Can Wanting to Believe Make Us Believers?
In the past religion has confronted a variety of scientific challenges, from the rediscovery of ancient scientific systems like Aristotle’s in the 12th and 13th centuries, to Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries, to Darwin in the 19th and beyond. These discoveries have forced religion to adapt in various ways, but those contemporary advocates of religion who are, in my opinion, the most sophisticated don’t feel that they have to oppose science in order to keep their faith.
.. For Mersenne and his contemporaries, the idea of the atheist was terrifying. Many thought that, without the threat of divine punishment, there was no reason for people to act morally. Establishing the rationality of belief in God had high stakes for them.
.. It is important to remember that Pascal’s wager it isn’t an argument for the truth of the proposition that God exists, but an argument for why we should want to believe that God exists: It only tells us that it is to our advantage to believe, and in this way makes us want to believe, but it doesn’t give us any reasons to think that God actually exists. In a way, I’m already convinced that I shouldwant to believe. But there is a step from there to actual belief, and that’s a step I cannot personally negotiate. Pascal tells us, roughly, that we should adopt the life of the believer and eventually the belief will come. And maybe it will. But that seems too much like self-deception to me.
.. But what worries me more than what God might think is the possibility that I may corrupt my soul by deceiving myself into believing something, just because I want it to be true. For a philosopher, that’s a kind of damnation in this life.