Kathryn writes:
>The personal theology I have adopted and continue to evolve as a working
>model is the result of a decision analysis. Over the years, I have asked
>myself the question of which metaphysical stance has highest utility, where
>utility encompasses both my personal utility and benefit to the world
>insofar as I am able to affect the world. In other words, I conduct an
>ongoing analysis something like Pascal's wager, although a bit more
>complex. (Pascal's analysis concerned only whether to live as a good
>Christian or as a dissolute hedonist; and his outcomes matrix was pretty
>standard Christian.)
>
>Therefore, I don't BELIEVE in God, or in any particular theology. However,
>I have adopted the policy of acting as if I believe in a God who satisfies
>certain attributes, because I have concluded that belief by myself and a
>large proportion of the population in a God approximately like the one I
>postulate would lead to more nearly optimal outcomes for myself and for
>society as a whole, as compared with rival metaphysical stances I've
>considered, under *any* reasonable "ground truth" metaphysic.
Kathryn -
I think your approach closely follows that of William James - an American
pragmatist from the last century. In short he argues that belief in God is
instrumental (and therefore - in his mind, and in accordance with social
norms of the time - is good). The question of existence in general, in his
approach, becomes meaningless unless it is tied to observable consequences.
The pragmatic aspect of this is to say of the truth of any proposition,
"How does it matter?" and if it doesn't matter, then just drop it. This is
a palatable theory of MEANING - a proposition is meaningful only if it has
"meaningful" consequences. James is taking this notion another step, and
using it as a test for truthfulness. This might be viewed as cynicism, but
James instead carries it in an optimistic direction.
The interesting thing about James is that he is not arguing out of social
or personal advantage (e.g. "I should believe in God, because people think
better of me if I do, or because it will put me psychologically at ease.")
He is making a epistemological argument about the nature of truth, and
applying it to belief in God. In general he is proposing that what is true
is such because it is expedient in the way that we use it to think about
experience. For him, experience is the fundamental thing. In one
interpretation of James, ".. a belief (that) is true will yield sensibly
satisfactory results in experience when thus acted upon. Truth is, in
short, to be seen as relating sensibly satisfactory consequences with the
actions undertaken in banking upon given beliefs."
(I. Scheffler, "Four Pragmatists [ Routledge, 1974, p. 103]) Now the
"consequences with actions" he is talking about can be actions that order
our experience by getting our truths to be consistent with each other.
This gets over the initial objection that "pragmatic truth" is
intellectually dishonest, because it would lead us to claim to be true
whatever is convenient at the time.
This notion remains about as controversial as it was when he put it forth.
Still I feel it has some desirable aspects for a Bayesian. Truth becomes a
relative and mutable thing that depends upon experience. Thus its
empirical and subjective aspects are preserved. It also gets subjugated to
values, which is novel (!) -- thus the truth must be good, by this
definition. A rather unconventional semantics of truth.
So where does this go w.r.t. James' belief in God? I interpret it in light
of two assumptions that were part of the 19th century landscape (and
similarly taken for granted in Pascal's time), but seem to be unfamiliar in
current secular thought :
1) Reason was not sufficient to establish the existence of God. There was
no way of proving the existence of God; a "leap of faith" was necessary.
2) In general, it would be a desirable thing if there was an argument,
short of pure reason, for believing in God, i.e. for having faith.
James did not interpret his argument in probabilistic terms. Here is my
interpretation: The evidence does not, and probably cannot, lead to any
certainty about the existence of God, it just leaves us with a non-neglible
prior. Spending more intellectual effort on the question, "does God
exist?" becomes pointless, so ask instead if presuming God exists is more
desirable in terms of our experience than presuming otherwise. In James'
intellecutual mileu, this value proposition clearly drove one to accept the
presumption, and supported the act of faith.
This argument has a nice decision theoretic flavor: Go as far as you can
with belief; then, when faced with uncertainty act upon the combination
that those beliefs and your values assign to outcomes. One may argue that
this argument disregards the pursuit of objective scientific truth, but I
have no problem with knocking an absolute notion of truth off its pedestal
as the sole criteria for action - even if its a "thought action."
Kathryn - an interesting historical note is that James came about this
argument by a similar life experience upon coming out of a long period of
psychological depression.
A bunch of questions about the definition of God, and how this applies to
current beliefs remain to be addressed, but probably this listserve is not
the place to do it. Just one point - about how do we distinguish arguments
about God from applying equally to "Zeus, Kali, or the tooth fairy." The
conventional notion of God is that God is good in a radical sense. I
suppose that this was the original, historical insight underlying the
monotheism that the Jews contributed to western thought. This is not true
of other mythical creations to which some might compare God.
Then the first question becomes, " Does it even make sense to speak of
something completely and perfectly good to exist?" (I hope so!) If so it
gets rid of arguments of the type "Even if God did exist, why would we want
to believe in something that has been the source of so much social
disruption, superstition, etc." Thus we can pry the notion of God free
from violent anti-abortionists and such who would co-opt it for their own
questionable ends. No reason that they should lay exclusive claim to such
a valuable notion in public discourse to be their own.
-john mark
JMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMAJMA
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] John Mark Agosta
home 650/856-2373 1648 California Ave
home fax 650/856-1373 Palo Alto CA 94306
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