A Hopeless Bet
I'm currently reading Jamie White's Crimes Against Logic . What can I say I'm a sucker for books about critical thinking. I particularly like his take on Pascal's Wager. It is the argument your girl friend in high school trotted out to convince you that even though you're an atheist you ought to go to church with her, just in case. If you marry the her you'll find that isn't the only thing she wants to change about you. You're a future project not a future partner, but I digress. Using a somewhat novel approach, Mr. Whyte does an excellent job of refuting this silly argument one more time.
The most famous argument for believing something for which you have no evidence is Pascal's Wager. Pascal claimed that it is rational to be a Christian even though the evidence available make the position quite improbable. Because if by chance Christianity turns out to be true, then you win everlasting salvation. While if it is false—if there is no God and no heaven or hell—then you are no worse off than the correct atheist. On the other hand, if you refuse to believe, you will go to hell if you are wrong and be no better off if you are right than a Christian who is wrong. An atheist can never win and he might lose badly. But a Christian just might win, and he can never lose badly. In other words, no matter how improbable the truth of Christianity, it's always the best bet.
There is nothing sanctimonious about this. On the contrary, it is rather tawdry. I wonder if someone who had somehow managed to make himself love Jesus on the basis of this calculation would find that love reciprocated. He certainly wouldn't if I were Jesus. But it is a matter of little concern, since Pascal's argument is not all it is cracked up to be anyway.
Note first that what is rational to believe has here been separated from what you have any reason to think true. This is the whole point of the argument. Pascal's Wager is thus irrelevant when the question is whether or not God exists. Pascal's Wager attempts to show that Christianity is the best be however unlikely its truth.
Nor, however does the argument work on its own terms. It does not show Christianity to be the best bet. By the method of Pascal's Wager, any other doctrine that attaches everlasting bliss to agreement and everlasting agony to disagreement does equally well. The choice is not, as Pascal tacitly assumes, between Christianity and atheism alone. The choice must be made between all the different religions according to which adherents go to heaven while everyone else goes to hell, Islam, for example. Pascal provides no grounds for being a Christian rather than a Muslim. The choice between them is a 50:50 bet.
Worse Islam is not the only heaven and hell rival to Christianity. There is also Blytonism: the view that only those who worship Enid Blyton as the creator of the cosmos will go heaven, the rest to hell. Admittedly, I just made up this religion. But it is a possible religion. Why should only those religions that have so far been made up receive the benefit of Pascal's Wager? Had Pascal lived in 2000 B.C. he might have come up with his wager, and it wouldn't have been Christianity that it defended. Nor should anyone object to the lack of evidence for Blytonism. It is the starting assumption of Pascal's Wager that the doctrine in question—Christianity, Islam, or Blytonism— lacks evidence sufficient alone to warrant belief in it.
Once you see that Pascal's wager supports equally not only Christianity, nor even all established religions, but all possible heaven and hell religions, the game is up. For infinitely many such religions are possible. Which will you choose? Choose any one of them and the chance that you have made the best bet is not 50:50 (i.e., 1 in 2), it's one in infinity; this religion versus all the infinitely many other possible heaven and hell religions.
Each possible religion including Christianity, is but one ticket in a lottery with infinitely many tickets. Each bet has an equal chance of being best: i.e., an infinitesimal chance. And an infinitesimal chance is no chance al all. Without some evidence, every religion is an equally hopeless bet.
Comments
To be fair to Pascal, I thought he originally posed this argument as a way to decide between Catholicism and Protestantism, a context in which it makes some amount of sense.
ummm, like right on. n stuff
"Note first that whit is rational to believe has here been separated from what you have any reason to think rue."
Could you rephrase that, please?
The argument is spurious as it takes Pascal's Wager out of context. The objective is not to develop a coherent logical rationale for Christianity, it is to convince French libertines to follow Catholic mores.
Two things are crucial. First, the brand of Catholicism espoused is one in which practice is more important than faith--think Judaism instead of nondenominational Protestantism. Second, the argument takes place in an environment--Enlightenment-era France--where there are in fact only two alternatives: Catholicism and atheism.
