Pascal was a brilliant polymath. If anyone could have laid out the relationship between God and humanity with electrical engineer like precision it might have been him. And if he could have done that why would then he propose a wager in which one is asked to bet one’s life because of the uncertainty of the proposition? I think the answer is that he wouldn’t.
To me that implies that he was thinking in a modern epistemologically agnostic context not unlike we are today. So I don’t think the engineer-like objective precision you’re looking for is possible in theology. Sorry to disappoint you.
Pascal was a fool. A parochial ignorant Catholic, who hadn’t a clue about the million faces of god, and the richness of human experience.
He was too dull and stupid to realise that there is no coherent massage to follow to ensure your passage into heaven.
You could easily waste the only life you have backing the wrong god.
By the time he was writing his religion was already out of date and proven by biblical analysis to be antichristian.
Only a fool would give him the time of day.
By the 21st C Pascal’s version of Christianity is not practiced by zero people. It’s beliefs are dead and where not completely replaced by a dozen Protestant creeds has also been much abandoned by his own church.
So, you share my opinion of Rumsfeld, just not objectively, as I supposedly do. WTF?? An opinion is subjective by definition! That is my OPINION of Rumsfeld, and I never claimed it was anything but.
You really do not know how to hold a conversation on a message board with other people.
Apparently a “lesson learned” on “holding a conversation” here at ILP.
Note to others:
Did you get that?
Again…
There are those who argue that Rumsfeld [or Nixon or Kissinger or Cheney or Bush] is a war criminal as though this could be established objectively. Using either the tools of philosophy or the tools of science. When, in fact, there are those on the political spectrum who argue that destroying Communism or Islamic jihad by any means necessary is acting morally, even heroically. And that people like pood are inherently/necessarily wrong in not joining them.
Now, me, given my own existential trajectory – re Song Be – I came to abandon Christianity and embraced Marxism. For the next 10 to 15 years, I came to embrace a radical left wing political agenda. As an objectivist. But then as a result of the wrenching experience I had with Mary and her abortion along with my introduction to existentialism in William Barrett’s Irrational Man, I came to abandon Marxism and over time “I” came to recognize instead that my staunch doctrinaire political values were basically just political prejudices derived from my experiences. My dogmatic frame of mind in regard to morality configured into this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Yes, a part of me is still convinced that Rumsfeld and all the others are war criminals. But another part of me recognizes how, had things been different in my life, I might have rejected that point of view. And that, again, there is no way in which to establish beyond all doubt whether they are in fact war criminals.
Mostly, if they genuinely believed in the cause they pursued in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan they were failures.
Next up: Is Truman a war criminal for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or for the fire bombing of Dresden?
Or was doing battle with the Axis powers back then different?
Okay, just out of curiosity, what might Pascal’s argument have sounded like?
Come on, how precise could his argument have been when, unlike with the electrical engineer and her light bulb and grasp of electro-magnetism, Pascal had neither a God/the God around to point to, nor anything even remotely approaching the laws of nature in grappling with the relationship between God and mere mortals.
I can’t agree with that. He seemed to be missing some very relevant details concerning justice (for example). He claimed that all nations should have the exact same laws (“globalism” - a very Catholic concept). But that is not justice - far from it. It is actually an injustice.
So what you are saying is that what is “true law” is just a matter of common opinion. So the entire world should be governed by a “one size fits all” system of laws that are established by the sacred rite of common opinion.
It seems to me that common opinion is very strongly controlled by ubiquitous media led by ideologists - such as Karl Marx. And that means that in your idea of a “just world” democracy is out of the question.
I don’t think there is rational argument against the existence of common laws. The issue is one of demanding that they be common.
When every creature naturally strives to survive - that is common - but is it forced upon them against their will? Or is it merely a reflection of their will.
Laws don’t need to be made to force people to do what they were going to do anyway. Laws are made to force people to do something that - supposedly - the majority of people will benefit by - despite the use of force. Man doesn’t seem very good at figuring out exactly how to do that even in singular nations or religions - yet it is proposed that the entire world should be subjected to such insanity?
This seems similar to the idea that Man MUST populate Mars - when Man hasn’t even figured out how to live peacefully on Earth.
Why not fill the entire universe with Manly insanity?
Different kinds of lives in different kinds of situations need different kinds of rules for their cooperative efforts - that is a “God given” fact.
“Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).” Wikipedia
The “as if” clause means the wager requires the individual to enter the proposed way of living and thinking subjectively. Therefore, the person’s understanding of what God wants is always speculative. And of course everyone’s would be different depending on their particular point of view. And furthermore that would depend on when and where they were thrown into the world plus whatever degree of freedom they are able to achieve.
Okay, so how would that all unfold if the rational wagers lived their life as though God did exist in regard to such things as abortion, human sexuality, gun control, animal rights, gender roles, hunting, the role of government, just wars, conscription, race, socialism, capitalism, fascism, anarchism, social and economic justice, natural rights, capital punishment, defunding the police, drug laws, global warming, minimum wage, universal basic income, gay marriage, prostitution, pornography, immigration policy…and on and on and on and on.
Again, given what is as stake: immortality and salvation.
And the points you raise are not all that far removed from the points I raise. Or, perhaps, were you just being ironic? Or…mocking?
Okay, so what does that mean “for all practical purposes”?
With morality here and now and immortality there and then at stake, the wagers can fall anywhere at all along the moral and political spectrum in regard to the issues above?
Salvation cafeteria style?
Again, a general description spiritual assessment such as “to live as if God existed is going to vary with the individual” works fine up in the clouds of psychologisms. You think it, imagine it being true and it can comfort and console you.
But bring it down to Earth and what do you get? Well, a whole bunch of “one of us” [the righteous few] vs “one of them” [the sinner majority] newspaper headlines for one thing.
I don’t think that Pascal was addressing agnostics at all, except as a rhetorical foil. I think that he was first and foremost addressing himself.
Pascal was a mathematician who, like Descartes, favored “clear-and-distinct ideas” and deductive proofs. Yet as you yourself suggest, his own religious faith didn’t look like that at all. So I suspect that Pascal was trying to convince himself that his own Christian faith was rational in his own chosen terms.
His wager may indeed be a valid argument if one accepts the premises of the argument, but I don’t think that it has ever proven to be very effective against agnostics. I’m an agnostic myself and I don’t find it convincing, just circular.
