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13561323 No.13561323 [Reply] [Original]

How do atheists reconcile with Pascals Wager?

>> No.13561327

>>13561323
Easily. There’s already a thread up though. Take your meme down

>> No.13561329

By not giving a fuck about Blouse Pisscal.

>> No.13561435

>>13561323
read Dawkins.

/thread

>> No.13561459

>>13561323
Pascals wager can be applied to all religions.
>You believe in Mohammad, you either are wrong and nothing happens or you are right and get eternal happiness
>You don't believe in Mohammad, you are either right and nothing happens or you're wrong and eternal damnation
Apply this to any religion.

>> No.13561471

>>13561323
Oh wow
Monthly samefagging

>> No.13561493

>>13561459
>You attempt to achieve nirvana, you either break samsara and nothing happens, or nothing happens

>> No.13561536

>>13561323

You didn't take three seconds to Google "atheist's wager" did you?

>> No.13561628

>>13561323
none of them have actually read Pascal so they just go by the oversimplified meme version as seen online

>> No.13562501

>>13561459
Cringe

>> No.13562506
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13562506

>>13561323
How do Pascals- Wagerists reconcile with pronatalism?

>> No.13562517

>>13561628
This. I thought Pascal's wager was ridiculous and idiotic when it was only given to me by stupid unthinking religious people who had never read Pascal. Now that I've read Pascal, I understand there is quite a bit more depth to it and have begun my search for God.

>> No.13562552

>>13562506
Why do antinatalists think everything is about their stupid ethic?

>> No.13562553

>>13561323
>>13561323
One cannot choose to believe "just in case"

>> No.13562562

>>13562517
>Assuming what you've set out to prove isn't assuming what you've set out to prove if it takes long enough.

>> No.13562588

>>13562553
but surely one can larp

>> No.13562611

>>13562552
Because if the wager applies, then certainly it is a more sure thing that someone should not be subject to damnation by way of their nonentity than by trying to guess what faith is true (even of the many separate Christian Disciplines). If the whole matter is reducible to any kind of wager than the best outcome is not to play.

And if you say "but what if they would go to heaven"? Well first off its "Paradise", not "heaven". Secondly their needing of salvation would be subordinate to their existence. Thirdly it says the chances are incredibly slim that this should be the case (afterall we are talking about a wager and therefore a numbers game). Finally would one, being a Christian and a scripture believer, actually contrive that God's election of his saints should rest on the undependable freely willed actions of flawed man, particularly where regards his exercise of sexual license? Surely that is anathema to the very nature of God.

>> No.13562619

>>13561459
No, because the teaching of Christ is so perfect that no other can compare, therefore Christianity is the only possible true faith. Either the christian God is real, or none are real.

>> No.13562626

>>13562619
Neoplatonism really seems more reasonable.

>> No.13562636

>>13562619
Lmao

>> No.13562646

>>13561435
I find Dawkins' work a bit dense myself.

>> No.13562649

>>13562646
If by dense, you mean its the product of an idiot mind with bad rhetoric then I agree.

>> No.13562659

>>13561459
That's why agnosticism is the way to go. Any religion might have the True God, or none of them, so the safest bet to avoid offending Him is to be nonreligious

>> No.13562676

>>13561493
based buddha, pascal BTFO

>> No.13562684

>>13562619
The absolute state of christcucks

Keep your faith lmao

>> No.13562687

>>13562611
This is actually some brilliant reasoning.

>> No.13562710

>>13562687
Thanks. Its the product of no small labor. I meditate on these things every day and then write essays on these matters which I will compile into a treatise and hopefully a book advocating that a Biblical worldview should admit an ethic of antinatalism.

>> No.13562715
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13562715

>>13562649
Okay, please don't insult Richard Dawkins.

>> No.13562776

>>13562649
>Pretending the selfish gene and extended phenotype aren't together a masterful shift in thinking about how to find meaning and altruistic values without God.

>> No.13562789

>>13562776
>being so christcucked you think this existence of any sort of cosmic potentate automatically explains the basis of morality, as if it were a first principle or something.

>> No.13562794

>>13561323
By considering something worse than eternal suffering, and something more important than eternal bliss. This "worse than" is faithlessness to life, and "more important" is faithfulness to life which contains an epistemic imperative to understand. Pascal's Wager is convincing only to the greatest coward who looks for some ultimate to minimize all the responsibilities and risks of conscious experience.

>> No.13562906

>>13562611
>the best outcome is not to play.
Except Pascal says you really have no choice in the matter.

