The Polemicists Debate: Does God Exist?
Arguing the affirmative: tefomohapi – Twitter: @tefomohapi
Arguing the negative: Michael Chase Walker – Twitter: @mchasewalker
The Affirmative:
In one way or another, we all believe in something. Whether it be God or gods, ancestors, the belief that your business will succeed, belief that your relationships will be happy and prosperous, belief that your children will grow to be the best they can be, belief that your job will still be there tomorrow, etc.
We are all believers.
Yet, when it comes to believing in God, it becomes a contentious matter. With many mocking religious people as being naive or failing to have reason or logic behind their belief system. I have to admit, with every day that passes by in the age we live in it becomes ever more difficult to prove and defend one’s religious beliefs whatever they might be.
Difficult and irrational as it might seem, I continue to believe.
For a long time I couldn’t find a succinct way to explain my belief in God except to say “It works for me, and if your belief system works for you too I suggest you keep it.”, but I recently came across what is known as Pascal’s Gambit (also popularly known as Pascal’s Wager). It sums it up for me succinctly and also makes the conclusion without as much as spelling it out in words.
The conclusion is left to reader to make, yet it is inescapable.
The Gambit, by Blaise Pascal
The philosophy uses the following logic:
- “God is, or He is not”
- A Game is being played… where heads or tails will turn up.
- According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions.
- You must wager. (It’s not optional.)
- Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
- Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (…) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.
Suppose that God exists. If you believe in Him, you will be rewarded in heaven and will lead a happier life on earth. If you do not believe in Him, you will suffer eternal damnation and torture. Now suppose that God does not exist. If you believe in him, you will be proven wrong when you die, but this will cost you nothing because you will be dead by the time the truth is revealed. And if you do not believe in Him, you will be proven right, but this vindication will profit you nothing, either in death or in life.
The Negative:
Of course, I would like to argue my opponents reasoned and well-stated assertions if he had any. Unfortunately, the ‘we have to believe in something therefore we might as well believe in god’ doesn’t quite cut it for any advanced level of ratiocination above the age of 4 years old or I.Q. above 60.
To argue god’s existence based on the 400,000 year old human history of “belief” would be to give actualization to buffalo deities, coyote messiahs, chicken-headed serpents (Yahweh), predicting the future through animal intestines (augury), alchemy, astrology, necromancy, human sacrifice, regicide and a collective array of religious atrocities and “beliefs” so primitive, cruel and unimaginable there’s good reason humankind has learned to reprove them over the eons.
Nevertheless, the persistence of a “belief” in god is scarcely evidentiary
of his/her, or even, its, existence, any more so than the belief the earth was the center of the universe eventually proved true.
I am not saying that the “idea” of a god has not been useful to human development
and therefore highly utilitarian to his existence, preservation and progress.
But we are also witness how the manipulation of this basic gullibility has served
conquerors, tyrants, despots, slavery, uniformity, and genocide as well.
So, humankind’s propensity to believe in a god does not prove anything other than the fact that humans are susceptible to “ideas” and events that confound his level of experience, education, knowledge or ignorance as is often the case. And in all cases such assignment of causality to an exoteric deity has proved categorically and irredeemably false.
(The various planets of our own solar system were once believed to be their divine namesakes:
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. and we now know them to be relics of archaic religions
and practices in service of the prevailing polytheistic scheme of the universe.
H.G. Wells: “Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.”
Studies at Harvard University Harvard University.[1] prove the more ignorant. less educated, sentimental or naive a person is the more likely s/he is to believe in a personal or impersonal godhead. And my opponent’s sentimental averrals would seem to support this. Or, as Robert Oxton Bolt
“A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.”
Sometimes, these collective beliefs are a good thing, more often they are not.
Otherwise we would not see them so readily abandoned throughout the eons
and decline of great civilizations such as Greece, Rome, Mexico City (Tenochtitlån )
In fact, over the 13. 8 billion year history of our universe, and the subsequent 400,000 year evolution of the cerebral cortex the one thing that has held fast throughout the manufacture and discarding of thousands and thousands of gods and goddesses is in spite of our most ardent and persistent fealty
to the idea of a supreme being the only thing that persists is our penchant to believe in them,
even while their various god names are committed to antiquity, museums, neuroses, or sometimes major metropolises ( Paris, Athens, Rome, etc.)
My opponent’s introduction of Pascal’s Gambit is a hodgepodge of nonsense I feel no urgency to redress until he arranges and states it more precisely.
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This debate is now open to comments, if you would like to get involved. Thanks.
The Polemicists 