"God Doesn't Make Mistakes" - Gender Dysphoria and Pascal's Wager

Pascal's Wager is an item which comes up often in my discussions with Evangelicals. The basic gist of this old argument runs, basically, thusly: Hell sucks a lot, perhaps infinitely, so even if the chance of the Christian Cosmology being true is apparently small, it is worth assuming it is correct for the sake of avoiding damnation. This is usually proffered in a halo of secondary claims like "Living a Christian life is basically good and healthy also - so what do you have to lose?"

The argument is a bad one. I'd really love to see people stop making it, because bad arguments, even for True things, are a kind of lie.

It is bad for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it poses a tremendous false dichotomy. The world is divided into "Christianity" on one hand and some kind of unnamed life of nihilism, probably destructive behavior on the other, as if these were the only two possible things a person could believe, as if only Christians behave well and everyone else is out whoring it up with cocaine all over their face. Non-Christians probably even drink alcohol, it is no doubt whispered. This puts Pascal's Wager in the unfortunately not so strange position of being one of those evangelical arguments which only makes sense if you basically already accept the rough outline of the Christian Universe.

The world, unfortunately, is not so clinically delineated. It is more realistically perceived as an almost sickly tumor of competing worldviews - each casting for human thought and each threatening one or the other kind of damnation for the wrong choice. A Christian is deluding himself if he believes that his faith should depend on a wager, because worshiping Jesus-as-God makes him a blasphemer to a variety of other faiths, and puts him on the fast track to damnation in them, if he has wagered incorrectly.

I will contribute my voice to the cacophony and suggest that, to devote oneself in error to falsehood, when life is transient and mind is precious, is a profound misuse of a person, among other moral wrongs. This leads me to the main content of this post.

This is a pretty nice, pretty fair, article on transgendered children. The article follows a family as they try to cope with their youngest child's insistence on a female gender for itself. The child is externally male, but has, from more or less day one, insisted that "he" is a "she," and has engaged in play towards this end.

I don't think anyone would suggest that this does not pose serious moral questions for the parents and for us.

One of the more beautiful aspects of Catholicism is the deep integration of gender roles into the theology of the Church. It may be that there will be no husbands and wives in the kingdom heaven, but until that point, the Church will be festooned with linked images of man and wife. Gender is a fundamental concept in Catholic Theology, one of the "real symbols" which represents and "is" a higher truth. The Church is the Bride of Christ, the Marriage is a microcosm of the relationship between God and Man, Christ's Sacrifice repairs the fundamental damage to the male-female relationship done by The Fall, where it all started, for us, anyway.

Similar, if faded, images, course around the wilderness of Protestantism.

Neither group deals well with human behavior which implies gender is a statistical, rather than elemental, phenomenon. That nature might make a man who loves men, or a woman who loves women, or a person who has no sexual identity whatsoever. The child in the Atlantic piece has an Evangelical friend whose parents put it bluntly: "God doesn't make mistakes."

In other words, in a universe with a person-God, where gender is an fundamental symbol/reality which fits into the narrative of the universe like a puzzle-piece, the intersexed and/or transgendered simply cannot happen.

This isn't necessarily the conclusion of theological thought, but it is the most obvious, and one frequently intuitively landed upon by the average person. To these people, deviations from the standard gender roles is necessarily the product of illness - either spiritual or physical, and measures prophylactic to the soul must be applied, perhaps in love or pity, but unavoidably.

It is not possible to view gender confusion as a difficult, but essentially morally neutral, situation for a consciousness to be in, which is how I see it. It is not possible to view the human mind at the center of the dysphoria as the essential object to be protected, and the statistically likely genders as mere coincidences in an ebullient universe, coincidences to be shaped, distorted or dispensed with entirely in the pursuit of the greater dignity of the mind.

An equivalently meaningful argument to Pascal's Wager is that to believe in a moral cosmology, at least any self-respecting one, requires that we restrict our behaviors in ways which have real, tangible consequences for real, living humans. If we are wrong about the supernatural, if we have no treasures waiting in heaven for us, then we have committed an awful wrong in treating transgendered people, for instance, as though they simply cannot exist, and must be ill.

If there is no God, then the universe is not going to provide peace for us, or wisdom. We cannot assume that mankind is not on the road to one or another kind of oblivion. It is dangerous to believe that there is someone driving the school bus when you do not know. Christianity may be right, maybe someone is driving, but I prefer to suggest that we be honest with ourselves, and if the driver's seat is empty, that we put humans in it, not a fiction draped over an unthinking cosmos.

---

Walker Percy

“Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A: Bad.
Q: No. I mean are you liberal or conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q: Grabbed aholt?
A: A Louisiana expression.
Q: But isn’t the Catholic Church in a mess these days, badly split, its liturgy barbarized, vocations declining?
A: Sure. That’s a sign of its divine origins, that it survives these periodic disasters.
Q: You don’t act or talk like a Christian. Aren’t they supposed to love one another and do good works?
A: Yes.
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellowman or do many good works.
A: That’s true. I haven’t done a good work in years.
Q: In fact, if I may be frank, you strike me as being rather negative in your attitude, cold-blooded, aloof, derisive, self-indulgent, more fond of the beautiful things of this world than of God.
A: That’s true.
Q: You even seem to take certain satisfaction in the disasters of the twentieth-century and to savor the imminence of world catastrophe rather than world peace, which all religions seek.
A: That’s true.
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellow Christians, to say nothing of Ku Kluxers, ACLU’ers, northerners, southerners, fem-libbers, anti-fem-libbers, homosexuals, anti-homosexuals, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, anti-hippies, senior citizens.
A: That’s true – though taken as individuals they turn out to be more or less like oneself, i.e., sinners, and we get along fine.
Q: Even Ku Kluxers?
A: Sure.
Q: How do you account for your belief?
A: I can only account for it as a gift from God.
Q: Why would God make you such a gift when there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellowman?
A: I don’t know. God does strange things. For example, he picked as one of his saints a fellow in northern Syria, a local nut, who stood on top of a pole for thirty-seven years.
Q: We are not talking about saints.
A: That’s true.
Q: We are talking about what you call a gift.
A: You want me to explain it? How would I know? The only answer I can give is that I asked for it, in fact demanded it. I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and in this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it. No doubt other people feel differently.
Q: But shouldn’t faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?
A: Yes. That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.
Q: You believe that?
A: Of course.
Q: I see. Moving right along now –”

- Walker Percy (1916-90), excerpt from “Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself” (Self-Interview, 1977)"

- via Stephen's Tumblr

I have a lot of respect for Walker Percy, in whom I recognize a kindred¹, if much brighter, mind. Unfortunately, I can't help but take issue with this self conducted interview, in particular this part: "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer 'Scientific humanism.' That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him."

What I object to is the idea that "Scientific Humanism" precludes, somehow, both mystery and delight. It is a position which I hear often and am, frankly, tired of addressing. The style I have used in these blog postings is in part meant to emphasize that I find life to be profoundly beautiful, even in the most tedious of moments. A fly lights for a moment on the rim of my screen, the blackness of its hard shell glinting crimson for a dilated moment before taking flight again. To stub my toe is to feel blossom within me a bright red throbbing, mysterious and wonderful, even as I know it is pain. Every moment of life can be glutted with beauty if a person chooses to cultivate it.

This does not seem to require God. There are reasonable explanations for how the perception of beauty may occur in the context of materialism. Some people, I guess, will say that such explanations render all things inert but these people have fallen for the fallacy that to describe a thing is to capture it somehow. If I were to describe, for instance, Venus, as "a large rock with some gas around it" I might be technically correct and yet, this description is both flaccid and utterly irrelevant to the fact that Venus can also be a pinprick of violent light near a tarnished silver moon on a clear fall night. Only the most tedious kind of person believes that things can only bear a single kind of description or that, in any case, to apply a description to a thing fixes, in any way, its nature.

Percy justifies his position by calling up the specter of death, pointing out the distinct and correct grotesqueness of death from the human perspective. But death has nothing to do with it, and it betrays what all of this is really about. Religion is about making the universe human, not beautiful. If Percy believed as I do that Christian thought represented a profound overreaching of the human desire to know, a patchwork and tattered blanket of inconsistent cosmology and philosophy, and a collection of highly unlikely statements about the world, he would find his capacity for the perception of beauty, and the capacity for the creation of beauty on the part of the universe, undiminished. What he would find is that the story of the universe had ceased to be about him and/or us. That there was no story at all except the story he told to himself and others and the stories others told him.

People will say at this point something like "How can our stories mean anything in the abscence of God?" To which I pose the counter question, "How does postulating an ultra-consciousness resolve any of the existential questions about the nature of 'meaning'?" There are many reasons not to postulate such a consciousness, but among the reasons to do so is not "It answers the question of meaning." God does not answer this question, He merely delays the question, perhaps sometimes with a fog of words about mystery. The theist is no more in possession of a justification for meaning than the atheist.

I do not feel stripped of meaning because of lack of belief in a person-God. I feel, on the contrary, profoundly grateful that such a song of stories could have blossomed in a universe so alien to it. To look out at the sky, the vast tracks of void utterly hateful towards thought, that make up the lion's share of the universe, is to be filled with love, a profound love, for the simplest moment of perception. No "person" is responsible for my being, for the architecture of the universe, for the suffering (however mild) I might endure, for the sadness, in any grand sense. It all might never have happened, never did happen on Mars or Venus, and so even at the worst moment, to be is a wonderful accident. In abandoning Christianity I have found for the first time the ability to love being in an utterly unadulterated way.

Mystery would, of course, be undiminished as well. Arguably the mysteries of my universe are larger than those in the Christian world view. In any case the notion that science has slain mystery, is slaying it, or will slay it, has probably more to do with scientists with poor imaginations than any apologetical attacks from the spiritually minded.

Why do I object to religion then? Because I believe it is a disservice to being. Sometimes, as in Catholicism in some individuals, such as Percy, it nearly reaches or exceeds the level of art, adulterated only by the fact that it is not True. In other cases it is corrosive to the human spirit, bending us towards an incuriosity that is criminal, a fear of being profound enough to twist a man into a glassy eyed knot.

When one of us dies, a light goes out. A light which, when cast upon the tedious mechanical universe, reflects back a place of subtle and outrageous beauty. The light is out forever. I can't countenance, then, systematic dimming of these lights while they still burn.

---

¹: Kindred, by which I obviously mean this.

Chairs

From comments:

Just Charlie said...

Toups,
Does one have the luxury of simply believing or not believing in ideal forms? Wouldn't they either exist or not exist? And if they do not exist, what does that imply about one's ability to reason?

October 3, 2008 10:50 AM

J.V. Toups said...

Ideal forms are a solution looking for a problem. When they were conceived, the problem was that people could recognize various objects as belonging to categories and the process by which this occurred seemed to require some large sense of "what things actually are."

These days we know how you recognize a chair for a chair. A series of neural networks analyze various components of your sensory input for properties and if enough properties are operant in that stream, they eventually activate a network of neurons corresponding to a fuzzy category of "things I call chairs so that I can communicate with other people." There is no need to postulate an abstract chair being anywhere. The notion of chair is much better explained as the activity of some neurons in your brain.

October 3, 2008 10:57 AM

J.V. Toups said...

In other words, I am not going to take seriously the notion of "ideal forms" until you give me a single piece of tangible evidence that I need them to understand some phenomenon in the world around me.

October 3, 2008 10:59 AM

Just Charlie said...

So you are saying that chairs are chairs, and one chair is not better than another or closer to the ideal chair than another (since no ideal chair exists). And so it follows that one might perceive a chair as being better than another, but that is really only her preference. Is that right? (feel free to begin a new post).

October 3, 2008 11:51 AM

------------------------------


I am saying we need not postulate the existence of an ideal chair to explain the phenomenology of chair recognition, appraisal and/or discussion. It is of course conceivable that such an ideal chair exists, since the lack of evidence for something is not evidence against it BUT the notion of platonic forms underlies Christian Theology SO if God loves me and wants me to understand Him and believe in Him THEN He must want me to believe ideal forms exist because I need to to even begin to grasp the Christian world view AND YET no observation I have ever made in this universe has even implied the existence of ideal forms, all being better explained by materialism, strongly implies that the Christian Worldview is inconsistent with itself and this, combined with the fact that it offers me no more ability than materialism to predict, understand, and/or make sense of the world, implies that I can neglect it as the tattered edges of the dreams of pre-rational man.

This is the basic argument which I will probably repeat over and over : I do not claim to understand the universe in any complete sense BUT Christianity does. To convince me of the validity of Christianity you must first convince me that I can know anything at all, that what I will know if I apply myself to the question of the universe is that the cosmology of the Christian Universe is True, and, in parallel, that the Cosmology of the Christian Universe is internally consistent.

Reason

See the first few chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach for a good primer on formal systems. The upshot is that a formal system is a set of symbols and some rules describing what combinations of symbols are in the formal system (theorems) and which are not. Formal systems may map onto predictions about reality (for instance the Natural numbers 0 .. infinity are composed of the symbols for those numbers and the rules of multiplication, division and subtraction with the caveats that certain divisions and subtractions are undefined (like 7/5 or 5 -7), it so happens that this system corresponds to counting things like desks and so we can use it to make predictions about desk-counting that work out).

To reason is to form a formal system and apply it to reality and to discard it or change the way it fits with reality when it fails to reflect the behavior of some phenomenon in the world.

This kind of reasoning won't get us far but I am afraid it is all there is. If we really want to talk about it, I can review formal systems more carefully over 3-4 posts. I could use the review

Wikipedia: Formal System

Never Say Die

This article is relevant to our interests.
Never Say Die

No... Where to end!

Now would be a great time to skip ahead and talk about hell, but I will not do so, delicious though it may be. Actually my title speaks more to the llllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhh
of your post. I won't yet complain, but I'll state my dilemma. I find that when arguing with you, you'll invoke some "bad" philosophy to which I have a solid refutation, however, before I can address it, you've moved on to a different but equally bad philosophy. (Of course I'm teasing to call them bad. All I mean, is that I believe they are wrong and I have good reasons why.) In time I'll address this post (ASAP), but experiment duties call.

Where to Start

Charles and I argue about "religion" although the arguments are really about, on my end, several other, related, topics. First is epistemology - we cannot discuss what we know about the world, and therefore religion, until we know what we know and how we know it. The second subject is cosmology, which I will apply in a rather slipshod manner to mean merely "what sort of universe are we living in?" The reasons I cannot accept Christianity fall into on or the other of these categories. The details of Christianity are of only mild importance.

I will make an attempt to sketch out the broad outlines of these reasons here. Epistemology first. There are two sub-strokes to this argument - the first is the more general and the second flows from making some conditional assumptions about the epistemology presented in Christianity and asking whether Christianity seems "reasonable" under those assumptions.

First things first. What is my position with respect to being? I say "my" and not "our" because establishing that anything else in the universe is of the same "kind" as me, whatever that means, is something for much further down the philosophical road. For now we begin with just this particular "thing" being without concerning ourselves whether any other particular thing "is" the way I find myself to be.

I find myself existing, but what does that mean? It is unfortunately unclear. The things which I can say about this state with anything like certainty are that 1) Denying that the existence "is" does not cause the sensation of existence to cease; 2) Denying that I exist also leaves me immediately in a difficult position logically, because "who denies?" if I deny my own existence; 3) there are things other than me, by which I mean that I cannot anticipate by self reflection all aspects of my conscious experience. It is possible that all "existence" is the product of "my brain," whatever that is, but I still consider that to "other than myself" philosophically. "My self" means here "that which is". My self would continue to be even if I could not recall, for instance, that my first memory is of a giant clay colored ant-pile across the gray chain-linked fence of my pre-school or the exact plump tulip petal of my first real kiss. These things, as far as I can tell at this moment, have no more objective reality than the images in a film. My senses, my memories, so on and so forth, could have a variety of sources unrelated to any substantive world. I make some kind of immaterial effort and they appear before me with some vividness, but vividness alone is not evidence for reality. Novels are often vivid and describe things which are not "real". What I cannot deny is that these things come from something other than me - they arrive from somewhere else. To watch a young woman clog out in the country was in some sense no more a matter of my own volition than the upwelling of sadness from nowhere I feel when losing love. Both were upon me as experiences, and neither could be avoided as they happened. A most interesting "thing" besides the mote of my existence is time, this sensation of a medium in which things happen and through which I pass.

How can we proceed? Being seems to have not provided us with the tools to distinguish it from a maelstrom of false impressions and imaginary memories. Honestly I don't believe at this point in the discussion we can really convince ourselves of the reality of the external universe or our "internal universe." We can only move forward with thinking because to not do so is at the very least just as much of a waste of time. So I move forward making the conditional assumption, more for the purposes of amusement than anything else, that my senses and mind report to me things which are real, by which I at least mean "fixed" in some sense. That the nightmare I had of the attic fan being haunted in my first home is a real experience, corresponding to something that actually "passed through" this body at some point. That the sensation I have right now of a tooth pick sliding loudly between my two front teeth corresponds to some "thing" following some rules "out there" which is consistent enough to learn about. That learning is itself possible. These are assumptions - but they are conditional. The universe might very well decohere into a kaleidoscope of sensations tomorrow or in the very next moment and under those circumstances I would have to re-evaluate my assumptions, just as I might suddenly realize the fact of dreaming within a dream.

In other words, "I appear to be, therefore I might as well think." Descartes's tautology might be comforting, but it gets us nowhere and I prefer to acknowledge that fact more directly.

So here we are being and thinking and assuming that there is some regularity in the external world. This brings us into the realm of cosmology. And the first place we kiss gently the subject of religion. Two kisses, in fact.

It is interesting that the scientific world view flows naturally from this epistemology. Science is the business of making conditional assumptions, and the first such assumption - the mother hypothesis - is that "things will make sense." Science has not yet encountered a nut which, able to crack it, has born fruit which called into question this fundamental assumption. Many a youthful hypothesis has fallen to the depredations of callous reality, but in each case we fall back and say "well, that isn't true, but this must make some kind of sense" and in all cases, some kind of sense has been made. Some questions are beyond our material or intellectual ability to probe, and so are left open (perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever - the universe made me no promise of understanding when I found myself being a moment ago), but it is important to note that nothing we can get into the lab refuses to submit, ultimately, to sense. This is a remarkable property of the content of being. There is certainly nothing in our Quiver of Fundamental Ideas (described above) to imply directly that this would be true. The Remarkable Consistency of Things is the second wonderful surprise of being, the first being being.

From this consistency - from the mere assumption of this consistency, has flowed a concussive wave of "knowledge" by which we may as well mean a giant catalog of consistencies. Things can be described in terms of position, direction, energy, and momentum. Electrons have this particular charge and mass. A hydrogen atom behaves this way. The rainbow I saw arching between two peaks in the alps, a sick heat in my heart, is the conspiracy of a trillion rain-drops bending fleet photons. Oh the beauty of this catalog, the magnificent fixed variety. The blue sky! The blue sky of scattered light! A heart could fill and break and mend and fill again a thousand times on it all. And miracle of miracles, this catalog is built on nothing but the silver sliver of a thought, that things ought to be predictable, comprehensible, sensible.

This is the first reason to discount Christianity - because we do not need it. The universe is quite believable if we merely assume that some prior provides nothing more than the possibility that things be consistent. This is next to nothing. The hypothesis that this prior source of order is a "person" is, to the naive, scientific mind, a kind of maudlin clown of an idea. An effigy of man attempting to embrace an infinitely more broad and beautiful universe.

Have we explained everything? Certainly, obviously, not. But neither does Christianity. Christianity plucks from the fertile forest of the universe all the questions which we cannot face and stuffs them together into a scarecrow and labels it "God." I felt no more "sure" of things when I tried to believe in God than I do now. I had the same mass of questions, though perhaps they were turned sideways or upside down.

This is the first kiss.

The second kiss involves the fact that wrapping up all the questions this way does nothing but twist the fabric of thought into a grotesque, nightmare landscape of pitfalls and peaks for the adventurous mind. I will deal with this kiss later.

OK...

I just set it up so that you and I should get a email whenever one of us posts or if anyone comments. This should then serve as a test of that.
-Charles

The Rules

Shall be: make sense.

Here it is.

Here is where we can post our arguments. Shall we agree to any rules?