Free Will vs Determinism

[davidm]

Pascal's Wager @ Rational Wiki

There's a lot of taking there, but most of it not very good. For example, in one of the arguments it fails to understand what Christian theology actually says, and makes non-sequiturs out of that...like that God can't take issue with "good" people, forgetting that nobody's "good" in that sense, and then suggests that God can't think otherwise....

I can't comment on all it says, because it's just too darn long; so I'll have to ask you to point to whatever you think is relevant. I think that much of it just misses the mark, actually.

Yeah, there was a seven-minute gap between my posting the link, and your response that the article was just "too darn long" for you to read. Of course!

Read it, and then we can talk. Otherwise, forget it.

[thedoc]

Well, it's got to be a different concept than time, because what we know as "time" is associated with things like entropy. I would merely suggest that a Supreme Being is unlikely to prove deficient in imagination, no matter how "long" time goes on...if that word even applies anymore.

Entropy is associated with temporal existence, time, therefore eternity would not involve entropy. Eternity is a spiritual existence and not the same as a temporal existence.

[thedoc]

There's a lot of taking there, but most of it not very good. For example, in one of the arguments it fails to understand what Christian theology actually says, and makes non-sequiturs out of that...like that God can't take issue with "good" people, forgetting that nobody's "good" in that sense, and then suggests that God can't think otherwise....

I can't comment on all it says, because it's just too darn long; so I'll have to ask you to point to whatever you think is relevant. I think that much of it just misses the mark, actually.

Yeah, there was a seven-minute gap between my posting the link, and your response that the article was just "too darn long" for you to read. Of course!

Read it, and then we can talk. Otherwise, forget it.

7 minutes is not long enough to read the whole article. Either you give IC more time to read and digest it, or shut up.

If you read it in 7 minutes, I doubt that you even began to understand it.

[uwot]

7 minutes is not long enough to read the whole article. Either you give IC more time to read and digest it, or shut up.

Here ya go doc; this is from the article:
The biggest irony of Pascal's Wager as far as Christian apologetics go is that even if it was otherwise completely sound it should then suddenly become a huge disincentive for convincing an unbiased party to worship YHWH specifically. By definition worshiping the Judeo-Christian God requires the worshipper to actively reject the existence of every other deity or potential deity thanks to the intolerance that is the First Commandment. In the absence of evidence for a specific deity, the theist-to-be would be better off directing some worship to one or more proposed deities that do not require exclusive worship. Pascal's Wager being a lynchpin of Christian apologetics (rather than being a shibboleth that must be denied at all costs) can be viewed as a case of cognitive dissonance engendered by Christian privilege.

In Bayesian terms, this can be stated as saying non-believers attribute uniform prior probabilities to the existence of any particular god; all equal, and all infinitesimal. Pascal's Wager alone cannot update these probabilities as the reasoning applies only to the One True God out of an infinite number of possible gods. Without any further information to whittle this down, the odds of inadvertently worshiping the wrong god is a practical certainty. Only when the probability of a particular god existing increases does Pascal's Wager become useful, i.e., if one god could be assigned even a mere 1% chance of being the One True God, Pascal's Wager would present a clear benefit. Hence for anyone constrained by a bias towards a particular god, the Wager is far more clear cut and supportive of their belief.

Which is pretty much what I said here:

...The thing is, the odds in Pascal's wager are exactly the same for every god that has ever been proposed. The odds of anyone choosing the correct god are therefore vanishingly small. Given that worshipping one god generally pisses off all the others, the best bet is in fact not to worship any.

Which, I'm sure you will agree, even Mr Can could read in under 7 minutes.

If you read it in 7 minutes, I doubt that you even began to understand it.

That's not nice, doc. What sort of god would condone such behaviour?

[henry quirk]

"But what about experiments? Are you up for those?"

As long as I don't have to drop a dime in the collection plate, sure.

[henry quirk]

"...he's sincerely interested in the question..."

Absolutely.

My disbelief is founded not on some high-falutin' philo-reasoning but on what seens to me to be the absence of a supra-natural dimension to the world.

I, despite bein' the greatest thing since toast, might be wrong.

If I buy skimmed instead of whole, that's an error I can live with.

If I dismiss the architect, creator, sustainer of reality cuz I was too dim to see him, that's a whole different kinda error.

So, as I can, I sit with the question, have coffee with it, consider it...not all the time, not everyday, but regularly.

I consider my interest to be sensible.

[davidm]

7 minutes is not long enough to read the whole article. Either you give IC more time to read and digest it, or shut up.

If you read it in 7 minutes, I doubt that you even began to understand it.

