Backed into a corner: Dan turns to "fashionable nonsense" to save the church

[Tom]

Dean Robbers seems to have struck a nerve:

Over at the Peterson Obsession Board, one of the posters seems recently to have assumed the task of interpreting my thinking to his fellow board participants. (He takes his moniker there from a notable Book of Mormon robber and murderer.) It is, I suppose, a noble effort, though I don’t think that his prospects for success in this new enterprise are very high. I mean, his is an audience that seems, on the whole, to have tastes and predilections more suited to People Magazine or the National Enquirer than to, say, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.

It seems that the Afore over at the Hitchens Obsession Blog has assumed the snobbish task of denigrating the reading habits of DM participants. How would he know what reading tastes and predilections the participants here have? Does he employ remote viewing?

Does he know that last year I read Elizabeth Jackson’s essay, “An Epistemic Version of Pascal's Wager,” published in the September 2024 issue of the Journal of the American Philosophical Society. After she formulates an epistemic version of Pascal’s Wager, Professor Jackson responds to four objections to her reformulated wager. The third objection involves “many gods.” She writes:

One might wonder what the epistemic wager implies about mutually exclusive religions. Suppose I take the epistemic wager and believe in the God of religion 1; I may not get the epistemic goods of religion 2.

My response is twofold. First, it is sensible to simply ask the question of whether one ought to be a theist, and then leave the choice between religions for later. The main purpose of this essay is not to adjudicate between religions, but to draw a connection between general theism and epistemic consequentialism.

Second, if all religions offer roughly the same epistemic goods, then according to the epistemic wager, one should practice the religion that one thinks is most likely to be true. It is not obvious, however, that we should quantify the epistemic value of all religions equally; the epistemic goods to be gained in the afterlife vary widely by religious tradition. For example, as discussed above, on many versions of Christianity, heaven involves the beatific vision—seeing God's essence and gaining a complete understanding of the world. Alternatively, by practicing certain versions of Buddhism, one can eventually reach enlightenment, the state of comprehending reality as it is (see Wright 2016), which also seems quite epistemically valuable. Mormonism teaches that humans can eventually become divine, as they ‘progress toward perfection and ultimately realize their divine destiny as heirs of eternal life’ (Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day [sic] Saints 1995). The epistemic benefits of being divine seem quite significant, to say the least. Thus, various religions at least offer different epistemic goods; there is a further question of how to weigh these goods against each other. If one thinks that a certain religion offers better epistemic goods than another, one can also factor that into the decision table; if one takes the goods of various religions to be infinite, one can utilize one of the decision-theoretic methods for comparing infinities discussed above. A detailed theological comparison of the epistemic goods of various religions is a promising area of further research.

(Mormonism also makes a brief appearance in an essay by Jackson and Andrew Rogers published in a 2019 issue of Philosophia Christi.)

As for me and my house, we prefer reading J-APA to subsisting on a reading diet consisting of articles published by, say, First Things, National Review, Liahona, and Interpreter.

(“Don’t believe me?” he writes at the end of one fundamentally misguided exposition. “Ask him!” Which, of course, nobody has. Including him.)

It’s odd that the Afore now is inventing elements of quotations. Where did the Dean write, “Ask him!” The Afore reminds me of movie marketers who invent exclamation points in quoting reviews.

Incidentally, most of the content of the Afore’s blog post today, “Some Thoughts On Islam And Terrorist Violence,” previously appeared in a 2017 Deserted News column, “Why are there so few Muslim terrorists?” Why doesn’t the Afore note that in his blog post? Did the Afore write the 2017 column alone or did Hamblin, who is listed as co-author, write part of it? If Hamblin wrote part of it, shouldn’t the Afore credit him in today’s blog post?

ETA: The Afore has responded to my comment by silently adding this note to his original post: “[Note: The material above is slightly modified from a 2017 Bill Hamblin-Dan Peterson column in the Deseret News of which, as it happens, I was the sole author.]” I wonder when the Afore plans to silently edit his plagiarized potato famine post of eight months ago to credit Mike Dash.