Abstract
Drawing on principles relating to the duty of easy rescue, I argue that any atheist who is less than wholly certain of the non-existence of a God or gods will in some circumstances be morally obliged to pray.
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Notes
John Lemos, ‘An Agnostic Defence of Obligatory Prayer,’ Sophia, 37 (1998), p. 73.
Ibid., pp. 77–78.
Consider for example a man who honestly thinks, though on objectively poor grounds, that there is a 20% chance that the chocolate bar he just bought his daughter contains rat poison (perhaps he received a chain e-mail warning about that brand of chocolate bar). Given his probability assessment, his action of buying the bar is negligent; he is duty-bound not to buy that particular brand of chocolate bar for his daughter, until such time as his mistaken probability assessment is corrected. Likewise, if, objectively speaking, there is a 20% chance that the chocolate bar is poisoned (as it happens a vicious factory worker made a point of poisoning 2 out of every 10 bars produced), but the father is inculpably unaware of this, he cannot be faulted for buying the bar.
Though really the worry is overblown in Pascal’s case. He was writing for an early-modern European audience for whom the Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian) God would have been the only live option anyway. Moreover he provides many arguments in the Pensées for privileging the Christian deity over the Islamic God and pagan gods. Rightly or wrongly, he at least thought that there were good reasons for structuring the wager in terms of the Christian God.
This worry is brought up by another referee: mightn’t the gods resent prayers from non-believers, enough to not only frustrate the prayer but actively punish the atheist for attempting it? I think what I have to say in what follows addresses this worry as well.
Ibid., pp. 79–81.
Once again, if my estimates of the numbers here do not pan out, then one could simply tweak my thesis in the previously mentioned manner. Though note that one anonymous referee has intuitions in the other direction, thinking that most atheists would not find it particularly uncomfortable to pray, referencing ‘the rather common phenomenon of atheists habitually invoking God.’
Consider for instance the following, pilfered from the author’s pocket Orthodox prayer book: ‘Be mindful, O Lord, of those who travel by land and sea, and air; of the young and the old; orphans and widows; the sick and the suffering, the sorrowing and the afflicted, all captives, and the needy poor; upon them all send forth thy mercies, for thou art the giver of all good things.’
Lemos, 1998, p. 84.
This paper was written during a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for which I thank the government and taxpayers of Canada. Versions were presented at a colloquium at McMurry University in January 2011, and at the 2011 meeting of the Central APA. I would like to thank all those in attendance for their helpful comments and suggestions, and in particular my APA commentator, Wes Morriston. My thanks also to Yoshiki Kobasigawa, Daniel Layman, Andrew Moon, Blake Roeber, and Michael Rota for helpful discussion, and to John Lemos and several anonymous referees for Sophia for their valuable comments on multiple drafts.
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Dumsday, T. Why (Most) Atheists Have a Duty to Pray. SOPHIA 51, 59–70 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0268-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0268-y