Re: Laskey's wager

[Kathryn Blackmond Laskey]

Folks,

I'm going to respond to a couple of points from various people, including some who responded privately. Then I think I'll give it a rest. I've got other things to do.

>1) God as defined in public discourse (especially in the US, the Islamic
>world, and observant catholics) has a very clear meaning, being an
>anthropomorphic, omnipotent parent-surrogate.

This is the God I rejected at age eleven. I believe any intellectually honest person will reject such a God.

But can you back up your statement that this is "God as defined in public discourse?" Even back when I was eleven and rejected God, this was far from all there was to God in "public discourse." It's just that no one had ever introduced me to any viewpoints other than the narrow viewpoint I had been indoctrinated into. Today the God of public discourse is even more varied and sophisticated than it was thirty years ago.

The God of the Hebrew Bible explicitly forbids anthropomorphizing. Not only are we not supposed to build graven images (prevents us from imagining the statue is God), but we are not even supposed to say his name.

>("There's this thing I call 'glosboss' that I think exists,
>and is very important to me personally, but no, I can't tell you what I
>mean by the term. Isn't this profound? Shouldn't we talk about it at
>length?")

Oh, but I CAN tell you what I mean by the term. Any time I've gotten into an open-minded and respectful dialogue with someone on the subject, we both refine our understandings of what we mean by the term. It doesn't sound as if you'd be interested in such a conversation, though, and I don't believe in prostelytizing. Especially on something I don't believe (see below).

>I think you might be leaving out an important concept in science: "I don't
>know." It recognizes the limits of our reason and doesn't try to put in
>information where we have none.

Oh, but I'm not leaving it out!

I pointed that out several times.

I said I don't BELIEVE in my "robustly optimal" God. I have chosen to take the intensional stance of acting as if I believe. I have chosen this stance on the basis of a decision analysis that I have thought through very carefully over the years.

As for my "real belief," there is a great deal of higher-order uncertainty, and it goes up and down from day to day depending on my mood, the latest thing I've read on the subject, and a hundred other things.

But my "real belief" doesn't matter as far as my actions go. Whether my"real belief" on any given day is .0001 or .75 doesn't matter to me or to the God I choose to believe in, as long as I behave as ethically and as responsibly and as respectfully toward others and as intellectually honestly as I can, and as long as I work hard at the work I feel "called" to pursue.

>But
>most importantly, I want to emphasize that you still face a decision...
>For thousands of years, we've simply punted
>the question; it's easier to be told what to do, even if we have to invent
>someone to tell us.

Oh, but the God I choose to believe in wants us to make our own decisions. This "conversation" I remember remembering said absolutely nothing about WHAT I was "supposed" to do, beyond that I was being given the opportunity to use my life to do good. The rest was up to me. In my weaker moments I've been angry at God for not giving me more guidance. But in my better moments I'm very glad of that.

In my view, it's PEOPLE who tell other people what to do and then claim it comes from God.

Do you know the story of Abraham bargaining with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah? Abraham exhibited quite a bit of chutzpah, to challenge God over the ethics of wiping out a couple of cities. God listened respectfully, and even agreed to the conditions Abraham laid out.

>But the God concept has reached it's limit. It doesn't
>work. Science has explained more in 300 years than religion has in 6000.
>Yet our current society is blinded by superstition and irrationality,
>hopelessly without even a coherent attempt to find real answers to these
>questions.

Einstein said that religion without science is blind, but science without religion is lame.

People have emotional needs, too. If they feel life is meaningless, then they will turn to superstition and irrationality to fill the void. Research shows that people with a belief in something transcendent are mentally and physically healthier. We seem to be made to reach for the transcendent.

>I plead with you to first finish your acceptance of your challenge: to
>accept that it is _you_ who will make the world a better place, on _your_
>authority and reason.

You are seriosly misunderstanding me if you think I am not doing exactly what you plead with me to do. But thanks for saying it, to give me the chance to clarify my meaning.

If a student comes to me with a question, and I say something that "triggers" the dawn of understanding, is not the understanding the student's accomplishment? If that same student then goes and uses what he learns to develop a useful product, is not the product the student's accomplishment?

It might have been God or it might have been an unconscious expression of my survival instinct that provided the kick in the pants I needed at that point in my life. If I'm going to be intellectually honest, I have to say I don't know the answer to that one. But what I accomplish in life is my accomplishment. God is not telling me what to do beyond the simple challenge: "I set before you the choice between life and death. Therefore, choose life." HOW to choose life, and even whether to choose life, God leaves up to us. But God was reminding me that if I continued to choose the way of death, I was acting against my own best interest.

> AJ Heschel said that religion is the
> interstices between words. As *we* strive to get everything down in black
> and white, it does behoove us to consider that our personal needs to
> intellectualize is only one response to our world, and we may be missing
> the true mass of the universe by simpy focusing that which we can label.

This is very similar to Gregory Bateson's view in a fascinating book, written posthumously by his daughter from very incomplete notes, called "Angels Fear." He speaks of the anthropological function of religion as a way to experience (not just intellectualize) that the world is far more than we can understand, and also to "transcend" the binds our minds put us in when our models of the world contain propositions we think are contradictory.

Consider the following "Father-Daughter dialogue" (an expository technique used quite often in that book):

D: If the mass is somehow what keeps me sane, it will be worth defending...

F: You see, the mass could embody -- encapsulate -- some complex truth you had no access to in any other form. And it could do that even while proposing a great many propositions of lower logical type that seem like nonsense, as long as these are such as not to create significant contradiction.

D: Or maybe contradictions are avoided by keeping different kinds of propositions separate? ... But do you mean that I might not even be able to state those most important truths?

F: It would be a different kind of knowing, the kind of knowledge we call character, built in at a very pervasive and abstract level.

This is enough for a while.

Kathy Laskey