MarathonMike
Diamond Member
- Thread starter
- #21
That was one of the fundamental reasons I couldn't accept my parents devout views on Christianity, God's plan and such. I'd ask "Why do little kids get cancer?" And I'd hear "God works in mysterious ways".God's plan looks exactly like random chaos. There is nothing orderly or preordained about this existence until a human makes it that way. The problem of why bad things happen to good people can never have a satisfactory answer to someone who has just watched a loved one die a horrible death. After what God did to my mother he does not deserve my belief, much less my worship. If I see him someday he's got some serious explaining to do about this screwed up world.Even people 300+ years ago were smarter than you.It's all about the mysterious ways of God. God has a plan and we are not to question it. It's a consolation to those who can't bear to live in a pointless universe ruled by nothing more than entropy.
Pascal's wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662).[1] It posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not.
Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).[2]
Pascal's Wager was based on the idea of the Christian God, though similar arguments have occurred in other religious traditions. The original wager was set out in Pascal's posthumously published Pensées ("Thoughts"), an assembly of previously unpublished notes.[3]
Historically, Pascal's wager was groundbreaking because it charted new territory in probability theory,[4] marked the first formal use of decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism and voluntarism.[5]