tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post6101326498033730110..comments2024-03-18T19:39:32.100-06:00Comments on Gus Van Horn: Not "Chilling". Just Aggravating.Gus Van Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-81092586986814546132013-05-24T04:52:47.113-06:002013-05-24T04:52:47.113-06:00C.,
This all reminds me of my first days of rejec...C.,<br /><br />This all reminds me of my first days of rejecting religion, before I encountered Ayn Rand. I was agnostic, absent her explanation of why atheism is a tenable position.<br /><br />I had become repulsed by the very idea that, on top of how ludicrous such arguments are, I was being asked to <i>worship</i> a tyrant like this. I concluded that a being that would do something like this to his own creation was not worthy of worship.<br /><br />GusGus Van Hornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05126749051688217781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839412.post-17683616729069730912013-05-23T16:27:02.355-06:002013-05-23T16:27:02.355-06:00Thanks Gus,
I hadn't thought about it but Pas...Thanks Gus,<br /><br />I hadn't thought about it but Pascal's Wager, at least as it is wielded by religious folks, is an argument from intimidation. Giving it a temporal context, as these muslims do, doesn't change that but the muslims certainly highlight that that aspect still holds, even if the executioner is a purportedly eternal creator.<br /><br />I was at at debate where Gary Habermas casually tossed off the line that "Pascal's Wager is an important insight that even Game Theorists acknowledge." Of course, his evangelical audience ate that up. But Pascal's Wager only has any value if the choice is binary and several other precondiitions apply. I was obnoxious enough to ask him which of the many Christian sects fell on which side of the wager. Baptists? Methodists? Mormons? Unitarians? He was eventually pushed into anwering (because of his ecumenicalism) that all of the above fell on the positive side of the wager because they preached the divinity of Christ. This did NOT please his evangelical audience. I forebore bringing up the iffy question of Unitiarians and Christ's divinity and instead raised the question of Buddhists. From which point on he ignored me. <br /><br />What I was trying to point out is that he wasn't being intellectually honest to raise Pascal in a context where a binary decision was not even remotely a posssibility. At least with the muslims and with the Inquisition Catholics, it is a binary decision; convert or die. But this gets them no closer to the truth and exposes their argument as a naked <i>ad baculum</i>.<br /><br />c. andrewAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com