Its been a while since I’ve last written, I know, but I’ve
been busy with school and all that. For the last few months or two we have been
discussing god in philosophy class and I have had the opportunity to read and
discuss some of the major arguments. After hearing both pro and con I figured I’ll
share my reflections with you.
First up will be “Pascal’s Wager”. Blaise Pascal lived in
france in the 1600’s, he was a great mathematician, scientist philosopher. His wager
comes from a collection of his notes that were published posthumously. I’m not
sure if the wager was ever supposed to be a stand-alone argument for religious
belief, however it is cited and used by many theologians (and we discussed it
in class), so I’ll address it.
His wager goes as follows:
Premises:
1.Either god exists or not
2. God is infinitely incomprehensible, therefore we
cannot decide by reason, what, or even if, he is.
3.We must therefore gamble.
4.If you gamble that god is; then if you are right
you gain everything, if you are wrong you have lost nothing
Conclusion:
5.“Wager then without hesitation that he is…”
There have been many people who point out the sort of
absurdities that follow from his line of reasoning. One popular example is
pointing out the fact that this is not really faith, and what kind of god would
be fooled by this. Another popular one is that this whole attitude to what
should be a serious topic is rather cheapened by is “c’mon, waddaya got to
lose?” attitude, like this
one, and I will add one of my own at the end. What I feel that they fail to
do, is point out exactly where and why he is wrong; more precisely, where is
the flaw in his argument. There has been one notable flaw that has been pointed
out by many, that being that he is really only saying that either the Christian
god as I understand him is true or it is not, and he is ignoring all the other
possible alternatives. However I would like to introduce what I feel is his
central flaw, it’s his second premise.
His second premise is an argument in its own right that can
be structured as follows. Premise: god is infinitely incomprehensible;
conclusion: reason cannot decide what or if he is. This is false, just because
something is incomprehensible does not mean we cannot talk about it. Infinity,
quantum mechanics, and relativity are three counterexamples that come to mind
of things which although we may not be able to comprehend them, we can still
decide if they are true, by discovering necessary consequences of these
theories. To bring this into the god conversation, imagine that I claimed that god,
who is infinitely incomprehensible, exists, has the attributes that were described
in the Qur’an, and that god has transmitted his infallibly true word and that
word is the Qur’an. My theory can be disproven, all one would need to do is
discover one falsehood in the Qur’an and it would be game over for my theory. As
soon as we can find one necessary consequence of a theory we can prove or
disprove a theory.
Ironically, Pascal grants this. When he introduces the concept
of god and infinity he says the following
“We know that there is an infinite, and are
ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it
is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But we do not know what
it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd; for the
addition of a unit can make no change in its nature. Yet it is a number, and
every number is odd or even (this is certainly true of every finite number). So
we may well know that there is a God without knowing what He is”
In other words, Pascal must concede that even though
something is beyond our comprehension, such as infinity, we can still talk
about of it, we can still analyze it, and as later theories in math showed we
can say a lot about it, since we can show necessary consequences of it. We need
not understand every detail about god in order to be able decide based on
reason whether or not we should assume that she does, or does not exist.
As I promised, here is a funny alternative consequence of his
premises 1, 2, and 3.
Premises:
1. God either exists or she does not
2. God is infinitely incomprehensible, therefore
reason cannot decide what or even if she is
3. We must therefore gamble
4. Let us therefore assign probabilities to each
option
5. Since reason cannot decide we shall assign to
each option an equal 50% chance
6. If god exists she might be the Christian god or
the Jewish god, therefore assign to each one a 25% chance of being true, while
the no-god option is still 50%
7. Repeat for every additional religion and flavor
of religion
Conclusion:
8. Wager then without hesitation that she is not…
Real conclusion: we
must always introduce reason, this should not be a gamble.
