On Blindly Believing
Whether or not
you believe in God,
you should live your life
with love, kindness, compassion, mercy and tolerance
while trying to make the world a better place.
If there is no God,
you have lost nothing
and will have made a positive impact on those around you.
If there is a benevolent God reviewing your life,
you will be judged on your actions
and not just on your ability to blindly believe,
when there is
a significant lack of evidence
of any
one god’s
existence.
–Agnostic Atheists Wager
This morning I read through fifteen pages of a Wikipedia entry on Paschal’s Wager. Paschal’s Wager is something that has not come to mind for many years, maybe as far back as grad school. It is a argument for the prudence of believing in a god. The potential gain outweighs the potential loss whether or not god exists, if one throws in with belief in god. The argument is a strategy for minimizing risk. You hedge your bet on the afterlife, should there turn out to be an afterlife.
The wager is simple in form, and the payoff applies to the afterlife. I have found myself engaged with, first of all surviving, and then, with some luck thriving in this life. The afterlife has always been close to the bottom of my list of concerns. I recognize that everyone has their own priority list of motivating factors. Those are learned as a child in the growing-up years. Everyone is not like me.
The aspect of the Wager argument that most interests me is the nature of Faith. Faith is the lynch pin of the Protestant version of Christianity. Sola Fide. Belief/Faith in Christ as god/savior is the “get out of jail free” card for those in the Protestant community. That leaves me to consider just what is meant by faith.
I am certain that faith is not something that is subject to a clear cut choice, like choosing between a vanilla or a chocolate ice cream. That is a trivial, nearly inconsequential choice, and it entails a great deal of evidence from past experience about the respective flavors, and immediate evidence of what one can see before one’s eyes. The kind of belief involved in Faith-in-god has to be a total disposal of one’s self, a reliance of the self and the meaning of one’s life —- on a Transcendent Being. How does one choose something like that? That is way beyond a preference for chocolate, over vanilla. That means no less than the indwelling of the self in a Reality that is unlike anything that one has ever known or can know.
Having said all of that, — I do believe in god.
