- Joined
- Jan 2, 2012
- Messages
- 11,204
- Reaction score
- 3,259
- Location
- Walking the Underworld
- Website
- www.richardgarfinkle.com
Pascal's Wager has a number of flaws, but there's an aspect to it that, it seems to me, is part of a larger scale casino-like atmosphere on the matter of philosophy and religion.
The wager is usually phrased in terms of belief, but if belief were the only thing that wouldn't matter. A person who adheres to a particular religion or philosophy makes choices about life relative to that religion or philosophy (e.g. what does one do with ones time, how does one treat other people and the world etc). Furthermore, if the religion has an idea of an afterlife (or karmic reincarnation) the person is likely to make decisions with those as a consideration (sometimes evincing a willingness to die for abstract things).
But, if we continue the gambling analogy, there is a bet that that is close to a sure thing: that one is a living being in a world. So the gamble that we all are making can be put like this:
The world exists and we live in it.
Should we decide upon our actions based on this fact or should we decided upon our actions based on a story of something that exists beyond the world?
The risk in deciding based on the story is that the story is false and the actions that we take will shorten our lives or the lives of others without good cause.
We cannot discern whether any such story is true, therefore, all possible story based worlds cancel out in the gamble (since for every story there is an equal and opposite counter story).
That leaves us with the only sensible considerations in the gamble of actions to be real world considerations.
This does not, however, eliminate the utility of religion and philosophy. A given person may gain a better insight and a sense of real world considerations from a particular religion or philosophy (or from a melange of ideas and practices from many such sources). Such a person makes better real world decisions because, for them, the religious or philosophical perspective leads to greater clarity about the real world.
The wager is usually phrased in terms of belief, but if belief were the only thing that wouldn't matter. A person who adheres to a particular religion or philosophy makes choices about life relative to that religion or philosophy (e.g. what does one do with ones time, how does one treat other people and the world etc). Furthermore, if the religion has an idea of an afterlife (or karmic reincarnation) the person is likely to make decisions with those as a consideration (sometimes evincing a willingness to die for abstract things).
But, if we continue the gambling analogy, there is a bet that that is close to a sure thing: that one is a living being in a world. So the gamble that we all are making can be put like this:
The world exists and we live in it.
Should we decide upon our actions based on this fact or should we decided upon our actions based on a story of something that exists beyond the world?
The risk in deciding based on the story is that the story is false and the actions that we take will shorten our lives or the lives of others without good cause.
We cannot discern whether any such story is true, therefore, all possible story based worlds cancel out in the gamble (since for every story there is an equal and opposite counter story).
That leaves us with the only sensible considerations in the gamble of actions to be real world considerations.
This does not, however, eliminate the utility of religion and philosophy. A given person may gain a better insight and a sense of real world considerations from a particular religion or philosophy (or from a melange of ideas and practices from many such sources). Such a person makes better real world decisions because, for them, the religious or philosophical perspective leads to greater clarity about the real world.