In the thread below, Curious Texan, for perhaps the 10-brazillionth time in human intellectual history, argues from Pascal’s Wager. The Wager is the thinking man’s version of the conundrum posed by the dudes who periodically bang on my door, Jack Chick pamphlets in hand, and demand to know: If you died today would you go to Heaven or Hell?
There are many problems with Pascal’s Wager, but the most obvious and most comprehensive is this: it’s a false dichotomy. In an infinite universe, there are many, many more possibilities than the two presented by this viewpoint. You could choose to believe in a Christian God only to find out that the Almighty was named Allah. You could worship Vishnu and wind up facing the Great Green Arkleseizure. In our multicultural world, Pascal’s Wager sends you down the rabbit hole fairly quickly.
Another false dichotomy holds that science and religion stand in opposition. They do not. I am by no means anti- or even a-religious; but I also cannot accept a worldview that ultimately asks me to believe that dinosaurs rode on a wooden boat during a worldwide deluge and wore saddles.
Not that there shouldn't be a division of labor. Both science and religion have something to offer a well-balanced person, and the key is in the balance. At the height of early-twentieth-century scientific hubris, a physician attempted to determine the weight of the soul by weighing patients just before and just after death. This attempt to make religion into science seems silly to us in the harsh light of the twenty-first century, but ID attempts to make science into religion are equally silly. Rest assured, the human soul will ever be the domain of metaphysics and religion and the human body will ever fall under biology. Attempts to mix the two-- by Dr. MacDougall, by Christian Scientists, by millennialists who believe in literal resurrections of bodies at a literal End of Time-- can only end in tears.
SPACEDARK
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