[ETA: Retracted because I don’t have the aversion-defeating energy necessary to polish this, but:]
5% or so probability to Christianity being true
To clarify, presumably “true” here doesn’t mean all or even most of the claims of Christianity are true, just that there are some decision policies emphasized by Christianity that are plausible enough that Pascal’s wager can be justifiably applied to amplify their salience.
I can see two different groups of claims that both seem central to Christian moral (i.e. decision-policy-relevant) philosophy as I understand it, which in my mind I would keep separate if at all possible but that in Christian philosophy and dogma are very much mixed together:
The first group of claims is in some ways more practical and, to a LessWronger, more objectionable. It reasons from various allegedly supernatural phenomena to the conclusion that unless a human acts in a way seemingly concordant with the expressed preferences of the origins of those supernatural phenomena, that human will be risking some grave, essentially game theoretic consequence as well as some chance of being in moral error, even if the morality of the prescriptions isn’t subjectively verifiable. Moral error, that is, because disregarding the advice, threats, requests, policies &c. of agents seemingly vastly more intelligent than you is a failure mode, and furthermore it’s a failure mode that seemingly justifies retrospective condemnatory judgments of the form “you had all this evidence handed to you by a transhumanly intelligent entity and you chose to ignore it?” even if in some fundamental sense those judgments aren’t themselves “moral”. An important note: saying “supernaturalism is silly, therefore I don’t even have to accept the premises of that whole line of reasoning” runs into some serious Aumann problems, much more serious than can be casually cast aside, especially if you have a Pascalian argument ready to pounce.
The second group of claims is more philosophical and meta-ethical, and is emphasized more in intellectually advanced forms of Christianity, e.g. Scholasticism. One take on the main idea is that there is something like an eternal moral-esque standard etched into the laws of decision theoretic logic any deviations from which will result in pointless self-defeat. You will sometimes see it claimed that it isn’t that God is punishing you as such, it’s that you have knowingly chosen to distance yourself from the moral law and have thus brought ruin upon yourself. To some extent I think it’s merely a difference of framing born of Christianity’s attempts to gain resonance with different parts of default human psychology, i.e. something like third party game theoretic punishment-aversion/credit-seeking on one hand and first person decision theoretic regret-minimization on the other. [This branch needs a lot more fleshing out, but I’m too tired to continue.]
But note that in early Christian writings especially and in relatively modern Christian polemic, you’ll get a mess of moralism founded on insight into the nature of human psychology, theological speculation, supernatural evidence, appeals to intuitive Aumancy, et cetera. [Too tired to integrate this line of thought into the broader structure of my comment.]
[ETA: Retracted because I don’t have the aversion-defeating energy necessary to polish this, but:]
To clarify, presumably “true” here doesn’t mean all or even most of the claims of Christianity are true, just that there are some decision policies emphasized by Christianity that are plausible enough that Pascal’s wager can be justifiably applied to amplify their salience.
I can see two different groups of claims that both seem central to Christian moral (i.e. decision-policy-relevant) philosophy as I understand it, which in my mind I would keep separate if at all possible but that in Christian philosophy and dogma are very much mixed together:
The first group of claims is in some ways more practical and, to a LessWronger, more objectionable. It reasons from various allegedly supernatural phenomena to the conclusion that unless a human acts in a way seemingly concordant with the expressed preferences of the origins of those supernatural phenomena, that human will be risking some grave, essentially game theoretic consequence as well as some chance of being in moral error, even if the morality of the prescriptions isn’t subjectively verifiable. Moral error, that is, because disregarding the advice, threats, requests, policies &c. of agents seemingly vastly more intelligent than you is a failure mode, and furthermore it’s a failure mode that seemingly justifies retrospective condemnatory judgments of the form “you had all this evidence handed to you by a transhumanly intelligent entity and you chose to ignore it?” even if in some fundamental sense those judgments aren’t themselves “moral”. An important note: saying “supernaturalism is silly, therefore I don’t even have to accept the premises of that whole line of reasoning” runs into some serious Aumann problems, much more serious than can be casually cast aside, especially if you have a Pascalian argument ready to pounce.
The second group of claims is more philosophical and meta-ethical, and is emphasized more in intellectually advanced forms of Christianity, e.g. Scholasticism. One take on the main idea is that there is something like an eternal moral-esque standard etched into the laws of decision theoretic logic any deviations from which will result in pointless self-defeat. You will sometimes see it claimed that it isn’t that God is punishing you as such, it’s that you have knowingly chosen to distance yourself from the moral law and have thus brought ruin upon yourself. To some extent I think it’s merely a difference of framing born of Christianity’s attempts to gain resonance with different parts of default human psychology, i.e. something like third party game theoretic punishment-aversion/credit-seeking on one hand and first person decision theoretic regret-minimization on the other. [This branch needs a lot more fleshing out, but I’m too tired to continue.]
But note that in early Christian writings especially and in relatively modern Christian polemic, you’ll get a mess of moralism founded on insight into the nature of human psychology, theological speculation, supernatural evidence, appeals to intuitive Aumancy, et cetera. [Too tired to integrate this line of thought into the broader structure of my comment.]
I want to vote this up to encourage posting good comments even when incompletely polished; but since you formally retracted this, I can’t.