I know that. I was referring to the fact that earlier, he responded to an article seven minutes after I posted it, which obviously indicated that he had not read it.

[thedoc]

7 minutes is not long enough to read the whole article. Either you give IC more time to read and digest it, or shut up.

Here ya go doc; this is from the article:

I started reading and after 10 minutes was not finished and I read pretty quickly, that is the basis for my statement.

[thedoc]

7 minutes is not long enough to read the whole article. Either you give IC more time to read and digest it, or shut up.

If you read it in 7 minutes, I doubt that you even began to understand it.

I know that. I was referring to the fact that earlier, he responded to an article seven minutes after I posted it, which obviously indicated that he had not read it.

2 points, was the earlier article as long? and perhaps he was already familiar with the subject and had ever read the article before. Did you ask?

Also this thread is over 60 pages long, I'm not going to scroll back through the thread to find it, so could you provide a link?

[davidm]

Also this thread is over 60 pages long, I'm not going to scroll back through the thread to find it, so could you provide a link?

It's just back on page 62.

[uwot]

I started reading and after 10 minutes was not finished and I read pretty quickly, that is the basis for my statement.

Fair enough, doc; I take it back.

[thedoc]

If you read it in 7 minutes, I doubt that you even began to understand it.

That's not nice, doc. What sort of god would condone such behaviour?

God who values honesty as much as I do. I try to be as honest as possible, about the only time I lie is when I am trying to spare someones feelings, where the truth is unnecessary and would hurt their feelings.

[Belinda]

"...he's sincerely interested in the question..."

Absolutely.

My disbelief is founded not on some high-falutin' philo-reasoning but on what seens to me to be the absence of a supra-natural dimension to the world.

I, despite bein' the greatest thing since toast, might be wrong.

If I buy skimmed instead of whole, that's an error I can live with.

If I dismiss the architect, creator, sustainer of reality cuz I was too dim to see him, that's a whole different kinda error.

So, as I can, I sit with the question, have coffee with it, consider it...not all the time, not everyday, but regularly.

I consider my interest to be sensible.

It is sensible. However it's odd that a reasonable man such as yourself doesn't take into account that if God is the sustainer of reality we don't have to believe that God mini- manages reality from day to day.

'Creator' and 'architect' are clear in their meanings. However 'sustainer' requires some more thought. It may be that God does not sustain reality directly via miracles but does the sustaining via the hands and minds of men.

[Immanuel Can]

Read it, and then we can talk. Otherwise, forget it.

I did read all of your article on quantum theory, as it was of reasonable length and had some chance of being relevant. The rationalwiki was mostly addressing the wrong questions -- as I say, getting Christian theology wrong, or else attributing functions or positions to the Wager that it does not assert. it didn't take more than browsing the categories to see which ones had a chance of being relevant. (For example, those who use the Wager as if it were supposed to yield a description of the specific nature of God were manifestly off target, having failed to understand the basic utility of Pascal's argument entirely.)

Seven minutes was more than enough time to browse the categories, select a few arguments, and burrow in to see if anything was there. Still, I'd have addressed any you wished to pick. But which you thought were relevant TO YOU, well, that's not for me to say. I certainly wasn't going to go through them all. This is too short a format for that.

So if you have a particular one of its many lines of thought you found relevant, we can talk about that. If not, I guess you're just throwing stuff and hoping to find something that will "stick".

Of course, we can play the game, "send you another link" all day. I'll bet I can send you a ton of stuff you, until you can't find time to write back on all of it either. But that doesn't amount to a conversation. A conversation is not a barrage of unprocessed, second-hand information followed by a "so there," but rather a systematic, developing line of thought.

But you know that.

So you'll have to suit yourself. I'll leave it with you. Conversation is a privilege, not a right we can demand.

[Immanuel Can]

"But what about experiments? Are you up for those?"

As long as I don't have to drop a dime in the collection plate, sure.

Okay. How about this modest experiment.

Ask God -- sincerely -- to make Himself known to you. Tell Him that you actually want to know, and if He will speak to you, you would want to know Him. Then see what He does.

I'm not saying you have to believe right of the start you're even talking to anybody. Let it be the ceiling, in your room alone. But tell Him honestly where you're at, in terms of your own thinking about Him, and invite Him to take you the next step.

That's all. No fireworks or clever arguments. Just try it out. But give it a bit of time. Invest yourself in doing it a bit, because taking time helps us to adjust to being sincere about it, and gives us time to figure out how we feel we need to talk to God. So say, first thing in the morning, thirty days, and five minutes.

If a person really wants to know, that seems an awfully small investment. And none of it goes in the collection plate.