Interesting article in today's NYTimes. Your thoughts all? Will pretending to believe lead to belief?
Full article in op eds of NYTimes
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.
So runs Blaise Pascal’s famous wager. His thought is simple: If there is a God, believing in him ensures an eternity of happiness, while denying him secures an eternity of suffering. If there is no God and you believe in him, the downside is relatively minimal. Even if the chance he exists is tiny, believing is the right bet.
This argument has produced few converts, as Pascal would not have been surprised to learn. He knew that people cannot change their beliefs at will. We can’t muscle our mind into believing something we take to be false, not even when the upside is an eternity of happiness. Pascal’s solution is that you start by pretending to believe: attend church, speak the prayers, adopt religious habits. If you walk and talk like a believer, eventually you’ll come to think as one. He says, “This will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.”
But many of us recoil at this suggestion. We don’t want to lie to ourselves. Say there were a pill that would do the trick: Pop it in your mouth and you’ll be a religious believer. Someone convinced by Pascal’s argument — at least to the extent of thinking that believing is the best bet — might nonetheless refuse to take this pill. She might be repulsed by the thought of going behind her own back to acquire this belief.
Pascal seems to concede that trying to believe is a matter of wishful thinking, self-deception or self-manipulation. He thinks we should do it anyway. But I think our hope of becoming better people — whether in respect of religion, friendship or justice, or in any number of different ways — rests on the possibility that there is a more straightforward and less self-abasing way to try to believe.
Read the rest at the NY Times link above. I hope they give a few free articles each month.
It's always encouraging when someone makes the effort to argue with a 17th century polymath. The contemporary reaction to hearing Pascal's wager usually would be more like "is it deductible?" or "whatever." Or maybe "fake math. Sad."
ReplyDeleteIn the days when people like Pascal were spoken of in colleges, I took a course labeled Apologetics, which purported, among other things, to teach us six proofs for the existence of God. One of them was the "ontological argument" which I hit upon independently while waiting for a bus one freezing night in Milwaukee. (Spoiler alert: The ontological argument has been refuted as often as it has been proposed.)
Alfred Delp, S.J. thought about the problem of belief while he was facing death, and he seems to think God takes it upon himself to deal with it:
"It is really unimportant whether God forces man out of his limits by the sheer distress of much suffering, coaxes him with visions of beauty and truth, or pricks him into action by the endless hunger and thirst for righteousness possess that his soul." (Page 92 in the 1963 of the Prison Meditations.)
We all have known Phils, and I think I have learned from breaking my head on their skulls is that belief cannot be acquired by frontal attack, either by oneself or others. Something bigger than himself or I has got to move Phil.
Did you attend Marquette U? If so, when. I was there from 1958-1962.
DeleteJim, You just missed me. I was there 1952-57 (with a year for grad school before the draft board found out I was married and acted promptly so I would not be lost to the great military machine forever).
DeleteGod has a lot of piss poor spokespeople--rich televangelists, snake handlers, know-it-alls who bludgeon others with Scriptural quotations, people who build amusement parks in the shape of Noah's ark, parochi-aid supporters, child-molesting ministers, religious educators who scare or bore small children, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's a miracle anyone believes.
Pascal's choice never had any cachet with me. An interesting but bloodless proposition, perhaps stemming from the intellect that founded the mathematics of probability. I resonate with his "Fire" note found sown in his clothing.
ReplyDeleteSeems like Pascal was saying, "Fake it until you make it." There are times when that works. But a lot of times it doesn't. What I think is more successful is to put yourself in "discoverable mode", if you can. I get that term from Bluetooth. I have an older cell phone that uses Bluetooth to download photos. To get the PC and the phone to communicate, the phone has to be in discoverable mode. I think the newer versions do it automatically. But it is kind of an analogy with putting yourself in a state of openness to being found by God, if that makes any sense.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't raised in a conventional faith or as a trinitarian. So a lot about Christianity was hard for me to believe, even when I left Unitarianism. to believe. An old Episcopal priest (who used to be a Catholic monk) told me I would always be a Unitarian at heart and would try to square other teaching with the beliefs of my childhood. 40 years on, I'd say he was right. I have gained faith that I might believe more whole heartedly and without reservation some day, faith and belief being slightly different things.
ReplyDeleteI think there can be some spiritual benefit in having the spiritual humility to say, "Even though it hasn't clicked yet for me, it seems to have clicked for others, including some who seem sincere and some whom I respect, and so I'll try to adopt the outward habits on the chance that it clicks for me someday." That's actually a leap of faith of some type or other.
ReplyDelete"Even though it hasn't clicked yet for me, it seems to have clicked for others . . . ."
ReplyDeleteWhat is it, though? Should we adopt the outward habits of Catholicism, Lutheranism, Judaism, Buddhism, or Islam? Or something else?
Jean, are you saying you have the feeling that certain things are true, but you simply can't bring yourself to believe in them? This is the way I feel on occasion. I remember reading an atheist saying that he found himself thinking something like, "God will certainly forgive me for not believing in him." I am fond of the Vladimir Lenin quote, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." My Catholic education was so much an indoctrination that I often feel I can never know what I really believe.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's a fair reflection of how I think.
DeleteI was also indoctrinated as a Unitarian, but in different ways. I was taught to be skeptical about the supernatural stuff that controverted God's established laws of physics and science, and to believe that God was not coming down here to help us, but that we would be judged by what we failed to do.
So I believe in hell, no problem there. But I find it hard to believe in a God who isn't eternally enraged at our screw-ups, personally and collective.
I do believe in the power of story, and the story of Jesus is powerful. In my earliest steps toward trinitarian Christianity, I felt that there was something "divine" in being able to conceive a "character" like Jesus; even if he never existed, he was an inspiration. As time went on, I started to wonder, "but what if it was real"?
I spend too much time here bashing RCIA and CCD efforts, but I do think that, in addition to discussions about "what Catholics believe," RCIA and CCD perhaps need to help people get into the "stories" more. There are a wealth of saints and parables and Scriptural stories that could fire the imagination.
People need this before they can appreciate the sacraments. How, for instance, can you approach Confession with real humility and wonder without having meditated on stories of repentance and forgiveness? Say Joseph and his brothers? The Good Thief? St. Guthlac?
Of course, that might not be the way in for lots of other people. But the problem with the group approach to religious preparation is that it turns into a "classroom" where the sage on the stage tells you what's what. There's no real conversation. At least in my experience.
A person’s emotions, thinking and behavior (e.g. religious emotions, religious thinking and religious behavior) are sometimes out of sync with each other. Cognitive consistency theory says we should be motivated to bring them into consistency.
ReplyDeleteRelationships have a lot to do with religion. When social scientists have studied cults, they find that new members hang out with cult members in the beginning, i.e. begin to behave like them, and only gradually change their thinking and emotions to accord with those of the cult members. In marriages generally the person with the strongest religious thinking, emotions, and behavior will convert the person of little religious thinking, emotions, and behavior.
So there is a lot of empirical evidence that if we change religious behavior, religious thinking and emotions will follow, although it may take time. What maintains our thinking and emotions may be different than what maintains our behavior. Merely changing our thinking may not effect our emotions or our behavior unless other people share our changed thinking and are motived to change their emotions and behavior.
That's interesting, Jack. Does it matter that this evidence comes from studying cults, which exercise elements of control and pressure that are beyond the norms of other religious groups?
DeleteMy Catholic education was so much an indoctrination that I often feel I can never know what I really believe.
ReplyDeleteAs an adult, I came to realize the extent of the indoctrination that takes place in the RCC when children are very young. Andrew Greeley, addressing the loss of adult Catholics, emphasized the traditional when it came to church buildings and the related décor, music etc – the unconscious impressions formed deep in the psyche of young children by being regularly surrounded by sensory images - statues and stained glass, flickering candles, mothers saying the rosary, rites and rituals such as First Communion, Advent wreaths. These externals are absorbed by young children and become part of a Catholic child’s identity as it is being formed. Greeley also emphasized the stories, because everyone loves a good story he said.
Years ago I came across the autobiography of Charles Davis, who had been seen as a rising star in the English theological firmament in the 60s - until he left the priesthood and said why. Then, of course, he was roundly condemned. He moved to Canada to teach religion and theology. Davis left after Paul VI went against the birth control commission with HV, which many thought he clung to in order not to make it seem that previous popes had erred. The teaching went against the lived experience of most married couples, and has been mostly ignored. Many believe it has been an important factors in the loss of educated Catholics in Europe and the Americas since then. Davis was stunned by HV, and it was the final straw in destroying his faith in the RCC, another doubt piled on top of all the other doubts he had formed during his studies, especially about papal authority.
