Tercel

You get to the end of your life. You are old, about to die. You're not really sure what's going to happen when you die. You think those religious folk are very most probably wrong and that after you die you'll be nothing but dust "pushing up the daisies" as it were. Indeed all your life you've been a hard atheist. But of course, you recognise it is possible the religious folks were right and there is life after death, however unlikely. Only religious zealots have absolute faith in their beliefs after all.

My question to you then is, given the ideas of Game Theory (that you should do that which is most advantageous, ie that which is most likely to yield the largest gain/smallest lost), would it not have been better to have lived your life with the working assumption that there was life after death?
If you die now and you were right and there is nothing after death but death then you'll be dead. You won't gain anything from being right.
But if you die now and you were wrong and there was something after death, then you might have lost an awful lot if you haven't lived your life believing in life after death. Or you might gain an awful lot after death if you've lived your life with true beliefs that the afterlife existed.

So if there is nothing to be gained from disbelief in the afterlife (you won't even know you were right), nothing to be lost by belief in the afterlife (after all you won't even know you were wrong), and quite possibly something to be gained by correctly believing there is an afterlife:
Then who on earth (who wasn't insane) would live their life without the working assumption of the existence of the afterlife?

SteveD

While I could make myself behave as if there is an afterlife I don't think that I can make myself believe that there is one.

I think another problem is in knowing how actions in this life would affect your existence in the afterlife. There is no way to know what the correct actions to take are or if actions in this life make any difference one way or another.

Steve

Writer@Large

Wow. Pascal's Wager has never been worded so trendy.



Your right, of course, which is why it would be in YOUR best interests, Tercel, to accept Allah NOW, and to learn the words of his only prophet Mohommed (PBUH).

--W@L

[ August 17, 2002: Message edited by: Writer@Large ]</p>

randomsyllable

My bold.

Umm. this is different how?

Jobar

Answer: no different.

Tercel, don't you see that this is an oldy moldy argument? As soon as I saw the title, it screamed "Pascal's Wager"!

I am strongly tempted to just lock it down, but I will leave it open until Sunday night on the tiny chance you might do something novel with it.

In the meanwhile- anyone with a really pithy reply to PW, feel free to post it!

Kantian

Pascal's epitaph:

"A finer species of the <a href="http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/af.htm" target="_blank">argumentum ad baculum</a> has never been found."

Edited to add: How pithy was that, Moderator?

[ August 17, 2002: Message edited by: Immanuel Kant ]</p>

Bible Humper

How about using Dungeons and Dragons as the "game" in your game theory.

Dungeons and Dragons is "won" by enjoying yourself while playing, your character can accomplish much, but there is no "checkmate" or it's equivalent.

Enjoy your life, or your character, because THAT'S how you win, in fact it is the only way to win.

If this Yahweh is going to toss us atheists into hell for not believing in him when he has apparently gone out of his way to make it appear that he doesn't exist, well, if that's his attitude then he'll probably just toss his believers into hell too, just for the heck of it!

99Percent

Curiously I have been thinking about this very same question from the atheistic point of view - namely the foxhole atheist facing eminent death. Would I change my outlook to incorporate a belief in life after death when facing inevitable death?

I thought about that, while watching people on deathrow delivering speeches before being executed. I thought about Dosteyevski and the like, contemplating non existence while heading toward their death squad. I remembered Australian soldiers in WWI ordered to execute actions that pitted them to their inevitable deaths (Gallipoli).

However, I think that even in the most dire circumstances I would not conciously believe in an afterlife or God. After all what is God but the unknown? What is death but the inexistence of the unknown? So to commit yourself to God, to the unknown in adverse circumstances is in effect to surrender, to already die.

The theist who already surrenders his/her existence to the unknown without even the immediate threat of death is what I find the most cowardly irrational action of all.

The ultimate undeniable fact remains, that a belief in an afterlife, no matter how trivial it may seem, already debases and denigrates this life and only provable life. And this is no matter how close and eminent death already is.

Writer@Large

No way, man! D&D is won by getting all the mondo-cool magic items and min/maxing like a munchkin, so you can, like, make the DM's life hell by killing off the major villain on the first night after he's put a month of work into it ...

... isn't it?

--W@L

bd-from-kg

Tercel:

You say:

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Because God is rational, He gave you the gift of rationality. It’s what distinguishes you from the animals. This life is a test to see whether you value this gift (and hence love the Giver) sufficiently to be worthy of living eternally with Him. If you stick with the principles of rationality right to the end you will be judged worthy; if you decide to base your beliefs – especially beliefs about the most important things - on irrational grounds you won’t.

Now to make this test interesting, God has arranged things so that we have no evidence that there even is such a thing as life after death. Thus if you believe that there is, you have based a belief about something really important on irrational grounds, and God wants no part of you.

Sorry, you lose.

Call this “bd’s wager”. At least it makes more sense than Pascal’s.