Sal Cordova mentioned Pascal’s Wager on the Randi thread, and I was surprised to find that there has never been a thread on that topic here at TSZ. Hence this OP.
Pascal was a brilliant guy, but his famous Wager is an irrational mess. (Religion can have that effect on otherwise bright people.) In the comments, let’s explain the Wager’s shortcomings to Sal.
To start things off, here is Wikipedia’s statement of the argument, using Pascal’s words:
In what seems like a proof of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, the “is morality objective or subjective” debates are playing out yet again at UD.
Here, in 60 seconds or less, is why theistic objective morality doesn’t get off the ground:
[Results not guaranteed. May vary with individual reading speed.]
1. For objective morality to have an impact, we need to a) know that it exists, b) know what it requires, and c) know that we have reliable access to it. We don’t know any of those things.
2. Lacking access to objective morality, all we have left is subjective morality — what each person thinks is right or wrong. This is just as true for the objectivist as it is for the subjectivist.
3. Even if God existed and we knew exactly what he expected of us, there would be no reason to regard his will as morally binding. His morality would be just as subjective as ours.
While composing my post on Veblen goods, I came across the concept of a “Giffen good”, which was new to me. It’s a fascinating topic that I think is worth a post.
A few months ago, my trusty old Seiko died and I found myself in the market for a new watch. I ended up buying a 
1,000, 
10,000 on a watch that does nothing more than my $100 Seiko?
The answer, of course, is status. Thorstein Veblen got it right in his classic Theory of the Leisure Class:
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
And:
Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.
This weekend, millions of Christians will express gratitude to Jesus Christ for saving them through his sacrifice. Few of them will be asking the obvious follow-up question: “How does that work, exactly?”
Here’s Christianity’s dirty secret: No one has a good explanation of how atonement works. There is no consensus among Christians, and none of the theories offered actually make sense.
In Judges 13-16, the Bible tells the bizarre story of Samson. YouTube contributor DarkMatter2525 has produced an excellent 3-part animated version of the story.
Please read the story first and then watch the three videos. If you do it the other way around, you’ll be asking yourself over and over: “Wait — does the Bible really say that?”
In the comments, I’ll pose some questions to believers regarding the story.
If you’re fascinated by irrational beliefs and the people who hold them, HBO’s new Scientology documentary is a must-see:
It premieres on HBO Sunday, March 29th, at 8 pm. For more airtimes, go here and mouse over “Schedule” in the lower right corner.
(I saw it yesterday in a San Francisco theater. They’re doing a very limited theatrical release so that the film will be eligible for Oscar nominations.)
Springtime is approaching. The 2LoT truthers are flocking at Uncommon Descent, hoping to find mates so that they can pass their second law inanity on to the next generation. Until yesterday, I was observing their bizarre mating rituals up close. Now I have been banned (again) from the nesting site, for pointing out a particularly ugly and infertile egg laid by kairosfocus.
Many others have been banned from the site as well, but we can still observe the spectacle through our high-powered binoculars. At this distance, our laughter will not disturb the awkward courtship rituals, as the participants preen and flaunt their ignorance in front of potential mates.
Hence this thread. Feel free to post your observations regarding the current 2LoT goings-on at UD and the perennial misuse of the 2LoT by IDers in general.
Christianity and other forms of theism are full of oddities. This is the first of a series of posts pointing out the oddities and asking theists to explain how they understand, deal with, or rationalize these oddities.
Today’s question:
Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If they didn’t know good from evil until after eating the fruit, then they were punished for doing something they didn’t know was evil.
Does this make sense to you? If so, why?
UD commenter Andre has a bad case of PCD OCD.
PCD stands for “programmed cell death”. Andre is convinced that it is the death knell not only of cells, but of modern evolutionary theory. He has been spamming the “bomb” thread at UD in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade us of this. (112 mentions of PCD in that thread, but no intelligible argument from Andre.)
Rich suggested that we set up a thread for him here, which I think is a great idea.
Here you go, Andre. Tell us why PCD is an unguided evolution killer, and be prepared to learn why it is not.
Let’s discuss Amie Thomasson’s paper A Nonreductivist Solution to Mental Causation. I’ll save my thoughts for the comment thread.
We have folks on both sides of this question, so it should make for an interesting discussion.
(I’m a ‘yes’, by the way.)
He raises the question in the New York Times Sunday Review:
I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do…
How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong…
Barry Arrington should stick to what he’s good at — banning blasphemers.
Instead, he has disinterred the corpse of the “natural selection is a tautology” argument, propped it up in a chair, and is now attempting to engage it in conversation.
Trust me, Barry – that corpse is dead, dead, dead. Among the coroner’s findings:
1.How many of you have a song or some other piece of music “playing” in your head, right now?
2. During roughly what percentage of your waking time do you have “mental music” playing (that is, when you’re not listening to an external source of music)?
3. How much voluntary control do you have over the music playing in your head? If a song you don’t like starts to “play”, are you able to replace it with something you like better, or do you get stuck with “earworms” – songs that you can’t get rid of despite trying?
The subject of obscure writing came up on another thread, and with Steven Pinker’s new book on writing coming out next week, now is a good time for a thread on the topic.
Obscure writing has its place (Finnegan’s Wake and The Sound and the Fury, for example), but it is usually annoying and often completely unnecessary. Here’s a funny clip in which John Searle laments the prevalence of obscurantism among continental philosophers:
John Searle – Foucault and Bourdieu on continental obscurantism
When is obscure prose appropriate or useful? When is it annoying or harmful? Who are the worst offenders? Feel free to share examples of annoyingly obscure prose.
I saw this photo at Jerry Coyne’s place a couple of days ago and laughed out loud. It’s flippant, but the question actually deserves genuine, serious consideration.
To the theists reading this: When you’re stranded on the throne, why doesn’t God poof a roll into existence for you? He’s surely powerful enough to do it, with less effort than it takes you to lift a finger, so what holds him back?
If your spouse, child, or even a roommate that you didn’t particularly like were in a similar predicament, you would surely be kind enough to rescue them by fetching a roll and placing it outside the bathroom door. Why doesn’t God do the divine equivalent?
Is it for the same reason that he never restores the limbs of amputees?
Question for discussion:
Is mathematics more fundamental than logic, or vice-versa? Neither? Or is it more complicated?
In a new post at UD, Denyse O’Leary quotes an article from The Scientist (which she misattributes to Science):
Populations of Escherichia coli grown in the lab quickly evolve tolerance when exposed to repeated treatments with the antibiotic ampicillin, according to a study published today (June 25) in Nature. Specifically, the bacteria evolved to stay in a dormant “lag” phase for just longer than three-, five-, or eight-hour-long treatment courses, before waking up and growing overnight until the next round of treatment began.