In the book, Davis discussed the indoctrination. He compared it to geese (!), to the process in which the goslings are imprinted as being geese instead of, say, ducks. Davis said it is very hard for those raised in pious, devout, Catholic homes to overcome this indoctrination, to do the very, very hard work needed to discover if this is REALLY what one believes, or if it simply was accepted because it was imprinted so early in life.
From wiki
“ imprinting is any kind of phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage) that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behaviour. It was first used to describe situations in which an animal or person learns the characteristics of some stimulus, which is therefore said to be "imprinted" onto the subject. Imprinting is hypothesized to have a critical period.
Davis studied all major religions, especially the different varieties of Christian. He concluded that all had some things right most likely (often the same in different versions of christianity), and that all had some things wrong. He never joined another church. According to his daughter, he formed what we would call an “intentional Eucharistic community”, gathering a few friends in his own home each week to talk, study, pray, and share bread and wine.
I was thoroughly imprinted. As a child in parochial schools in the 50s, I asked questions, not appreciated by the nuns who taught us. One dealt with papal infallibility, a teaching that I challenged because only God is infallible. I learned to be quiet. In the 5th grade, we moved, and my religious ed was CCD, about which I remember precisely nothing except that it was a chance to see friends outside of school in our rural area. It took decades for me to stop ignoring what my mind and conscience were telling me about what I really believed vis a vis the RCC. Now I struggle with what I really believe about Christianity. The EC retains the basics, but it does not DEMAND "internal assent" to teachings that go against a person's mind and conscience. So I am OK with them.
“The Roman Catholic Church contradicts my Christian faith because I experience it as a zone of untruth, pervaded by a disregard for truth…..Words were used not to communicate truth, but as a means of preserving AUTHORITY without regard for truth. Words were manipulated as a means of power……For me Christian commitment is inseparable from concern for truth and concern for people. I do not find either of these represented by the official church. There is a concern for authority at the expense of truth, and I am constantly saddened by instances of the damage done to persons by workings of an impersonal and unfree system.”
Delete“The sad fact is that the pattern of doctrine, law, ritual and government imposed upon the Roman Catholic Church no longer corresponds to the genuine and ordinary experience of people today. Hence a constant sense of frustration, aggravated by each further instance of backpedalling by authority and by the frequent jeremiads uttered by Rome against modern aberrations.”
Charles Davis, “A Question of Conscience”, 1967
One of my favorite spiritual writers is the late Anthony de Mello, SJ. His book, "Awareness" is one I re-read every few years as I become "aware" of different aspects of what he is teaching every time I read it.
ReplyDeleteDeMello told a story about imprinting that has stayed with me ever since I read it the first time..
A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat on his strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbour. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.
We're all victims of our imprinting, aren't we? We are all affected by the images of what our churches, parents, friends, spouses, children want us to be. We can fight some of it, but most of us try for compromises and balance.
DeleteWe're all chickens in some way, I think.
Jean, I agree. That's why I think that most stay with the religious tradition they were born into. If you were born into a family in India, you stay Hindu, even if you grow up and never go to a temple. If you are Catholic, or protestant, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim or the child of rabid atheists - that's what stays with you, even if you make some kind of deliberate change as an adult. I have noticed from reading sites like Patheos, with most blogs written by very conservative Catholics, that many are converts from evangelical or fundamentalist protestantism. They may now embrace the much richer traditions and liturgy and sacraments of the RCC, but their religious worldview remains firmly what it was when they were protestant.
DeleteThat's what interested me about Pascal's idea that people should try to believe - just in case it's true. If one says and does the "right" things - go to church, pray, etc, is a delayed "imprinting" possible? It seems most say it is not.
I think imprinting isn't always bad (of course it can be, depends on what you were imprinted into). If there were at least some positive aspects it means you always have a home, even if it sometimes sucks. What was the Robert Frost quote, "Home is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in."
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ReplyDeleteI think it is quite possible to "learn" to believe in God, and even to "learn" to become a member of a specific religion by practicing it with an open mind. The problem is that this is no guarantee that God exists or that the specific religion one chooses to practice is true.
ReplyDeleteWhen Mark Salzman was doing research for his novel, "Lying Awake," he asked the nuns if they ever had doubts. They said, yes, of course. About what, he asked. About whether any of it was true. When Pope John heard one of his siblings had died, his reaction, if you can believe Thomas Cahill, was to hope the promise of heaven was true.
DeleteSo, no, no guarantees about truth.
Guarantees would be nice, but I am certainly not expecting them. The point is that (in my experience) when people say to put practice before belief, they are expecting you to adopt their practices so you will come to take on their beliefs. I have no doubt that this would work in many cases, but it is really committing to a specific belief system at the outset, before you believe it! It's a kind of self-indoctrination.
DeleteAnd by the way, the Catholic Church does give guarantees. The pope is infallible. The Bible in inerrant. Dogma is guaranteed to be true.
David, I don't think those guarantee what the people who want guarantees want. Yes, the pope is infallible, except when a succeeding pope changes what he did (in which case, what he did did not partake of his infallibility) or when the current pope is subject to a dubia from the right. The Bible is inerrant, but, of course, you can't put the Matt. and Luke infancy accounts next to each other and get a consistent whole except in school plays. Dogma, whatever it is, is guaranteed to be true, but what is it?
DeleteWhen people ask for guarantees, they want something that is as true as 2 + 2. Such as, when your insurance company finds out you are dead, it will stop paying your annuity (but it won't pay your beneficiary unless he comes after them). Or that tax cuts pay for themselves. Or that it has been proved there was no collusion. Or any other certainty with which we go through life.
http://digital.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/rc/id/26
ReplyDeleteI recently viewed this interview with Mary Karr, the author of the popular memoirs “The Liars Club”, “Cherry”, and “Lit”, who converted to RC as an adult. Her experience is vaguely similar to Pascal’s “Fake it til you make”, recommendation. I come from a very Catholic upbringing, said the rosary as a family every evening, went to mass every Sunday of course, but also everyday during lent, even benediction on Sunday afternoons. There’s no way that that experience could be erased from my emotions. Yet, I’m not even sure what I believe. I’ve long ago quit struggling with the virgin birth, heaven and hell, and on and on... But in my heart I know that that is the way I want to live my life. There is a reality of a loving god, I feel my deceased parents around me, not all the time but at night before I go to sleep, when I ponder my life struggles. I have spent so much time living like that it’s not much of an effort anymore. I give myself the same leeway. I have had the prayer of St. Francis on my wall for so long that my soul knows it by heart. I jokingly call it my mission statement. I try to see the suffering of Christ in others. I look at others as Godmade. That can be a problem but when you make an effort to view them that way, it makes life a lot easier. One thing I’m not too crazy about is writing in this little box. How do you guys do it. I’m used to seeing the whole page. I guess it’s the imprinting...maybe I’m a chicken who grow up among eagles. That story in reverse. I deceive myself into thinking I can fly.
Rachel, I rarely do this myself, but it really is a good idea to compose comments of any length somewhere other than in these little boxes. Not only is it easier, but it prevents you from losing whatever you have composed if there is some kind of glitch when you click on Publish. Just yesterday, I meant to click on Publish and absent-mindedly clicked on Sign Out. I was actually able to retrieve what I had written in almost-final form, but it would have been much better if I had written it "offline."
Delete"I feel my deceased parents around me . . . ."
DeleteIt is interesting you should say this. I have been meaning to write a post about such things. I have no sense at all of the continued existence of my parents or any other people I have been close to that have now died. My sense is that they no longer exist. I have asked my older sister if she has any such sense, and she says no. (She was much closer to both of them geographically when they were alive, was with them when they died, and is the only one in the family who is still a practicing Catholic.) Of course, the presence or absence of a sense of the continued existence of the dead certainly does not count as evidence of anything.
A guy I was close to during the short time I knew him hung around me for awhile after he died. I could feel his presence off and on for weeks after the funeral. I know that sounds nutty. All I can say is it I knew he was there, and I have run into enough people who know what I am talking about when I make the nutty comment that I doubt that it's nuts.
DeleteI can remember one time when I was feeling very discouraged, and I felt my deceased grandmother's presence; almost as if she had put her hand on my shoulder and said "There, there!" Another time, during my mother's fatal illness, I and some family members were sitting in her hospital room. I had dozed off, and in that state between waking and sleeping, I saw my grandmother (the same one) seated in the chair opposite me. I blinked and the chair was empty. Does that prove anything? No, it could have been wishful thinking, even though both instances were totally unexpected.
DeleteDo nutty "associations" prove anything? No. But of all the people I've known who have died, why would it be Jack (that was/is his name) rather than someone I was closer to longer? I mean: Of all the memories in all the cemeteries of the world, why did he have to walk into mine? I can think of other people I might have more reasonably expected to wishfully think of.
DeleteTom, even though our nutty associations don't prove anything to other people, we know what we experienced. The experiences I mentioned were comforting to me; and were very much in character for Nana, that she would take a time-out from heaven to comfort a loved one.
DeleteJack may have been trying to let you know that he had valued your friendship; maybe you had been there for him when he had needed someone.
In my extended family, only one story of a possible encounter with a deceased loved one. My cousin saw a misty figure in the rec room of her mother's house as she was retrieving something for the luncheon after her mother's funeral. Otherwise, nothing personal. Just some odd manifestations in a couple houses. If they were caused by my family's psychology, why weren't they experienced everywhere they lived as opposed to a couple specific places? As for me, absolutely no such experiences.
DeleteI think we're talking less about whether we can "learn" to believe in God than about whether we can or should persuade ourselves that what we learned as children or new converts about God is true.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, I'm not sure that anything Christianity teaches about the Hereafter is true. I hope it's as advertised, and if not, well, it has helped a lot of people in their final hours. Last Rites have given death dignity and mourners comfort. I have asked Raber to make sure I get them when my time comes, mostly for his sake. I've seen him at death beds. He will need something to do. Do I believe the sacrament will send me straight to heaven if I was appropriately contrite? No idea. But Raber does, and that's what matters to me.
What I think is true about the Church is the way it teaches us to think about and treat others. It upholds the dignity of life. It tries to make judgments that come down on the side of those who are the most innocent or have the smallest voices.
I suppose you could say that I appreciate the philosophy of Catholicism without believing in all the signs and wonders.
This used to bother me until I came up with the idea that if God needed Mary, for example, to be a perpetual virgin, then she was. I can stop worrying about whether I can actually believe it. That's probably shallow, but I have ADHD when it comes to these theological points.
Clearly, I'm not going to "learn" to believe some things, and that's when I pulled myself out of the communion line and decided to take what I could and leave the mysteries on the table for others to ponder.
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ReplyDeleteJean, As I said at the top, I doubt that we can learn to believe in God. I think the belief comes before the learning. We figure out what we think of signs and wonders after we act on a faith that comes from God. For example, I don't know and I don't care what happened at Medjugorje, butmwhat happened at Guadaloupe is so important that I risked life and lung to visit the the shrine last month. That is the end of my travels.
ReplyDeleteI have never had a Sixth Sense moment. The dead have never made their presence felt. The stories are interesting, but, as with the Near Death accounts, one can't help but wonder how much is due to brain activity that we don't yet understand well. While I have never experienced a visit from a dead person, I did have an experience of what I came to believe later was an example of telepathy. I had often heard of this occurring between identical twins, but as I am not a twin, never expected such an experience would occur to a born sceptic like me. I don't think telepathy is supernatural, but is simply one manifestation of powers of our brains that the scientists are far from identifying and understanding. There is strong evidence that the near death accounts are the result of chemical activity in the brain, and I suspect that some of the experiences of "visitations" and telepathy are too.
ReplyDeleteI suppose none of us will ever know as the science is in its infancy.
I doubt that we can learn to believe in God. I think the belief comes before the learning. We figure out what we think ... after we act on a faith that comes from God.
ReplyDeleteSo why does God bestow faith on some and not on others?
Anne, That is a genuine mystery that I can't answer. The old answer is that some resist the gift when God gives it. The newer answer is that he keeps offering it right up to the moment of death and maybe 15 minutes beyond. I would think sociopaths would have a legitimate excuse for rejecting it, but then that leaves the question of why God creates sociopaths. So: I dunno.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of sociopaths and spirit visits: My mother used to believe her father was haunting us because she could smell cigarette smoke in odd places. The smoke was from my brother, who was puffing in secret. He was happy to use Grampa as cover for his illicit activities.
ReplyDeleteIf we had been quicker on the uptake, we could have bought a bottle of Kessler's and blamed that olfactory visitation on him, too.