As for your other points:
In christianity, there is something known as baptism of desire, or baptism by blood, for in the case of christian parents having a miscarriage but wanting their child to be baptized in the church.
Although the chances are slim, the reward is the greatest with the alternative being the greatest loss.
And finally, a flawed man who devotes himself to God, giving up all other passions (yes, even sexual desires) should be elected to be blessed by the church. There still needs to be some form of miracles (at least nowadays) for them to be considered as a saint. However, there tends to be investigations as to whether they are deserving of sainthood. I highly suggest reading the confessions of St. Augustine.

>> No.13562910

>>13562776
Dawkins genius is in following the implications of the dominant metaphysics of capitalism (competition and self-interest, which finds formalization in game theory) to its ultimate biological conclusion: the genetic level, with competition between genes being more fundamental than that between organisms. With the concepts of extended phenotype and selfish meme this thesis returns to the metaphysical with the omnipresence of competition in every facet of experience. The dynamics he is describing are doubtlessly real, which makes the perspective of hyper-competition important for the understanding of life biologically and philosophically. That said the totalization of competition is a wholly incomplete account of life, and Dawkins like many others finds it difficult to imagine an alternative to the metaphysics of competition. "to find meaning and altruistic values without God" for Dawkins' is to realize that cooperation for mutual benefit outcompetes competition, which seems like altruism, but this "cooperation" only exists on the background of fundamental competition: interests are aligned against a common enemy. The totalization of competition as encompassing all of reality is retained.

The current Bible of capitalism most faithful to it is "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny" by Robert Wright which focuses on game-theoretical dynamics. But if solitude is not the final word, and life isn't endless competition requires one to seek a horizon beyond that of the "science of strategy," one that doesn't exclude its perspective but dethrones it from its false claims of being absolute. Unable to clarify it with significant rigor, Dawkins describes this horizon as human creativity, "genuinely creative art" where he reboots his definition of the meme as a "mutation in the mind" rather than a replicator of self-similarity, elevating the account of life as divergence from and not only similarity with and what can be brought into effective routine.

Dawkins is also insightful by his compulsion to generalize evolutionary processes beyond that of the biological to the epistemological and relational. What is different for him to question is the assumptions of substance metaphysics with its thing-in-itself, preventing greater generalization of evolutionary theory to a truly evolutionary metaphysics (and eventually a physical theory of universal evolution that bridges all sciences.) This requires radically evolutionary thought, Richard Dawkins' main problem is that the science he is intuitively looking for doesn't even exist yet and exists only in prototypical speculative philosophy, most especially that of process philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ The metaphysics of competition requires the metaphysics of substance, and to bring the thing-in-itself into questionability is to question the assumptions that makes the totalization of competition seem inescapable.

>> No.13562923

>>13562789
Did you even read what you replied to?

>> No.13562940

>>13562910
What metaphysics?

>> No.13562946

>>13562794
Nice.

>> No.13562953

>>13562789
If morality was guaranteed (i.e. automatic) it wouldn't be morality, which suggests that morality is dependent on the inherent risk of living activity: attention and inattention makes a difference. This is the same for knowledge, which requires the ability to be incorrect for advancement of knowledge to be a possibility; if this wasn't the case we would function perfectly well as fully automated p-zombies. Biological evolution similarly requires the "death penalty" to be a creative process, and implicit in the actions of all organisms is a "faith" in the possibility of its own pursuits: nourishment is possible from a position of lack. Science requires the possibility of an experiment to show otherwise than expectations, and to understand the implications of the experiment, and philosophy requires the ability to be inconsistent. All of this suggests that the cosmic potential of error is not just behind morality but all forms of creativity, including aconscious creativity. That one only truly ever learns from their mistakes is a richly insightful aphorism that speaks to our intuitions about learning.

>> No.13563014
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13563014

Seriously? Its one of the worst arguments for a belief in God, particularly the Christian God, I've ever heard.
Frankly, I'm a bit of a reactionary in that I think most people are better off believing, whether god exists or not, for more tangible reasons. I'm not even opposed to being convinced myself. I'm sick of seeing midwits and brainlets drive themselves to intellectual dead ends with militant atheism and degenerate nihilism. Still, this argument sucks. Once you realize why that is, it would be intellectually dishonest to continue using it.

I find YouTube atheism cringey now, but this still does a good job at "reconciliation":
https://youtu.be/fZpJ7yUPwdU

>> No.13563102

>>13561323
easy, is it better to be honest about what you believe or don't believe or dishonestly conform out of fear of punishment or cynically seeking a reward?

>> No.13563224

This thread was moved to >>>/his/7021451