Question for Pascal's Wager followers

[volgadon]

51 minutes ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

Let's look at statistics, not specific examples. Of course there are evil scientists and engineers, but let's look at the stats. 

The more educated you are, the more income you get. 

 

 

That is income rather than education, and it is more that the wealthier you are, the easier it is to get an education and get ahead career-wise because you tend to have an effective network. Definitely does not equal a simplistic formula of better educated = less violent. Were that true, we wouldn't have examples like the one I mentioned.

Edited March 4, 2016 by volgadon
Posted too soon.

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

I am not asking the 100% convinced, I am asking the pascal wager followers. 

Pascal's wager followers are deluding themselves. The faith required for a 'just in case' belief will save no one.

 It is like people who say you should be agnostic just in case. Any God who would be impressed by that is an idiot not worth following.

[TheSkepticChristian]

36 minutes ago, volgadon said:

That is income rather than education, and it is more that the wealthier you are, the easier it is to get an education and get ahead career-wise because you tend to have an effective network. Definitely does not equal a simplistic formula of better educated = less violent. Were that true, we wouldn't have examples like the one I mentioned.

I never said that educated people that are violent didn't exists.  

It's the same thing, the more educated you are the more income you get. Even the engineers working for the drug cartels get a high income, even a higher income because cartels pay them a lot of big money.  

Look at El Chapo, he is a billionaire, but a big drug lord. I don't think El Chapo as a scientific background. 

Edited March 4, 2016 by TheSkepticChristian

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, TheSkepticChristian said:

I am not asking the 100% convinced, I am asking the pascal wager followers. 

I hope you understand that Pascal thought that evidence for or against God was irrelevant to why we should believe in him.

Essentially the argument is : "since God's existence, cannot be proven (in any way-including science) we might as well believe, since there is no reason NOT to believe."

So your quest for evidence of God doesn't take Pascal's full argument into account.

My way of thinking is based on Pascal, James and Wittgenstein- I am a fideist which means that speaking about religion has nothing to do with speaking about science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism

Edit- added quote below from above site.

Quote

Alvin Plantinga defines "fideism" as "the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth." The fideist therefore "urges reliance on faith rather than reason, in matters philosophical and religious," and therefore may go on to disparage the claims of reason.[5] The fideist seeks truth, above all: and affirms that reason cannot achieve certain kinds of truth, which must instead be accepted only by faith.[4] Plantinga's definition might be revised to say that what the fideist objects to is not so much "reason" per se—it seems excessive to call Blaise Pascal anti-rational—but evidentialism: the notion that no belief should be held unless it is supported by evidence.

 

Edited March 4, 2016 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, The Nehor said:

Pascal's wager followers are deluding themselves. The faith required for a 'just in case' belief will save no one.

 It is like people who say you should be agnostic just in case. Any God who would be impressed by that is an idiot not worth following.

Agreed for some, on the other hand, one MUST to some degree accept the idea of "faith over reason" in order to have a testimony at all.  God is invisible, and of course many do not believe.  One can be ridiculed by believing in what critics call the "flying spaghetti monster"- an invisible being who will take care of us after we are rotting corpses incapable of consciousness.  "Ridiculous!" they claim.

To overcome THAT and give one's life whole-heartedly including all that God has given you, to a being which is unseen and might just be, as Scrooge said, "a bit of undigested potato" DOES require faith perhaps worth of attaining salvation.

It doesn't hurt to know rationally, while exercising that kind of faith, that indeed one does not need to worry about reason contradicting faith.

So in my opinion, fideism itself can be seen as a kind of religious belief, a kind of "faith" in the idea of faith itself.  It is a rational explanation for why faith is important in life.  To me, it is no delusion- it is in fact the most reasonable model of human thought possible.  It is pure logic. There is more to human experience than can be expressed verbally, and therefore communicated scientifically.  All science is based in communication between scientists, and therefore is linguistically based.  THAT is the basis for the argument against the "correspondence theory of truth".   All this is pure logic.

The reality is that visible evidence does not account for the feelings in the hearts of billions of people worldwide that there is something to this "God" idea.  Nor do statements about chemical reactions in the brain have anything to do with the beauty and sense of awe found in the experience of a sunset.  Science just cannot go there. One cannot deduce statements about the experience from statements about chemicals.  "Blue" is not a chemical reaction.

So when one already has faith, it is nice to be able to explain why it is rational, and that is why I find fideism useful.  It is largely an apologetic strategy.