Before this, while the possibility of atheists existing could be entertained, they loomed more as a theological boogeyman, as there is a seeming dearth of any actual atheists. He can be followed at his website, or on Twitter WithEdSimon. Suppose that you and your roommate, Riley, get equally drunk…. Bad ideas die hard, and then sometimes they come back to life.
What separates the sciences from the humanities? What unites them? And how can they each illuminate the nature of mind and self? These were some of the…. If by any chance you spot an inappropriate comment while navigating through our website please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly. Forgot your password? Retrieve it. If by any chance you spot an inappropriate image within your search results please use this form to let us know, and we'll take care of it shortly. Term » Definition.
Word in Definition. Freebase 0. Suggested Resources 0. Alex US English. David US English. Mark US English. Daniel British. Libby British. Mia British. Karen Australian. Hayley Australian. Traditional, epistemic arguments hold that God exists; examples include arguments from cosmology, design, ontology, and experience.
Pascal — French philosopher, scientist, mathematician and probability theorist — argues that if we do not know whether God exists then we should play it safe rather than risk being sorry. The argument comes in three versions Hacking , all of them employing decision theory.
For those who are unfamiliar with decision theory, the idea can be illustrated by considering a lottery. Is it rational to play? In comparison, not playing involves zero expense and zero payoff. In this case, unless you have some reason to believe that a given ticket is not average, playing the game is irrational. The course of action having the maximum expectation is the rational one to follow. Pascal begins with a two-by-two matrix: either God exists or does not, and either you believe or do not.
If God exists then theists will enjoy eternal bliss cell a , while atheists will suffer eternal damnation cell b. If God does not exist then theists will enjoy finite happiness before they die say units worth , and atheists will enjoy finite happiness too, though not so much because they will experience angst rather than the comforts of religion.
Regardless of whether God exists, then, theists have it better than atheists; hence belief in God is the most rational belief to have. What if the atheist is a happy hedonist, or if the theist is a miserable puritan? In that case the value of cell d is greater than that of c , and the dominance argument no longer works. However, if there is a chance that God exists then we can calculate the expectations as follows:. Hence it is rational to believe in God.
Furthermore, this infinity will swamp the values in cells b , c , and d , so long as c is not infinitely negative and neither b nor d is infinitely positive. According to doxastic voluntarism , believing and disbelieving are choices that are up to us to make. Intellectualists deny this; they say it is impossible to adopt a belief simply because we decide to. Evidently not. But although we cannot adopt a belief simply by deciding to, the same is true for other actions.
For instance, we cannot go to school simply by deciding to; rather, we have to wake up by a certain time which may mean first developing a certain kind of habit , we must get dressed, we must put one foot in front of another, and so forth.
Then if we are lucky we will end up at our destination, though this is far from guaranteed. So it goes for any other endeavor in life: one chooses to become a doctor, or to marry by age 30, or to live in the tropics — the attainment of such goals can be facilitated, though not purely willed, by appropriate micro-steps that are more nearly under voluntary control. Indeed, even twitching your little finger is not entirely a matter of volition, as its success depends on a functioning neural system running from your brain, through your spine, and down your arm.
Your minutest action is a joint product of internal volition and external contingencies. The same applies to theistic belief: although you cannot simply decide to be a theist, you can choose to read one-sided literature, you can choose to join a highly religious community, you can try to induce mystical experiences by ingesting psychedelic drugs like LSD, and you can choose to chant and pray.
No mere exercise of will can guarantee that you will end up believing in God, but neither can any exercise of will guarantee that you succeed in doing anything else you decide to do. If there is a difference between our ability to voluntarily believe something and our ability to voluntarily wiggle our toe, it is a difference in degree of likely success, and not a difference in logical kind.
Atheists, on the other hand, have no particular reason to think that mere praying should notably effect conversion. An agnostic would do well then to try; for it would be precisely in the case where success matters that trying is likely to be most efficacious.
Indeed, it might not matter whether we can choose to have the beliefs we have.
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