Wrestling with Religion

The Burning Bush by Marc Chagall Of course, God isn’t God’s name. It’s a proper noun, but no more the divine name than Elizabeth II’s name is Queen . Speak it aloud or start a sentence with it, and you have a tossup or an interpretation from context. The English word derives from an old Germanic one that referred to Thor, Frey, and Odin and appears in texts of living religions as a translation of deus in Latin, theos in Greek, el in Hebrew, and deva in Sanskrit. All have been used by polytheists and adapted to mean a supreme god such as Zeus. Even Allah , revered from pre-Islamic times as the high god (if not the only god back then), is a Semitic term meaning “the god.” In the Vedantic tradition (which predates the Hebrew Bible by 500 years), ultimate reality (often called Brahman) is a single being expressed by many names and images, human and nonhuman, but transcending all possible names or representations. In contrast, the god of Moses has a true name, one dictated from ...

Even if we accept the possibility of a God that dispenses an infinite jackpot for belief and withholds it for disbelief, Pascal’s Wager--his argument that it is infinitely more lucrative to believe in his God than not to--is reasonable only absent the possibility of another God offering the opposite payoff. Here are some possibilities: (1) a God who rewards reasonable disbelief and punishes gullibility or (2) a God who insists that we make specific theological choices (such as Baal vs. YHWH, Catholic vs. protestant, Christian vs. Muslim) and rewards only the correct choice. The possibility of even one such Being creates an opposing infinity and invalidates Pascal's Wager.  Belief in a generic supreme being also seems not to be enough. The priests of Baal (who competed with Elijah to call down fire from heaven and were slaughtered for it) believed their god was more powerful than Elijah's Yahweh, whom Pascal identifies with the true God, so if all that is required is beli...