Pascal's wager

To honestly state, "I believe in God", requires a simultaneous commitment which is "I have absolutely no way of proving that He exists to myself or to anyone else".

This is the purest definition of faith. Or as I like to call it - the shortest distance between points A and B.

Every other definition (The Bible, Quran, Torah, Book of Mormon, etc.) are longer distances between points A and B. Each one says there is a God and each one says you must believe in God through faith.

If you accept the premise that there is a God but there is no way you can prove it, what if anything does this belief do for you?

Since there's no way to prove that God exists, there's also no way you'll ever really know a damn thing about Him either. Everything you've ever been told about Him has been hearsay, at best. You'll never meet Him (not in this lifetime, anyway), never see what He looks like, never read one of His posts on Priuschat, etc. Someone else pointed this out earlier in the discussion.

So in a way, The God you believe in will be your own creation.

 

If that was the case, the belief would be meaningless.

Fortunately, for those like myself that have truly experienced God in their lives have all the proof they need. I have also seen dramatic changes in others.

Everything I need to know about Him is clearly presented in the book He authored.

Fortunately I don't have to depend on hearing... I can read for myself.

I have met some truly remarkable people, willing to give you the shirt off their backs and love unconditionally... that is Christ's face.

I don't know,,, there are some real angels on this site.

Sadly for some... not so much for others.

 

Where did you demonstrate that? so far I've only seen you dismissing it without providing logic, just assuming that it cannot be done.

Not true. One can easily draw conclusions without probabilities. if one can show that for all assignments of probabilities, the conclusions hold, then the assignments don't matter.

Actually you assume probabilities are equal, that cannot be proven without data. Only with a large number of observations, which cannot be done before your first bet, could one conclude that its fair.

Nope, one can often prove results without a infinite error range. if the state/computation constrain the choices it can reduce the uncertainty of the input probabilities. There is no assignment of probabilities for which choice F produces a positive yield. There is no assignment of probabilities for which choice B yields a negative result. So no matter what the probabilities might be, B is better than F.
THere may be times when they are equal, but if there is even one instance where B is better than F, and they are equal in in all other cases, then B is better choice F.


if you disagree please explain under what conditions F is better than B.

 

It takes more faith to believe the universe was created without a being or any kind of intelligence.

 

one of many sources...
Myths of Martin Luther King by Marcus Epstein


And another...

there are numerous folks that commented on MLK during his life as well as after...

I am a person that remembers his speeches from the days he spoke them.

MLK was a socialist... was he a party member... no... his ideology however was.

Those that deny that this day are revisionists... or worse...

And another point... MLK was a believer in parity of the races... in the equality of all human life... what he was definitely against was the class society we had in his days while breathing air... and the needless killing of people in wars of aggression... my belief is he was a man that had weaknesses of the flesh as any man does, and an ideology that included more people than excluding them.

 

The construction is artificial to better allow separation of the concepts of making decisions about choices even with a lack of information about the probabilities. Casting everything in religious terms can introduce a bias in thinking so I wanted to disentangle it a bit. You said one cannot draw a conclusion without knowing probabilities. I was just proving a logical person often can.

 

Rumsfeld, the canned Pentagon darling when Cheney & the sock puppet were at the controls, was a master of logic at his press conferences, his formula for successfully getting the press to believe his lies impeccable. "Start with a BS premise," he said, "and then proceed with irrefutable logic from there".

Logic is only HALF the equation to knowledge; sound premises make up the other half. You can draw any conclusion you want with perfect logic if you make any BS premise that'll lead there. A conclusion reached at the end of a flawless logical trail is worthless if the starting premise(s) are junk.

 

GIGO in the computer world: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Tom

 

And even more faith to believe that something capable of creating the universe was created without a being or any kind of intelligence producing that.

Fortunately, the sum total of things (matter and energy) in the universe is zero, so that makes it easier (for either hypothesis).

 

No it isn't. Most of mathematics is artificial and arbitrary, but still of supreme meaningfulness. All he is saying is that you can set up your preferences (based on potential values for the odds) before you know the actual odds.

If I am offered two bets, A] where if red comes up, I win $2 and if blue comes up I win $1 or B] where if red comes up I win $1 and if blue comes up I win $5. Clearly, the right choose depends on the ratio of red to blue, but I can figure out in advance for which ratios I would choose Bet A over Bet B.

 

The God of the Old testament most certainly DID prove himself to people. He didn't expect Moses to believe in him through faith; he provided a burning bush. If he wished for Neil deGrasse Tyson to believe in him, he could whisper the rest energy to 20 decimal places of the Higgs-Boson to him. I am sure that would be sufficient.

 

OK, find complex things on this Earth that happened from simple stuff...watches that just happened or computers that upgraded without human interface.

 

^ ....belief, faith, assumption.

Bottom line is everybody believes in something they can not prove, including atheists as incredibly distasteful as that is to them.

These assertions that simple matter somehow evolved into very complex things including lifeforms without an intelligence and you're ignorant if you don't agree is the height of intellectual arrogance.

Scientific knowledge progresses in unpredictable directions.

Nobody has all the answers