The Springfield philosopher shows us that the issue of God’s existence or non-existence is of little importance
Source: Julian Baggini · guardian.co.uk
Having argued last week that prayer provides benefits for believers that are not available for atheists, I was interested to come across an academic paper by Tim Mawson that argued atheists have an obligation to pray to God that he stop them being atheists.
Mawson says his argument only works for atheists “who assign anything greater than a negligible probability to God’s existence”. In that respect, his is just the latest in a long line of arguments that use the mere possibility that God exists as a reason to be religious, or at least give it a go.
The most famous of these is Pascal’s Wager, which, in a nutshell, says that you have more to lose by not believing and being wrong than you do by believing and being wrong, and more to gain by believing and being right than not believing and being right. Critics protest that this is only true if all outcomes were equally likely, but if there is only a minuscule chance that God exists, the odds aren’t worth taking. To which the reply is: the stakes here are so high, even an incredibly long shot is worth a go.
I think there is a fairly decisive response to this, which also takes care of Mawson. But it also has a more interesting positive corollary: it shows why belief in God doesn’t matter. Even if we think it is more likely God exists than not, we should not bother to believe in him. (Apologies for the masculine pronoun, but I defer to the conventions of those who believe.) I won’t call it Baggini’s Wager, in part because I’m sure I’m not the first to think of it. So let’s call it Homer’s Wager, for reasons that will soon become clear.
Here’s how it works. Let’s start with the very generous assumption that we think it more likely than not that God exists. To put a number on such things is ridiculous of course, but for the sake of argument, we’ll use the figure of 67% which was the one a risk assessor came up with a few years ago. You might think that, if this is true, you should believe in God. But here’s the problem: does it matter which God you believe in?
Maybe it doesn’t matter, but it does matter if it matters. …
Read more on the Guardian here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/19/struggling-question-belief-homer-simpson-answer
Categories: Agnosticism, Atheism, CHRISTIANITY, Europe, Islam, UK
Looking forward to brother Zia Shah’s comments on this article….
Thank you brother Rafiq for posting the article. I think fortune telling and psychic powers do not exist and I have never spent much time to seek those or even refute those.
Atheists deny that there is no God but cannot give up their obsession with God. On religious forums they are very active and engaged in one disguise or other. My personal belief is that it is a Freudian slip on their part, they are never comfortable with their beliefs.
Once an atheists came to Khalfatul Masih II’s question answer session and in the form of prelude to a question spoke for half an hour trying to prove his position, while Khalifatul Masih II, Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmood Ahmad listened. At the end of it he replied that I find it very amusing that whereas, God talks to me on a regular basis, listens to my prayers and reassures me and you are here trying to prove to me that He does not exist.
More about specific wagers later on but here I would like to link two of my articles pertaining to Dawkins and Stephen Hawking:
A challenge for Dawkins: Where did carbon come from?
Stephen Hawking has a change of heart: God did not create Universe?
The atheists can congratulate each other all they want for the splendour and precision of their thoughts but for me in the final analysis a short Quranic verse captures the reality succinctly. The Holy Quran says: