Authority

Good stuff! You have very clearly explained your position. Well done! Here are my thoughts…

You said:
“I think it (Pascals Wager) more or less comes across, at least to me, as an expression of the perceived futility of non-belief. Does that make sense?”

Absolutely. I would tend to agree with you.

You said…

"I'm a pragmatist, Jason, mostly because my lack of pragmatism has been violated more than once. I accept what works, and reject those things that I see as not working, mostly just simply because I don't know how to do otherwise. Here is an example of my pragmatism: If someone were in a fairly pragmatic way able to show me that christianity provides a more accurate conception of reality than anything else, I'd accept it as true. Here is another weird result of my pragmatic idea. If someone's christianity leads them to make choices in how they interact with their environment that helps them and those they love flourish in that environment, it doesn't matter if the christianity(or any other religion or worldview or personal philosophical construct) is correct or not. It may even be a character flaw on my part that I can't be like that(flourish as a christian while knowing that christianity isn't real, simply because it'd be a good way to cope with a very christianized environment), but I don't know how to be other than what I am."

Here are a few thoughts in response:

I guess my first response is that Christianity is not pragmatic. I think I would do a disservice to the truth of God by trying to make it so, and so would anyone else. If someone were to do so then they would probably strip Christianity of its truth in order to do so. So my first hope is that no one ever tries to convince you that from a pragmatic standpoint Christianity is a “more accurate conception of reality”.

Secondly, my hope is that you never accept Christianity as true for pragmatic reasons. Now I know that this might at first sound bizarre to you, but it is true. To me this appears to be a simple choice between two authorities in the thought world. There are only two. One is rationalism, the other is revelation. Rationalism is trusting in unaided human reason for the standard of knowledge. As I read your words I thought them to be an almost perfect functional definition for rationalism. Herein lays the rub. I would not want you to accept or believe in Christ because your rationalistic mindset has told you that it is true. This is simply because you would still have the same authority, which is your unaided human reason, and at any time when something else appears more true then you might change. So, though I believe Christianity to be the only accurate conception of reality, I would hope you never believe it because it is. No, I believe in the end that this is truly a question of authority, and as much as I like to debate with you, it comes down to whether we trust in our own reason or in revelation. What is my ultimate authority and what is yours. Does any of this make sense?

You said…
So if you tell me that prayer works, I want to see it work in a way that is clearly, obviously the result of prayer, and not the side effect of some other process. Sorry, but at this point I don't think that you or anyone else can do that in any meaningful way.

I guess the problem here is that it sounds like you believe that God cannot use His creation to answer prayer. I believe that God uses creation and human will and “scientific means” in order to answer prayer. In other words, he uses what he created to do what he wants to do. I really don’t see a problem with that and can’t find fault in Him using what is His to bring about His will. It sounds as if this is unacceptable to you, but that God must answer prayer or move in a way that you cannot explain in another manner. That doesn’t bother me at all, but I do think our two ideas show forth our pre-scientific worldviews that color our views of reality.

You said...
If you say that your god is real, and that it/he loves me, I'm fine with that, but I want to see consistent evidence of that, that I can point to, and see as working in a consistent manner. Hasn't happened so far, hehe

I would think that you would be able to point to the historical events of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus as consistent evidence that God loves you, but that is obviously because I do. I guess it all goes back to that authority in the realm of thought thing again huh?

Anyway, I am off for another week of fun in Edwards! Have a great week!
Jason

Pascals Wager

Yes! Once again you and I agree! I too think Pascals Wager is flawed because it is a purely pragmatic argument. Now, I don't suppose we agree on why it is flawed, but at least we both think it is flawed. All of what you said about reasons for it being flawed I do agree with. I would put it a little differently from a Christian point of view but I think it is almost the same.

I guess, trying to flesh out my thoughts here, I saw in your original post what I believed to be a "pragmatic" approach to all of life. I could be wrong but that is how it appeared to me. In simpler terms it sounded like you were saying, "Hey, if it works for you then believe it!" That is why it conjured up in my mind Pascals Wager. Now I personally think pragmatism is wrong, so I would never use such an argument, but I thought it drew good application to what it sounded like you were saying. To me, trying to think from the pragmatic ways of things, Pascals Wager does appear to be the most pragmatic approach to life.

Anyway, on to something that I suppose is more relevant to both of us. It goes back to what I originally asked and a statement you made in your latest blog.
"The insurance policy that you are suggesting that I buy doesn't cover all the possible eventualities, much less the primary one that the evidence of nature supports, that we just simply exist and should make the best of what we have."
So is our view of nature purely pragmatic also? How do we really know if any of this stuff actually exists. How do we know if our conception of nature is real or imagined, or is all that matters is that my conception works for me? In other words, how you understand nature is simply a metaphysical concept in your mind. Are you saying that it really doesn't matter whether that concept reflects what is real or not, so long as it "works for me"?

What the Hell?

You said

Thanks for your thought. Here is my thought in response. If the God of the Bible is real then anyones unbelief or lack of trust in Him culminates in... well, you know. So though a Buddhist might "live longer" because he made healthy decisions, yet still he will regret it for all of eternity. So how is it beneficial for him or how does this increase his survival? I think it has the opposite effect.
So I guess I would personally fall back, at least on a survivability aspect, on the words of Pascal. "Should a man be in err in supposing Christianity to be true, he could not be a loser by mistake, but how irreperable is his damage and how dangerous is his end should he err in supposing it to be false."

Don't be shy, Jason. If you're going to threaten me with Hell, use the real word. Threatening me with hell only works if I actually believe in it. I don't. If you believe that christianity is true, and that non-believers like me are just denying the reality of what they really truly know is real, then arguments such as pascals wager must seem extremely good, and very persuasive. I imagine that if that were my position, it might see like a good argument to me, too. But pascals wager could be applied from the perspective of most of the worlds religions and seem persuasive from that internal perspective. After all "Should a man err in supposing Islam to be true, he could not be a loser by mistake, buy how irreperable is his damage and how dangerous is his end should he err in supposing it to be false." is just as valid, or substitute any religion that threatens some form of suffering. If an argument is just as valid from multiple opposing viewpoints, the argument fails to convince.

New Thoughts

So I have recently been doing more work on an article on Christian Mathematics. The other day a co-worker approached me (at break time) and asked what I was working on. When I told him he responded first with a puzzled look, and then had a thought come to him. "Oh, I see!" he said, "You are trying to prove that God exists by math and science!" I responded, "Actually, no. Its 180 degrees the other way. I am justifying the existence of math and science by God." I then proceeded to explain to him why mathematics and science are reliable guides to truth.

This raises a good new question for our discussions. We have talked about "evidential inquiry", about science, about numerous other ideas. Yet all of these concepts rely upon basic axioms, axioms like the uniformity of nature, the reliability of the sense perceptions, the accurate correspondence of the mind of man to his senses, of the senses of man to nature, the rationality of man in making logical connections, etc etc.

My question is this: How does our worldview account for these axioms? How does our worlview account for science? How does it account for math? How does it account for logic and rationality? In other words, how do we account for counting? How do we justify justifying? How do we validate the idea that evidential inquiry is a valid inquiry into truth? These questions I raise for both of us. I guess it goes back to a previous blog where I said, "The question is not does science account for creation/evolution, but how does creation/evolution account for science?" (I think thats what I asked anyway).

Well, this should spark some good new discussion. I look forward to hearing from you.