From: stoesser@i31s22.ira.uka.de (Achim Stoesser)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: God's Family Values
Date: 20 Aug 1992 10:46:53 GMT
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: i31s22.ira.uka.de

(Ob.misc.kids: "Cute things they say" in the last 2 lines)

In article <2A8FFD43.452D@intercon.com>, ooblick@intercon.com (mikki barry) writes:
|> In article <1992Aug17.130252.3254@newstand.syr.edu>, 
|> kgatling@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Keith E Gatling) writes:
|> > If you bet that God exists, and behave in accordance with what you think
|> > God demanded, and then find out in the end that there is no God, what have
|> > you really lost except 70 odd years of living with hedonistic abandon?
|> 
|> How other people choose to live their lives is not what concerns me.  What 
|> does concern me is other people telling me that I am wrong for not buying 
|> into the same belief structure as they do.

Form the alt.atheism FAQ file:
>>>
 8. "If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing
     -- but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you will
     go to hell.  Therefore it is foolish to be an atheist."

     This is known as Pascal's Wager.  It has several flaws.

     Firstly, it does not indicate which religion to follow.  Indeed, there
     are many mutually exclusive and contradictory religions out there.  This
     is often described as the "avoiding the wrong hell" problem.  If a person
     is a follower of religion X, he may end up in religion Y's version of
     hell.

     Secondly, the statement that "If you believe in God and turn out to be
     incorrect, you have lost nothing" is not true.  Suppose you're believing
     in the wrong God -- the true God might punish you for your foolishness.
     Consider also the deaths that have resulted from people rejecting
     medicine in favour of prayer.

     Many feel that for intellectually honest people, belief is based on
     evidence, with some amount of intuition.  It is not a matter of will or
     cost-benefit analysis.

     Formally speaking, the argument consists of four statements:

       1. One does not know whether God exists.
       2. Not believing in God is bad for one's eternal soul if God does
          exist.
       3. Believing in God is of no consequence if God does not exist.
       4. Therefore it is in one's interest to believe in God.

     One problem with this argument, in the abstract, is that it creates
     information from no information.  This is considered invalid in
     information theory.  Statement 1 indicates one has no information about
     God -- but statements 2 and 3 indicate that beneficial information can be
     gained from the absolute lack of information about God.  This violates
     information entropy -- information has been extracted from no
     information, at no "cost".

     The biggest reason why Pascal's wager is a failure is that if God is
     omniscient he will certainly know who really believes and who believes as
     a wager.  He will spurn the latter... assuming he actually cares at all
     whether people believe in him.
<<<
								   Achim
________________________________________________________________________

I'm an anarchist, atheist, pacifist, and vegetarian. "Vegetarian? _Not_
German?" - 10yo