Pascal's wager

Of course not, since a delusion is *always* an irrational belief.

Logic, Treb, logic.

 

As Pascal has proven it's irrational not to believe.

Humor, Sage, Hu. . . oh never mind.

 

The key phrase in this definition is "evidence to the contrary." I suspect that SageBrush would be more than willing to change his belief given sufficient evidence to the contrary. The problem is that Tre and Sage will never agree on what constitutes "sufficient evidence."

Tom

 

I want to apologize for the perception by mentioning a member of my family was killed by a quack right after this post quoted, thinking it was an innuendo against DrBermann, as it might have offended many.

 

In regards to A J Ayers' near-death experience, why would his doctor invent a story he saw God? I'd think he would report whatever he actually said.

 

My guess? It was a joke that was misinterpreted. But who knows.

 

Ask him.

To my mind, the more substantial objection to this entire argument (?) is on what basis does the NDE participant have to decide the hallucination is in fact an ET ?

 

^ OK Dr SageBrush, find his name and contact information and I can ask him, then in the unlikely chance it goes that far, he will cite doctor-patient confidentially.

As a doctor, you should know that's a non-starter.

Try making a rational statement next time, please.

 

I know I cannot read his mind, and I am pretty sure you cannot either.

<<shrug>> I thought my point was straightforward and rational: your guess as to his motivations is baseless.

 

Sometimes I see divine beings in my dreams, too, but they're not usually there when I wake up.

 

That's the crux of a very large problem: failure to recognize that honesty does NOT equal veracity.

A few years ago Ricky Gervais made a movie titled "The Invention of Lying" which postulated a society whose inhabitants never lied until Ricky's character discovered he possessed that talent and hilarity ensued. Ricky's character made many statements and claims that, because everyone else thought he spoke truthfully, they took AS truth.

No one ever considered the possibility that Ricky could be WRONG.

Take a wife and husband at home one afternoon. She looks at the clock and says "Oh goodness, I have to get to Barlow's before they close if I'm going to get that hat on sale" and out the door she goes while her husband waves her off airily, barely looking up from his magazine. Ten minutes later her friend calls on the landline.

"Is she home?" she asks.

"She's gone to Barlow's to get a hat," the husband says, and they ring off.

Only she isn't. Ten minutes out the door she met her lover and they spent the rest of the afternoon in room 20 at the Bide-A-Wee Motel. That evening she got a cheap hat at Sears and went home.

Did the husband lie? No. He spoke what he believed was true. Truth serum would be useless to get anything else out of him. He doesn't know what's true; he only thinks he does.

Or believes he does.

But he's wrong. His statement may not have been a lie, but it was absolutely false.


I think most of us try to be truthful in most of our interactions, but we're right only part of the time, perhaps less than half the time. We haven't got enough knowledge to be right most of the time, let alone ALL the time.

So when somebody says he "saw God", and isn't lying, but speaking as truthfully as he knows how, that does not mean he "saw God". It only means that he believes he did.

 

Then a very long precept of English Common Law is going to be something you are going to have an issue with - [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_declaration]Dying declaration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] ... that dying people don't intentionally lie so it's accepted as evidence. That's about what A J Ayers actually said as he was dying.

In regards to A J Ayers' doctor account of what his patient said: doctors report what happened - not make up stories.

As for NDE itself, people are debating it. But NDE is probably more substantial then Pascal's Wager.

I know you had other points, but this addresses one of them.

 

First of all, that's a legal instrument, and is not necessarily corroborated by scientific study. The assumption that a dying person has "no motive" to lie is, when you give it some thought, a very poor one. There's nothing to indicate that imminent death makes a person suddenly rational, or selfless, or anything else, and a dying person could have every reason in the world to perpetuate or create a falsehood he believes will have some effect he hopes to achieve after he's gone.

Second, legal instruments change, as new knowledge contradicts long held assumptions. For centuries eye-witness testimony was regarded as the gold standard of evidence, assumed to be accurate. Recent studies of memory have revealed almost exactly the opposite: that eye-witness testimony is perhaps the LEAST reliable testimony, not from any deliberate deceit by the witness but by the fallability and malleability of human memory and human perception. It shouldn't surprise anyone that five people witnessing the same auto accident will give conflicting accounts of what happened.

Likewise fingerprints as evidence have come under question; there is insufficient scientific evidence that present methods used to identify fingerprints have any factual basis. It is a field based mostly on assumptions. It may very well develop that after scientific study identification by present fingerprint methodology will be proved valid, but those studies don't yet exist.

Third, and finally, even if Ayers and his doctor spoke truth as they understood it (which they probably did), there's nothing to prove that what they said and what actually happened are the same. It is a false syllogism to conclude that if an entrenched atheist says, honestly, that he saw God, then that must be what happened.

 

I don't question that people lie frequently.

I've known a few people that are pathological liars...fortunately not that many - none of them at PC.

Just saying there is no reason for the doctor to do so. If he was, he might be in the direction of a pathological liar.

Lying on the job can destroy a career...if you follow the NFL there is a huge example. Because the New Orleans Saints did not fess up to knocking opponents out of the game with bounties and continued for a couple more seasons, the severe sanctions this week put the Saints in (football) purgatory. Lying made the penality much worse - the assistant coach responsible may be done.

Nixon is another example. If early on he acknowledged the Watergate break-in, he probably would not have had to resign.

Back to my point, the doctor was "on the clock" and it's bad for his career to be dishonest on what his critically ill patients said.

I'd prefer to use the word denial, but that definitely could be an element in the accounts of A J Ayers and his son.

 

I resemble that remark.

Anyway, the logic is flawed Daniel. The fact that MDs are people does not say anything about what kind of people they are. My large anecdotal experience is that MDs rarely lie, and if they do lie it is on purpose. The reason I think is practical and born out of selection: one cannot be a good doctor while wearing rose colored glasses. Reality has to be accepted for smart, empathic and utilitarian decision making.

Science encourages the same behavior, because a person is not going to understand science, let along advance the field, if bias ruins their powers of observation and analysis.

 

Although my belief system is definitely not like Daniel's, there seems to be one thing we agree on: Humans are basically bad - not good. (his remark on people lie)

 

Here I profoundly disagree. A comparison of any era in human history with any preceding eras consistently shows steady progress toward making life less miserable and, more recently, expanding access to less miserable life to wider swaths of humanity, as well as incresed democratisation of governance.

Life isn't all roses, of course, and humanity suffers its savage throwbacks, but if it were truly the case that we are basically "bad" rather than basically "good" we'd have extinguished our species a long time ago.

And if it were true, your list of famly, friends and acquaintances would be mostly people you'd avoid, not embrace. You don't really believe your entire network of personal human connection is basically "bad" - it'd make you unsociable and none of them would want anything to do with you.