{"id":757,"date":"2010-08-10T03:26:12","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T10:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blog\/?p=757"},"modified":"2010-08-10T03:28:13","modified_gmt":"2010-08-10T10:28:13","slug":"pascals-wager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2010\/08\/10\/pascals-wager\/","title":{"rendered":"Pascal’s Wager and the Value of Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pascal’s Wager<\/a> has been cited, and the value of ‘truth’ has been question<\/a>ed, in a rather curious Guardian article by Harriet Baber<\/a> who has been trashed by PZMeyers<\/a> who has been called out by ‘Siris’<\/a> (with John S Wilkins agreeing<\/a> to some extent), and Ophelia Benson has also taken it on<\/a>. Despite the objections of Siris (and having now read the above linked Stanford Encyclopedia entry) I don’t think Meyers is off-base with regard to the Wager being “bollocks”, but I do think his ad feminem tone was more what I would expect of some of his fanboys than of himself and I also think he missed some of the subtleties of Ms Baber’s position. Not that I agree with her, but I do find that she gives some insight into how an intelligent and thoughtful person can come to adopt a religious position.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, the question<\/a> of\u00a0 ‘truth’ also comes up in Philosophy Talk this week, where John Perry takes issue<\/a> with the pragmatic theory of truth in the promo for a broadcast on William James.\u00a0 Am I wrong to imagine a connection between James “pragmatic” theory, what Baber says, and the postmodernists’ ideas of\u00a0 “socially constructed” truth?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pascal’s Wager has been cited, and the value of ‘truth’ has been questioned, in a rather curious Guardian article by Harriet Baber who has been trashed by PZMeyers who has been called out by ‘Siris’ (with John S Wilkins agreeing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":759,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757\/revisions\/759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}