kierkegaard's leap[ of faith to pascal's wager?

[randall patrick]

Soren Kierkegaard quoted in Nathan Scott's Mirrors of Man in Existentialism:



"One stick's one's finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger into existence---it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How come I am here? What is this thing called the world? What does the word mean? Who is it that lured me into the thing, and now leaves me there....How did I come into the world?....How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?"


How can a mind as intelligent and introspective and incredulous as this manage to actually take a leap of faith to God? I have never understood this about Kierkegaard. I can understand a leap to God in the broadest sense of the word...where God becomes merely a metaphor for the extraordinary mystery of existence. But Kierkegaard's leap was to a God...to the God. He abandoned Regina Olsen because he felt compelled to show the world "what it is to be a Christian." His beef with Bishop Mynster and the Danish Church was not about the existence of God but how the church hierarchy had turned religious faith into a scripted, institutionalized puppet show. He insisted on concocting his own script. The existential one.


There have been other minds equally intelligent who have made this leap---Barth and Tillich and Marcel and Buber and Kung and Novak and Wilson and Updike.


Or Pascal: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?"


God's of course. Call it a wager.


Personally, I can only presume it is a psychological reaction to living in an essentially absurd and meaningless world...to death and oblivion. Some minds just can't endure this. They invent actual Gods to make this go away. At least for a while. Or they invent philosophical equivalents---monads and pantheism and noumena and solipsism and forms---which they somehow manage to attach [by way of, say, transendental idealism] to God.


They blink, in other words. Eyeball to eyeball with the useless passion we all become when we are eyeball to eyeball with the abyss, some...well...choke.


I recall, for example, years ago when I was politically active on the left I attended a meeting in which Daniel and Phillip Berrigan spoke. They spoke of the relationship between God and their political activism in a way that was completely nonsensical to me. Someone kept probing this relationship deeper and deeper and I got a visceral sense that it was really nonsensical to them too. But then I kept thinking, "what the hell else is there?"


Still, I wonder: How in the world can any intelligent human being actually believe there is an actual denominational God---a loving just and merciful God---who created this world? Yet thousands upon thousands do. In other words, these people are not hicks from the sticks who have had God crammed into their craniums from the day they were born. They are very bright, articulate, immaginative, creative, well-informed and intellectually sophisticated in many regards. And yet somehow they manage to rationalize a leap of faith that seems utterly preposterous to me.


Maybe it's a genetic thing. Some of us don't have the one that allows this.


And here I include a few atheists I have bumped into as well. If you know what I mean.


rp

[Milton Bradley]

Complicated problems often call for complicated solutions. It really is pretty difficult to rationalize away the entire existance that one can observe if you are not willing to consider God in the equation.


I would personally be willing to believe a God exists, and in fact I did at one time. It almost seems necesarry to have some kind of outside force maniplating the observable because it seems like a lot of the answers man craves do not seem answerable to us in our current situation.


I still consider myself agnostic, or an atheist, but it is not because I was not willing to believe. I was just not willing to take the leap of blind faith required to be part of any of the religions I am aware of, because I think I am smarter than the author, and see through the falsehoods, contradictions, or misinformation contained in the message. Any religion I would ultimately consider would have to stand up to some pretty tough scrutiny from the Peanut Gallery, because, after all, thats where I launch my questions from.


In the end, the simple answer to your question is, in my opinion, peoples inherent weakminded tendency to require an answer to every question they can ask. People want answers, and they want them yesterday.

[Boetie]

If you blank out the human ego aka "I" or devalue the "I" to a mere fiction, then the leap to faith and the wager will not make sense.