions/philosophies and find the one that is most likely to be true.

We all HAVE to wager our finite lives on the infinite.

We’re all playing the game of life. It will end soon and forever.

Wager wisely, my friends. :slight_smile:

ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees.iv.html

What if the wager is fixed so as to guarantee a house win?

What if the house prefers a full house attendance over anything but a straight flush, 4 of 1 kind. Or a royal?

What if all games are like that?

( including the game of doubt, of the prisoners’ dilemma, language games, and even the very game of becoming conscious)

What if ‘in the beginning, the games were not ‘like that’ but unlike the games children play’ and the houses were not built of cards?

Children had to simulate parents, and assimilate them, without a thought to the matter.

Those kids could bet the exercise of the whips of outrageous fortune if a violation occured .

Then that happens.

It doesn’t seem as probable to me, though.

Just a reminder…

With objective morality on this side of the grave and immortality and salvation on the other side of it at stake, you would think that a God, the God, your God would have provided us mere mortals with a more definitive access to the One True Path.

What’s your take on that?

Why make it all about “leaps of faith” and “wagers” at all?

Also, as you go about the task of “study[ing] the various religions/philosophies [to] find the one that is most likely to be true”, please bring your own selection here…

1] a demonstrable proof of the existence of your God or religious/spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and religious/spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed…but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual’s belief in Gods and religious/spiritual faiths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God or religious/spiritual path

Number 4 being my own particular fascination.

This part:

God sustaining “an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages”.

Then another ironic twist occured along the way, of the probabilities dwindling, disfavoring the fixed house, and that irony was not lost on any but the ones who could imitate the life on an authentically revealed image, which used irony inversely, proporting the required redoubling toward the singled out objective, …

Otherwise the focus between the two (eyes) would d
remain…fixed. ( in a manner of speaking)

I may be wrong …

iambigous says:

"God sustaining “an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages”

meno says:

" yes but that is only one minuscule universal slice out of innumerable other ones"

Okay, but I’ll wager I’m not the only one here who doesn’t have a clue regarding what on Earth this means. Indeed, what on Earth this can mean.

Unless, of course, given any particular “act of God” above, you’d care to expand on “ones minuscule slice”.

Is it like, say, innumerable slices of pizza?

Speaking of which, what are the odds that pizza is even allowed in Heaven? Place your bets?

Now it’s meno says. me no/meno…what’s the difference?

I think God provided us tons of evidence.

Millions of people in history over thousands of years have had experiences of God and the supernatural. I’ve talked to some myself; college professors, Ivy League graduates, not frauds.

The overwhelming evidence is that God is real.

I do get Your point ok, in variance of why Your not getting mine points to a literally used ambiguous perception on Your part.

The slice can be compared to the whole cosmos, or even to use another metaphor: a slice of the pie.

Another irreducible analogy.

And I’ll wager there are tons of others out there who couldn’t agree with you more…

thebestschools.org/magazine/wor … -starters/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions

…about this.

Only they will all assure us it is not your God or spiritual path, but theirs that leads us to immortality and salvation.

Okay, for those who believe this, let’s bring this “real God” of yours around to this:

Then we can discuss the hard evidence you have that your God does in fact exist and not one of the hundreds of others worshipped around the globe. And the part where your own religious convictions are not embedded existentially in the life that you lived given such factors as history and culture and personal experiences.

iambiguous,

I’ll wager on Jesus. The #1 seed. The guy who hundreds of people saw resurrected from the dead.

What’s your wager on?

Alas, it appears that those here like Bob and felix and Ierrellus, ILP members in possession of an intelligence I always had a great deal respect for in discussions of God and religion, have moved on.

Now it’s the likes of shackledspirit1984, Ecmandu, Ichthus77 and their inch deep/mile wide ilk that prevail. Though, admittedly, Ec does clearly have a “condition”.

I mean, seriously, those here who actually do have a love for philosophy, did you ever imagine the day when ILP would devolve into a venue in which posts like shackledspirit’s above were the rule!!! Try to imagine Blaise Pascal’s own reactions to them!!

Pinheads for Christ!

Of course, of course: if “I” do say so myself. [-o<

Pascal was a giant in philosophy. So were Aquinas and Augustine. (All three believed most people were going to Hell, BTW)

Meditate on that.

Again, with immortality and salvation at stake, I’m not interested in what these men believed, but in what they could actually demonstrate was in fact true here for all rational men and women.

After all, even if their own convictions were anything but an inch deep and a mile wide, that doesn’t count as substantive proof for the existence of a God, the God, their God. Aside, of course, for her and that ilk here.

Although, sure, I would be curious as to how sophisticated minds like theirs might reconcile their own understanding of God with this:

“God sustaining ‘an endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction events…making life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the ages’.”

Even Bob and felix and Ierrellus were, in my view, reluctant to go there.

iambiguous,

Below is an article about Aquinas and the problem of evil. I also like Pascal’s theory of finite vs. infinite.

