Religion:
Rob re JoT re Peter re "Wager"

While I agree with you wholemindedly that we ought to "try not to credit subjective, self-serving judgments," I'm afraid that I don't agree with this:

Saying “atheists lives are better than believers’” is just as unverifiable as saying “believers afterlives are better than atheists’.”

This is only true if one accepts a sort of softcore behaviorism - granting the existence of an interior life, but denying its accessibility to investigation. That attitude is as defeatist as it is unnecessary. While it's true that it is considerably more difficult to investigate consciousness than, say, frog guts, we can still claim reliable results using self-reporting and imaging techniques. Questioning their validity is, well, valid, but isn't that far removed from asking how we know that what we see in front of us really exists. Fascinating questions, but, unlike our inner lives, not open to scientific investigation.

Briefly:
Our inner lives can be investigated by scientists.
Scientific methods can be investigated by philosophers.
The afterlife can be "investigated" by theologians.

So, while I do not agree that atheists' lives are prima facie superior to believers', I do believe the question would yield to investigation.

—Rob Lightner
December 2005

Rob, you're right. Sometimes I exaggerate, and this exaggeration went over the line. So I've changed the last line of the response, and now it says, "I don't trust an atheist who says that their life is better than a believer's any more than I trust a believer who says their afterlife is better than an atheist's." Still something of an exaggeration, but not just wrong. —JoT

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