Monday, November 14, 2011

Defending Pascal's Wager

Further into this weekend's e-mail, a good e-friend (I've never met him in real life) shares some personal history I've suspected but not read in this article:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9150461/answering_pascals_wager.html?cat=25

Okay, Donald, so now we're adversaries. I guess I can live with that. Because I've also been hurt by misbeliefs about God, I'm praying for you. Because I've had plenty of agnostic moods when Pascal's Wager has been the thing that's defined me as a Christian, I can relate. But the title of this post promised readers a nice abstract logical defense of Pascal's Wager that they can use, so here we go:

1. There is only one God (and yes, when Christians are speaking Arabic, we call the Holy One "Allah" too). All viable religions teach that a Supreme Being who is infinite and eternal and beyond mortal understanding is able to deal with the misbeliefs we mortals invariably form about God. As mentioned in a previous post, my understanding of the Bible is that religious bigotry is probably just another one of the errors for which we'll ask to be forgiven one day.

2. The Bible doesn't say how old the world is. Some of us have confused a picture-book version of the book of Genesis with the real thing. What more of us need to understand is that, although our translations and interpretations of the Bible may be inaccurate or overly literal, our "scientific theories" about the origins of our planet are at least equally fallible and probably more so.

3. If your early understanding of God and/or religious teaching gives you nothing but pain, you should reject it. But what you need to reject is the misunderstanding. If, as a child, you were threatened with "When children misbehave, policemen take them to jail," and so you formed a fear of police officers, and once you got separated from your parents in a store and hid under a garment display rack because you thought the mall security guard was a policeman who was going to take you to jail, would that mean that you should be afraid of all police officers, or that the police don't exist? Obviously, neither...and the same principle applies to our misbeliefs about God.

The belief that this world wasn't intelligently designed is beyond my capacity. I can, however, believe that it's possible that God is uninterested in saving or condemning us and doesn't care what we do. It's not very logical that we were created with consciences, sensitivities, and a sense of honor that our Creator doesn't share, but many things in observable reality aren't very logical. So we're back to Pascal's Wager: if God doesn't care what we do, we lose nothing by having acted as if God cared. When people have been harmed by believing in God, the source of the damage has been their misbeliefs.

Of course, there's more to Christian faith than Pascal's Wager. There is, for example, the observed fact that I still love the writer known as Donald Pennington. Once again, I don't know him personally. In fact, some things that he's written and some things that I've written show that it's probably better if he and I never meet in real life. (I wouldn't have liked C.S. Lewis in real life, either.) But I've read enough to know that there's a real live decent human being writing under that name, and for no obvious biological reason I find myself caring about what becomes of that human being. Well, we "met" via Associated Content, a site that owed much of its success to its built-in incentives for writers to promote one another...but the godless Darwinian universe admits no possible reason why I hope some guy in Texas can put his marriage back together. To account for things like that we have to fall back on the possibility that we were created by a Supreme Being who loves.

No comments:

Post a Comment