So, even if a human suffers terribly in a finite life, that’s swamped by an infinite afterlife. The suffering is terrible but it’s still finite.

aquinasonline.com/nature-of-evil/

Of course not, but then You didn’t get the wager evil.made and lost. The devil can not deal with underage children, there was no deal in the late middle, ages require maturity, and hence the devil advocate had become immaterial., it was really a test as was the sacrificial foreseeability of Isaac, a simulation as well , as a test, that was sine quo est, to become the necessary irony that had to have been made real from the image simulated. It was written so, that AI could understand what’s at stake, where misunderstanding could bad made all the difference in the world.

Who simulates whom?

There arose a keen sense that the so called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ the one that makes a distinction between the nature of mankind and how mankind should break from the natural setting. This break away, can be interpreted as a matter that for the most part, belongs into that realm of man which concerns the willful exercise of man, or the other version which started evolutionary progression with a higher objective, that which parallels three planes of experience:

1 Those ideal features of behavior, which develop man’s goodness, sense of beauty, and the pursuit of peace

2.The understanding of how the cognative functional equivalents progressed from these ideal presuppositions, into the analogous perception and interpretation their embedded signs into memory functions.

  1. How these memory functions acted and reacted in a cyclical simulated form, from basic assumptions toward their applicability, and how these probabilistically favored , evolved series , finally identified the primary ( prophetic( assumptions with an ‘ethereal Object’ which was foreshadowed , and finally were interpreted as consisting of an identical structural Entity.

The fact that we have gone through this eschatologicalky sensible process, proves for the most part, that MAN as a creature of Nature, favored and was favored to break away, and become conscious of Who he part takes the ideas, which selectively must adhere to the ideas of how his existence should be, in any case, how it should or could have been.

This life may be merely a slice of the ‘eternal’ Cosmic Pie, and some existences failing, may not be evidentiary of the failure of other civilizations elsewhere. To think otherwise would be myopic and centrist to the same degree as way back when it was thought that the earth was the center of the universe, or the earth was flat.

Now the wager:

The betting on either for or against the existence of God is a pushback into a nominalism which has a rational basis, culminating in either a total, absolute pantheism , or a complete nihilism. Enter Christ Jesus the messenger. He obliterates this doubtful realm , He reaffirms Einstein’s comment that “God doesn’t plague with dice”.

Then the ideologically inclined skeptics, who remain transfixed in this here present reality, will point to all the awful horror that existence burdens mankind with and declare god dead. But isn’t this type of thinking apropos to the very break of what us, what can be proof of the mysteries behind those aspects of evolution which can not be accounted for?It is folly to assume man gas all the answers regarding how that urge to do what should be done developed, from it’s what we denigrate as mythical beginnings, onto the theoretical embedded phenomena
of simulations , which have become carbon copies of an original, where the two can no longer be distinguished?

I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take this argument over to my theodicy thread – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=196522 – and react to it there in the near future.

Meanwhile, provide us with what you construe to be the strongest evidence from Aquinas [a favorite of none other than the fierce atheist Ayn Rand] that in fact the Christian God exists…and not one of the other Gods.

Over at the PN forum, Immanuel Can and I use the Pope residing in the Vatican vs. the Christian God residing in Heaven as a way to explore this. There is a ton of hard evidence available to establish that the Pope does in fact reside in the Vatican. Where is the similar evidence that the Christian God does in fact reside in Heaven.

Now, IC eschews leaps of faiths and/or wagers here. He insists that he can prove that the Christian God exists. His “world of words” arguments for example: forum.philosophynow.org/viewtop … 11&t=35028

The final point is that although there is uniqueness, the original carries this through the various blocks, filters of conscious realization, that uniqueness disappears through the continuous overlap which makes It happen. It, the primal moving mover, becomes a universally entity of being, in a general sense, not that it has not always been as such, but It’s progression releases It’s uniqueness, as if a particular existence, context, was pre-detetmined. to realize It’s self in various particular ways.

At the apex , the difference between the messenger, the message disappears into a general consciousness. Since at that point of realization , all spatial temporal differentiations melt into One-another.

Becoming conscious of this process is anything but an all inclusive, static pantheism. It is incessantly moving from an imminent contextually subsisting in variously related intersubjectivity toward a transcendent objectivity.

The transcendent imminence can be represented by an near infinitely succeeding plates , or reality images which create various realities which best fit the idea of an eternally returned set of variants which the message imminently delivers.

To those who’s claim subsists in the level of : believe it or not, would naturally relapse unto the 18 the century categorization , as a limit of absolute understanding, and relax into the positive interpretation that meaning can only be explicated only from the analysis of how words are used within context.

To those, there really avenues of recourse about how the etymologies of these words were intended to be used, so the current use, describes the one one dimensionality into which they were condemned to be abrogated. This tempting exit , from the no exit situation, conveniently short-cuts any effort to assert motive to abstract meaning, and by that token , accede to deprive meaning in it’s original formal situation, This is, however the state of uncertainty written as an apology for the way things are, the status quo signified, and any other possibility, ruled out.
To move this argument up a notch tries to at least give all possibilities a chance not to exempt one in favor of the other.

Thanks for the links. My favorite arguments of Aquinas are not his famous “5 ways” but his description of Jesus incarnation as the God-Man as well as Aquinas’s personal mystical experiences. There were many.

But, these theological debates are endless. That’s why I love Pascal. We all need to “wager” for or against God.

We get one life and we HAVE to wager. :slight_smile: