Tuesday, October 28, 2008

"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.




31 comments:

InterestingPhysics said...

Firstly, I think you wrongly claim that "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'm not in a position to fall on a sword for Pascal's Wager, but I would like to see the variety of faiths of which you speak.

As to the gender question, Its terribly easy to find someone who says what you want him to say and to then refute that. Its not for me to judge either the transgendered nor their earthly judges; Both are judged by God. And really, that is simply where to leave it. To the transgendered (from here on referred to as TG) person who seeks a relationship with God, and with Jesus, I say to them to read the scriptures. While they don't speak specifically to the issue of being TG, they do speak to bearing the 'fruits of the spirit'. When Paul talks about eating meat sacrificed to idols he doesn't claim that it is right or wrong. He says in 1 Corinthians 8:1-8 " Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God. So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it {the food} is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do."

(emphasis added, and note about {the food} inserted at my peril)

What I am getting at is that for a TG person who wants Jesus to be the Lord of his/her life, this will be a secondary issue. Their identity would be first in Christ and secondarily in their gender/sexuality. Understanding about 'eating meat sacrificed to idols' or sexual desire for another person (because where else would the TG question come in? -- I assume that you're asserting the claim that a TG person by their existence cannot help but sin if they desire any other person sexually, especially if it is a person of the same apparent sex) Is ultimately between the person and God, and for the person who wants God to be the God of their life, their conscience, and scripture will be their best guides. (Also, a person who uses scripture as their guide and has a relationship with the person would be valuable)

It is non sequitur that TG beings cannot exist in God's world. Don't forget that Jesus tells the pharisees that when we resurrect we are neither married nor given in marriage, but are 'like the angles'. Angles appear to be sexless. I think that masculine and feminine are distinct from male and female. Like I said yesterday, I am a part of the Bride of Christ. In that role, I must assume feminine characteristics. I must receive the Holy Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit must know me, and indwell me. As Jamie's husband, I should assume masculine characteristics, because in that role, I am to 'love her as Christ loves the church and gave his life for her'

Anyway, you hopefully now see the folly of long posts. I'm not sure where i started or where we'll end up.

J.V. Toups said...

Charles, excellent post.

I am not suggesting that every strain of Christian theology is identical on this issue, and I would agree with you that, ultimately, it is a personal issue between God and Person. But, penultimately, the issue manifests itself socially, and it cannot be ignored. Should the medical establishment provide hormones? Should doctors provide sex-reassignment services? Should gender dysphoria be considered a disease or some other kind of state? These are real life, practical questions which most Christians feel that the state should be involved in. Christians, in general, seem to believe using the state to mold the universe into a place with more a Christian shape is appropriate, acceptable, even mundane.

I don't doubt that the God of Christianity, if he exists as you describe him, is "large enough" to love a transgendered person. This is obvious. I ask whether the universe that that God implies cannot do better than to merely love the transgendered person "in spite of their flaws". Maybe we can elevate them to symbols of raw humanity - to symbols of will manifest in the world, despite nature.

I realized after my post that my language was ambiguous - my point is not that TG people cannot exist in God's Universe, but that if they do exist, they are most easily explained as Fall-induced errors or imperfections in some ideal fabric.

The point is that discarding the notion of ideal forms of gender identity can be liberating and useful, and we lose that ability when we assume the Christian Cosmology is real.

The classical example, by the way, is that worshiping Jesus as God is obviously the worship of a False Idol if you are Jewish. If Jesus is not God, then you are in serious peril by believing he is IF Judaism is True. Islam recognizes Christians as people of the book, but I am certain they also believe that seeing Jesus as divine constitutes blasphemy. I am not a religious authority, but I believe it is morally unacceptable to believe things which are not true, so I also assert you damage your dignity by believing in the Divinity of Christ. Mormons would assert you will make it to shitty-heaven.

Battybattybats said...

Excellent.

You show how easill Pascals wager condemns itself by pointing out its ommitions.

As for the place of TG people in the bible...

In biblical times they used to be called Eunachs, Eunach did not just mean castrated as we use the word today but included many different types of people.

And God holds Eunachs quite highly in some parts of the bible and Jesus speaks very highly of them!

"Firstly, I think you wrongly claim that "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'm not in a position to fall on a sword for Pascal's Wager, but I would like to see the variety of faiths of which you speak."

Well lets see, it wont help you break the cycle of endless reincarnation but will likely lead you to further entrapment, so thats most of the Hindu and Bhuddist faiths (of which there are plenty).

Your not accepting Mohammad as the final prophet of god and your worhsiping Jesus the prophet as God so Islam is damning you to hell.

Your not walking the Dao to imortality and no-ones burning yellow money for you when you die so it's off to the poverty riddled slums beyond the yellow springs in the main Daoist afterlife.

Your not buried with coins for Charon the ferryman so you'll be trapped on the wrong side fo the river Styx according to pagan greek and roman beliefs.

No tobacco and no weapons with your burial so many Native American afterlives are closed to you.

Being burned or buried after death dirties the purity of the elements rather than being eaten by vultures in the towers of silence so the Zoarastrian afterlife is not likely to be good.

Ignoring the importance of earthly deeds may well result in too heavy a heart when your faced with Anubis.

You could be lucky, not every non-christian belief system will condemn christians. The Yezidee could be right and Satan repented already and his tears quenched the fires of hell and regained his place amongst the angels so there is no damnation any more.

Or it might be the vikings and by failing to die in battle or drown at sea you miss out on the fun in Valhalla, the glory of ragnarok or the paradise beneah the sea for drowned sailors and instead suffer the drudgery of the bleak realm of Hel till after Ragnarok is over, but after that its ok as the new world created by Balder the dead god after ragnarok should be pretty cool, pity about the eons of suffering you have to endure waiting for it.

That enough examples for you? One can restate Pascals wager with almost all of them and they could be just as effective an argument for Islam or Hinduism or Bhuddism or Daoism or Zen or Zoastrianism or Shintoism or Animism or many many others.

Unknown said...

Pascal may have chosen to believe, beyond evidence, in the deity purported by Judeo-Christian mythology, however, his wager applied to deism most broadly. From a non-Christian point of view, Pascal's wager still makes sense - as nonsense.

I think the argument is best "nutshellized" thusly, by Alan Dershowitz:

"I have always considered "Pascal's Wager" a questionable bet to place. Any God worth "believing in" would surely prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite."
(Alan Dershowitz)

Rufus McCain said...

Try Peter Kreeft's piece on Pascal's Wager.

Rufus McCain said...

Where I see a problem with the wager is in the notion that my belief or unbelief will necessarily result in salvation or damnation. We all fall along a spectrum of belief and unbelief and surely if there is a benevolent God who created us in this condition of uncertainty and confusion, mercy will be extended to those of us who have fallen prey to the lies and obfuscation and bad philosophy that lead to unbelief.

On the other hand, I think it makes sense, existentially, to embrace the humility that our condition in the universe so clearly calls for--to commit oneself to God or some notion of God, even if it's just the undefined "higher power" of Alcholics Anonymous. If, as it seems clear, there is one uncreated being who created everything and everyone else, then it makes sense to acknowledge that. If there are signs and hints in the history of the world suggesting the possibility that this being is personally interested in our lives, then, yeah, it makes sense to bet on that. In those terms, I think the wager is on the right track. Kierkegaard may come to the aid of Pascal here.

J.V. Toups said...
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J.V. Toups said...
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J.V. Toups said...

Rufus,

You don't appear to have read my post. To commit oneself to a "higher power" is to assert and act as though there is an order to the universe and a wisdom to it. If there is no such order then you have done something very dangerous, something akin to riding in a limousine and saying "We might as well assume that there is a driver" when there is not one and you may be heading towards a cliff.

The existential qualities of being-without-God may not be ideal but only a fool would suggest that oblivion - a very real possibility for humanity and consciousness - would in any sense be a superior situation. Therefore if there appears to be no God then it is best for us to act accordingly and seize our practical and philosophical destiny for the betterment of consciousness or at least for is continued existence, and not depend on some God to have sorted, or to sort, things out.

Does this make sense?

J.V. Toups said...

Also I would indicate my other postings for reasons why 1) there does not appear to be a "being" as the "uncaused cause" and 2) that there is no good evidence, as in "I would be able to publish this in Nature" for the idea that this "being" ever interacted with man.

Battybattybats said...

Let us consider this for a moment.

A god that would damn any human to an eternity of suffering on the basis of losing said wager, or for failing to accept a particular doctrine, or for following a different faith especially if the gods true faith is never known to them even though said person has lived a good and just life is a less ethical and moral being than many mortal humans.

If a human can be morally greater, more compassionate benevolent and forgiving than god then if such a god exists it is one that should be condemned!

Could humans sit in judgement of god? Could individual humans be better morally than their creator?

The god of Pascals wager is a lesser moral being than most of the humans that I know.

As such either such a god does not exist because it could not be so fallible or if such a god exists it is unworthy of worship or obediance but deserves only outright and total rebellion and defiance until it learns to raise itself morally to the level of its often superior creations!

Pascals wager is an argument in favour of a cruel and evil god. A Cthulhu-style god of an uncaring and unsympathetic tyranical universe.

And damnation would be better than obediance to a cruel and unworthy and unjust tyrant-god.

Rufus McCain said...

J.V.: If I'm riding in a limousine and it is tooling along, turning when the road curves, stopping at intersections, etc., then I think it's a fair bet to say someone's driving it, even if I can't see the driver.

J.V. Toups said...

Rufus,

excellent - now demonstrate to me the reality that there is any credible reason that applies to the world at large, the human condition, etc.

The much more plausible and elegant statement of reality is that humans are an emergent phenomenon of and ordered, but unintelligent fundamental physics which we have a very good description of in the standard model.

There is no evidence for a person God which is credible, and no need to hypothesize one given what data we have about the universe.

Rufus McCain said...

I think the analogy you propose succinctly states the case. The fact that there is something rather than nothing, and even more so that there is discernible majesty and order to the universe and even more so that you and I are carrying on this conversation -- is highly suggestive of a creative intelligence at work behind the whole of existence -- that there is someone who created the limousine and is in control of its ultimate destination.

You suggest that it's dangerous to believe someone is in the driver's seat when in reality there is no one there. The opposite case could be just as dangerous. Imagine you are riding a bus and one of your fellow passengers turns out to be a lunatic who believes there is no driver. So the lunatic grabs the wheel and in the ensuing struggle steers the bus off a cliff.

See, we arrive at a stalemate. And now we're back to some form of Pascal's Wager.

J.V. Toups said...

"is highly suggestive of a creative intelligence at work behind the whole of existence -- that there is someone who created the limousine and is in control of its ultimate destination."

No. There is no good argument which suggests that order implies intelligence.

Intelligence is a kind of order - it is in all observable cases a very specific kind of material phenomenon manifestly within this universe and made up of complicated arrangement of matter.

It is wacky to suggest that there is, as the "meta-phenomenon" some thing which resembles consciousness - where did the order producing that first consciousness derive from?

I am not saying it is impossible or that I can prove that it is not true - I am saying that it is a silly idea, especially since there is no evidence for it and no need to hypothesize it.

InterestingPhysics said...

Kreeft is dead on. If you have not followed that link please do. Toups, your analysis of Pascal's Wager has been wrong from the start. Of course Pascal ultimately adopts the 'Christian Cosmology', but his wager is really for Theism vs Atheism. Thus, if you find yourself taking Pascal's Wager, only then must you try to understand the nature of God and evaluate the cosmology of religions. Kreeft has even ennobled the wager for those who require it.

One should be careful when appealing to higher forms of morality. You suggest that there is a morality higher than Gods, and then insert your higher morality with no proof that it is in fact better than God's. You appeal to us as if it is commonly known or accepted that your morality would be better than God's. On what would you base your appeal? What is the standard to which you are appealing? I would submit that unless there actually is a highest form for morality, then you can't make your argument. If there is not a highest form for morality, then none are better, worse, true or false. All moralities just are and may be different. But then there is no use in ordering them. By ordering them you are just saying which one you prefer.

You may continue trying to give value to a morality by justifying it with survival, usefulness, common good, and the like, but again you are stuck with having given a value (or rather making a moral judgment) to things that should fall inside the system of morality.

I always feel like I leave with more to say, but I can't be on this all day...

J.V. Toups said...

I don't really see how morality came into this - I don't imply that there is a morality higher than God's - in fact, I do nothing of the sort at all.

The question of whether God is or is not has no bearing on the question of whether His morality is "the highest" under the assumption that He exists.

Obviously IF God exists THEN his Morality is the highest.

The whole discussion about Pascal's Wager takes place in the real world, though, where we do not know that God exists. Not only do we not know but His existence is sufficiently implicit (if it is real at all) that two grown scientists can actively disagree on the question and no experiment or argument can resolve the dispute with any kind of finality.

This is the universe we live in. This is the universe in which Pascal's Wager is advanced as some kind of argument. This is the universe in which I am suggesting that it does not constitute a rational one, for the reasons already outlined.

Suppose I come to you claiming that I can give you something as awesome as heaven + 10% and all you have to do is a little jig for me and also not be a Christian - which is to say, I am making a claim - that Christianity is not true, and that I can offer you more than what Christianity offers. I would hope that you would not apostate yourself simply because 1) you cannot discount entirely the possibility that I can deliver on this claim and 2) the reward I offer is apparently greater than the one God offers.

Why? Because it simply isn't credible that I can deliver on the promise - it isn't even credible that I can conceive of something 10% greater than heaven.

So you weigh the reward I offer you by your estimated probability that I am right (basically 0) and THEN you compare that quantity to similarly computed quantities corresponding to other offers. In a Universe with only Christianity and My Offer, you would be pretty stupid to accept my offer because Christianity is considerably more credible.

This is how Bayesian inference works, by the way, which Pascal did not know about because he was born before Bayes.

Battybattybats said...

To know if there is a 'driver at the wheel' we should look for noticable changes in the order, not for consistencies of order. And these changes should be unexpected ones, not gradual or predictible or explainable ones but total inexplicable suspensions warps and twists of the order.

Such as the car turning a sudden corner rather than continuing on.

Without this a guiding intelligence canot be assumed.

And these changes should be seen to be intelligent in nature and not random such as the car avoiding an obstacle rather than just drifting about but also must be unconnected to external influence such as the slope and lee of the road. There should be clear observable evidence of inconsistency of the creation that is inexplicable in any other way to show that there is indeed a guiding deliberate interferance rather than just patterns in random events.

As for morality it is quite simple to show. Most (though of course not all) modern humans avoid unneccessary cruelty.

The existence of eternal suffering is unneccessary. Especially for an arbitrary reason like 'no-one brought the bible to South America for thousands of years so all those native peoples burn in hell'.

If they didn't get the book thats gods fault not theirs. To punish them for his own incompetance is a sign of an unworthy god.

To create Satan is a sign of Gods incompetance or evil. If he new full well that Satan could or would rebel (ie god is omniscient) then God is evil because God deliberatly created evil, is responsible not just for the existence of evil but for its prevalance and all its qualities and attributes. If he did not then God is incompetant for making something so powerful as to rebel and either have a chance of success or think that it did that could not instantly be anihilated or reprogrammed for obedience with but a whim.

"I would submit that unless there actually is a highest form for morality, then you can't make your argument. If there is not a highest form for morality, then none are better, worse, true or false. All moralities just are and may be different. But then there is no use in ordering them. By ordering them you are just saying which one you prefer."

You don't need a 'highest' form of morality to have a 'higher' form of morality. And the latter is easy to judge. Internally consistent is a good start. Fair is another.

Unbaptised babies burning in hell is an unneccessary and unfair act of cruelty upon those incapable of avoiding there own fate that God (if he is omnipotent) could instantly suspend.

Therefore a God that causes suffering unneccessarily or for petty reasons like demanding worship and obediance and using threats of suffering to obtain it is clearly an unethical, petty, emotionally imature being.

We can easilly evaluate god as if he were an ordinary person firstly because we are supposedly similar 'made in his image' but also because we have sufficient intelligence to question.

"Obviously IF God exists THEN his Morality is the highest."

Not neccessarily. Just as the enlightenment can rise out of a state of tyranny so to is it logicly possible that Gods creation could develop a more just system of ethics than the creator.

If there is a creator there is no reason to automatically assume it is omniscient or omnipotent or omnipresent, just capable of creating.

And morality is an implicit part of the wager. it is essentially 'its best to believe in god and follow his alleged edicts because failing to do so may involve punishment while doing so may involve reward if it exists and nada either way if it deosnt.'

Well firstly there is an assumption of which god to follow to successfully follow those edicts and avoid the punishment/get the reward.

But this is a moral dilemma too. God in the wager is a tyrant who rewards only the obediant. An evil dictator who shows preferential treatment not based on merit but on nepotism.

As such even if oblivion or eternal damnation are the result it may be argued that obediance of a nepotistic tyrant is wrong and worse that if he does not exist such obediance may well propagate harm to ones fellow creatures by perpetuating this belief and living a life dedicated to furthering the belief rather than one based on reducing suffering of both the self and others, increasing happiness of both the self and others and reducing injustice.

So any god whose choice of who to reward Pascals wager would work with would be one that it would be unjust to support.

Instead even if defiance were futile in its ability to actually harm or reduce the power of an evil god such defiance would still be more worthy simply because it is standing up for ones own self against a cruel jeolous nepotistic tyrant.

Whereas living a virtuous life and having a positive impact on the people and world one interacts with is in itself virtuous and also rewarding in life as is taking personal responsibility whether there is or is not a god.

And on top of that if god is concious and intelligent and aware of people and their decisions (one should not assume this offhand because we should not assume that god is greater than his creation simply because he has the capacity to create it! God may not neccessarily be omniscient) then it is possible that god could in fact learn greater moral reasoning from that defiance and change his behaviour accordingly.

Oh and if god is omnipresent then god is also his creation, god is also in satan and is satan, god is responsible for all evil and nothing can be apart from god.

InterestingPhysics said...

In the short term, I'll suggest reading "the Problem of Pain" or "A Wrinkle in Time" or both to answer questions about suffering and its relationship to free will. Themes along these lines are somewhat borne out in the Matrix movies, but not so obviously.

More in time.

J.V. Toups said...

Charles, I see now that you were responding more to BattyBattyBats re the question of morality.

I have to more or less agree with you on this one - if we do live in a Universe where there is the God of the Christian Religion, then it is very difficult to imagine how anything could be Right except to follow that God.

It is tempting from a secular perspective and a sense of drama to complain about the cosmology of Christianity as being apparently unjust, but it is very hard to imagine how it could be in the context of the religion being true - after all in that case Justice would be What God Intends.

Battybattybats said...

In the hypothetical assumption that the christian cosmology is correct that does not mean we should automatically agree with and support god.

Parents do not own their children even though they created them. We do not have to obey such a god just because it created us nor is it automatically right to obey a creator simply because they tell you to do so.

We overthrew the tyranny of kings specifically because tyrany is unjust. Why should we not use the same principles to judge a tyrannical and unjust god?

Our free will and capacity to reason enables us just such a power and makes bling obediance wrong.

Why should we not in fact put on trial and condemn such a god for his crimes against humanity just because we have not the power to carry out sentence? For commanding acts of murder and genocide just to start with.

If such a god exists they are not free from judgement, they are not above right and wrong themselves.

It is right to oppose tyrants so it would be right to oppose a tyrannical god. Especially one that grants free will and then condemns those who use it the way they didn't wnt them to. Such a god deserves to be judged by our free will and clearly found wanting.

Why should such a god be obeyed simply because they command it? So they wrote the rules, so what? Being powerful does not make them perfect or beyond reproach just like a King or military dictator may be evil so too may a creator god, even the christian one may be evil.

And any god that grants free will and reason and then condemns with eternal suffering those that use it in ways that creator didn't want is a cruel and evil and worthless god.

And so, a god who grants favours based on nepotism as pascals wager involves is one that cannot morally or ethically be followed but one who morally and ethically MUST be opposed at any cost!

Just as a german soldier who would face execution for refusing to participate in the holocaust was considered to be obligated to die rather than to follow orders so to logically would all of us considering pascals wager be obligated to risk eternal damnation rather than support a biased corrupt tyrant who orders genocide, punishes those that disagree with it and rewards those who agree.

Consider pascals wager from a pe-christian South American religious perspective.

Say the god of the wager is Camasotz or one of the other bloodthirsty human-sacrifice demanding gods?

Should people tear the hearts out of others and willingly have their own heart torn from their living chest in fear of the gods displeasure or in hope of its reward?

The same logical principle applies to the christian god too.

If neither are real supporting the religion is wrong as it promotes suffering, if either of them are real and the wager makes the difference they are a cruel, jeolous tyrannical god who it is better to suffer the wrath of than to suck-up to as a sycophant to evil.

An evil tyrant oft calls themselves good (history is filled with them and there are many around today) so just cause such a god calls themselves good does not make them so just as an evil tyrant remains evil no matter the golden statues and massive crowds expressing love for them in stadiums out of fear while peasants starve in the fields.

Pascals wager supports obedience to tyrants. A Hitler-like god or Stalin-like god or Saddam Hussein-like god is a god worthy of rebelling against no matter the punishment so any god who rewards obedience to pascals wager and condemns good benevolant kind and compassionate people who disobey their edicts is such an evil god.

Wheras a god worthy of respect is one who would reward the virtuous who are virtuous for its own sake irrespective of their obedience or even who rewards the disobedient for their integrity!

J.V. Toups said...

Well, basically because in the Christian cosmology, Justice is not an intellectual object we produce by thinking - it is woven into the very structure of the cosmos and of being by God - it is synonymous with God.

We could disagree, because we have will, but we can't be right to do so. At least not in a standard Christian universe.

Battybattybats said...

And the justice of saddam hussein was woven into the legal and political structure.

There is no difference.

A god that weaves an injustive into the fabric of the universe is simply comitting the same injustice on a grater scale.

The Nazi soldier obeying Hitler would be called right in doing so by fellow Nazis.

So that the christian cosmology claims that because God created the universe what he wants is just and what he opposes is unjust just because he says so and weaves it into the very cosmos just makes the scale different.

It's still the action of a petty dictator bereft of virtue or ethics.

And as such a god like that, if real is an evil one that should be oppossed no matter the cost and if not real obeying such an imaginary tyrant for fear of potential retribution would be to do evil for selfish aims of self-preservation.

Support a divine evil or merely a material evil in case there is a divine evil?

Such a god if it exists has been outgrown by their creation who has the capacity to judge them as a tyrant.

And in fact if there were some way for a human to gain the power to harm or even overthrow such a god beyond the symbolic thwarting of disobedience then they would be obligated to do so just as we consider citizens obligated to attempt to overthrow evil tyrants like Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

So the existence of a creator god would not ensure that god is a good god just because they made the universe.

And a wager on the potential existence of such a god could be used to justify human sacrifice to Camasotz every bit as much as to the Christian god by the same self-referencing reasoning that if they exist then they are right.

So if such a god exists that the wager would work with then they are an evil god and the wager instead supports being evil, supporting material evil in case of the existence of divine evil.

J.V. Toups said...

We can certainly imagine a universe which looks superficially like the Christian one where what you say is true, but that isn't the same as assuming the Christian one.

Battybattybats said...

How so?

The christian god says they are right so they are right? the King says they are right so they are right?

Our free will gives us the power to reason, to clearly deduce that such is unjust no matter the power used to force it upon people.

And if it is right to oppose a tyrntn king no matter their power then it is just to oppose a tyrant god even if that is the christian god no matter its power.

The words of that god is that 'i am good' and they would say that wouldn't they! So do human tyrants.

The philosophical error is that just because in the christian cosmology god calls themselves good and gets to define by power what happens and what does not that they then are beyond reproach.

But that need not be so as far as I can see.

J.V. Toups said...

It is pretty insufficient to describe the Christian God as a "King", even the "King of the Universe". In a Christian universe moral rules are as fundamental an aspect of creation as physical ones. Maxwell's equations are on equal footing with the Golden Rule and the structure of the Divine Plan of Redemption. It is this very aspect of Christianity which I find difficult.

Free will does not give us the promise that we will reason correctly, in any case, or that we may reason to the right moral judgements - I don't think morality can be arrived at entirely by reason even in this universe and certainly not in the Christian worldview.

Think of it this way - even if I decide that an electron has no mass, for whatever reason, simply believing the electron is massless does not make it so, I am still simply WRONG about the mass of the electron.

In a Christian cosmos morality is like the mass of the electron - it is a fundamental property of being, not under the jurisdiction or control of man at all.

J.V. Toups said...

Christian readers, please feel free to elucidate and or correct me.

I am not any kind of authority.

Battybattybats said...

But fundamental parts of the cosmos can be measured and deduced by their interactions with other things that can be measured.

As for morallity via reason alone I think that is easilly possible.

The capacity for basic intellectual empathy (as not everyone is born with intuitive empathy where a person says 'It is wrong to do to others the EQUIVALENT for them of what I do not like done to me' is easilly a rational basis for morality which has as its inevitable logical consequences the principles of Human Rights.

It's a slight variation of 'do unto others' that allows for others liking or wanting different things.

Its solidly reasoned and reasonable.

Battybattybats said...

oops, that should have read:

"The capacity for basic intellectual empathy (as not everyone is born with intuitive empathy) where a person says 'It is wrong to..."

The close brackets is important, sorry.

J.V. Toups said...

Empathy may constitute a basis for reasoning about morality but it is itself an assumption - all value systems begin with the assertion of a few axiomatic values and then reasoning begins.

Pure reason cannot furnish these assumptions.

There is no reason that just because a thing cannot be measured in a particle accelerator (for instance), it cannot be a fundamental aspect of creation, particularly not in the Christian cosmos.

I think we need to be fair to Christians and honest with ourselves about these questions, and I think it is fair to agree that IF the Christian Universe is true, THEN it is also Just - it is practically tautological.

Battybattybats said...

But as people can experience things done to them by others that they do not like is that then not the basis logically for all that follows?

As I said, not all people are born with intuitive empathy or with the instinctive theory-of-mind skills that enable them to recognise that others are both reasoning and feeling beings like themselves and yet different and seperate beings capable of thinking differently.

But these things can be reasoned logicly even if they are not felt instinctively.

And once such conclusions are held does not the rationality of empathy as a guide of behaviour then follow logicly?