Mopologetics and the 5 stages of grief

[Dr Moore]

For confidential reasons, I found myself reading about the stages of grief today.

• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance

It strikes me that LDS apologetics on the whole, and by degrees with various “gospel topics,” has exhibited some (if not all) of these stages of grief. Part of coming to grips with the gulf between what we teach on Sunday and what actually took place in history.

[Nimrod]

I think the late Bill Hamlin went through all 5.

[Gadianton]

Everyone at SeN is stuck at stage 2.

[drumdude]

I vaguely remember DCP arguing for the reasonability of Pascal’s wager. So he might be at stage 3!

[Dr Exiled]

I could see DCP at stage 4 while appearing to be at a mixture of 2 and 3. The guy incessantly travels like he is running away from his thoughts, trying to keep busy so he doesn't have to reflect on his stage 4 depression for fear that it will lead to stage 5.

[Alphus and Omegus]

I vaguely remember DCP arguing for the reasonability of Pascal’s wager. So he might be at stage 3!

I really hope Dan isn't a Pascal person. It's such a terrible argument and has been debunked pretty much since it was first proposed. I can't say I would be surprised if Dan were a Pascal wagerer, however.

[drumdude]

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... d-one.html

It was the subject of one of his myriad quickie control-c, control-v blog posts.

[Dr Moore]

For one, the gospel topics essays were a form of bargaining, following decades of denial and, at times, anger at the "critics" who merely pointed out the inconvenient truth.

FAIR is all about bargaining.

Seems like the overall state of LDS apologetics is hovering around that stage. Less developed Mopologists are stuck at denial and anger -- we know who they are.

Then there's Jim Bennett. I've seen some of his posts and there's plenty of depression and acceptance to be found. Depression about the divisiveness and cold-heartedness of much of mainstream Mormonism, and acceptance of the messy stuff he can't change. I dunno... to the extent Mormonism is a thing we've all "lost" and gone through versions of mourning/grief or whatever, it's interesting to see the state of apologetics be forced to also undergo those stages as it (the field) deals with the fact that nothing is easily defended. Literally nothing.

[Physics Guy]

People shouldn’t hate on Pascal’s Wager so much. Its extreme form is clearly silly: you must believe in my particular sect’s conception of God, and only that God, because if you do then you’ll have eternal bliss, and in every other case you’ll have eternal misery. And that may well have been what Pascal himself meant, even though it was silly.

The Pensées are casually written, though, and were just Pascal’s personal notes. It’s not clear that he ever meant to offer that extreme form of his Wager as a sound argument for the general public. And although Blaise Pascal was certainly a devoted-to-fanatical Catholic, he wasn’t just an apologist hack trying to dress his bogus theology up in stolen mathematical language that he didn’t understand.

Pascal invented probability. He invented the concept of weighing reward against risk, quantitatively. This doesn’t make him an authority, necessarily, but it means that he understood the basic issues well enough to explain them in his own words without ever having been taught them by anyone else. To assume that he spoke about something he cared about deeply (belief in God), in terms of an important mathematical theory which he founded (risk and reward), only to say something obviously silly, is itself a pretty risky assumption.

What is much more likely, given that Pascal had himself originated this kind of probability analysis, is that he was mainly articulating something that now seems too obvious to bother saying, but which really was new to Pascal at the time—and thus new to everyone. And it may be something that is obviously true, but nevetheless easy to overlook or underappreciate, so that it actually is worth articulating even today.

I think the real content of Pascal’s Wager is just that belief isn’t always just a judgement of how likely something is to be true. Often belief implies actions, and can therefore better be considered as a move in a game—or a bet. To assess whether the bet is wise, the probability of winning is not the only factor to consider. You also have to consider the prospective reward. If you place a bet for a 100:1 payoff, because you have good reason to estimate the probability of winning at 2% rather than 1%, you’re making a smart bet—you’re not deluding yourself into thinking that the winning chance is any higher than it is. If you run into a burning building, you’re not being sure that it’s safe: you’re judging that it’s worth the risk to save that child’s life.

That principle is certainly not a knock-down argument for belief in God. The fact that risk and reward have to be weighed together is well understood by plenty of people with different beliefs and disbeliefs. Even so, I think that if you do understand this concept, then you have to admit that it’s important enough to deserve attention. It’s definitely not an open-and-shut answer to the question of religious belief, but neither is it trivial or irrelevant. If believing in God brings sufficient benefits—of any kind—then that reward may be sufficient to make belief, in the sense of acting consistently upon the premise that God exists, a rational move in the game of life, even if the apparent probability of God existing seems low. That’s an issue that has to be considered, however one decides to act in life. Simply trying to judge the probability, without considering costs and rewards, isn’t enough to settle the practical question.

An obvious point, we might say today; and it’s an issue, not a conclusion. In Pascal’s time, the issue probably had not been raised so explicitly. It wasn’t at all silly of Pascal to spell it out in those down-to-earth terms, as a wager. And even today it remains a significant issue. Whether Pascal himself only meant to raise that issue, or whether he really thought he had an airtight case for Catholic belief, is only of historical interest to me. If “Pascal’s Wager” weren’t a good label for the point that risk must be weighed with reward, we would be looking for some other label for such an important issue. We have this label, though, and even if it isn’t perfectly accurate historically, it’s pretty fitting as such labels go. I think we should apply it to the most worthwhile referent that it can fit.

We certainly shouldn’t use an extreme interpretation of Pascal’s Wager, which makes it out to be something just silly, as a surreptitious straw man to deflect attention from an issue which really is important—all the more important for being unclear and debatable in its implications. Is it in any sense worthwhile to believe in any kind of God? Maybe not. There’s no point in ducking the whole question of worthwhileness, though, by laughing it off as just that silly old Pascal’s Wager again.

[Alphus and Omegus]

For one, the gospel topics essays were a form of bargaining, following decades of denial and, at times, anger at the "critics" who merely pointed out the inconvenient truth.

FAIR is all about bargaining.

Seems like the overall state of LDS apologetics is hovering around that stage. Less developed Mopologists are stuck at denial and anger -- we know who they are.

Then there's Jim Bennett. I've seen some of his posts and there's plenty of depression and acceptance to be found. Depression about the divisiveness and cold-heartedness of much of mainstream Mormonism, and acceptance of the messy stuff he can't change. I dunno... to the extent Mormonism is a thing we've all "lost" and gone through versions of mourning/grief or whatever, it's interesting to see the state of apologetics be forced to also undergo those stages as it (the field) deals with the fact that nothing is easily defended. Literally nothing.

What's desperately needed in Christianity is a post-faith tradition like which exists in Judaism. Most Jewish traditions have accepted that the issues are so great that it's perfectly rational not to believe. But many of the non-believers also have accepted that there are a lot of things in the tradition--moral values, philosophies of living, culinary ideas, whatever--that are worth hanging onto.

I think of Mormonism in this way. The origin story is pretty awful and the leaders don't seem to be particularly exemplary people, but many of the members have evolved some great ideas such as sticking together and hard work. Mormonism is also less far to the right than other literalist traditions like evangelicalism, and the wonderful story of the Community of Christ is very instructive in these times of deranged fundamentalism.