Taking an argument out of context, holding it to a standard it was never intended to meet, and then proving it false does neither Pascal nor you credit. This is not to say that the argument is necessarily valid, but that it has been twisted into a straw man for the vindictive pleasure of an atheist on the rampage.
Just because we think we're right doesn't mean we should be a**s about it.
Way I love this site. Cuts through the bull.
If there is a God he/she knows all. So God will know that you are hedging. If you are disingenuous with God that will make him made. God will not turn his back on a life well lived. That is if there is a God. I figure I will try and live up to my principals
Pascal's wager is not only full of shit, it's full of holes. Not only does it not calculate the improbability of religion being untrue based on our current scientific knowledge of the universe it also does not consider the likelihood or unlikelihood of God being good, evil or indifferent. I suppose the religions take care of that though and since there are an infinite amount then I suppose we just bet on black. I can no longer sit back and pretend religious are not doing themselves and all of us a disservice. Before I was willing to tolerate their tripe but we are human beings. We are bound by this physical universe. Just because these losers are too scared to accept that death my the ultimate end of their existence and they may never see their loved one again doesn't give them the right to ruin this existence for the rest of us particularly if this is all we get. I'm not saying there is no afterlife. That is unknowable. What I do know for sure is that if there is one we don't know what the hell it is. It ain't heaven that's for sure because rich people got that now.
There is also the activist approach to this:
if christianity is right, then God is unjust, sneaky, devious. He tricks people and punishes them for falling for the trick. He only has enless love for those who are blind and don't fall for the substantially convincing trap.
If He would do all that to us, then i refuse to even be swayed by the threat of punishment nor by the bribe of heaven.
If this leads me to suffering then I will do my best to act with compassion even in the imprisonment of hell.
All of you who would join me in hell: there are people to take care of down there-our people-and we will do our best to carve out a life there and to make the situation the best we can.
And if it's a load of imperial propeganda gone out of hand for 2000 years, then let's do the best we can here on earth, eh?
Just to take on the "spiritual" side of this argument:
I think the truly enlightened religious person, of ANY religion, would say that it is the SEARCH for that unknowable paradigm and the willingness to open yourself up to it that creates "spiritual survival." The tools of that search are just that, tools.
Very "refined" religions can produce very crude people and very "crude" religions can produce very enlightened people. It is the way the tool is used that makes the difference.
As for this argument, the honest student of religion would say that it is a pointless straw man on both sides.
Contrary to the more politically influenced religious propaganda, many of the more progressive interpretations believe it is not the simple following of a religious custom that "saves" a person. It is the way that custom causes them to rise above their basic animal instincts and impulses that will make the difference.
If some philosopher wants to make a "legal argument" about probabilities and so forth that's fine but most would say such an argument is strictly intellectual.
Personally, I think that, if "spiritual" development and "survival" is something that exists, it is probably something so deep and complex that religions are little more than nursery rhymes and even athiests can get in on the game if they achieve the same state of being.
The context is irrelevant. Pascal's Wager is at its core a mathematical argument. Whyte has simply stripped away the elements not necessary to determine if the Wager is a good one, it is not. The question of whether or not God exists is not at issue.
The context is relevant, because that determines what quantities get entered into the payoff matrix. IIRC, when the argument is used to decide between Catholicism and Protestantism only, the only negative infinity you get is if you're Protestant when Catholicism is true. In this context, Christianity being true is taken as a background assumption, and the argument is meant to be pitched to people who already hold that belief in the first place.
Ed can you provide a source for your contention that Pascal is making a argument that only applies to Catholicism and Protestantism. "Pascal's wager" is taught all over the country in philosophy departments as an argument for belief in God. For example, here is a link to an article on the subject in a philosophical encyclopedia. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/ Here is the first line from that article. "'Pascal's Wager' is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God." I don't see how the context is relevant if this is in fact what Pascal was doing.
The context of the original argument matters little if theists use Pascal's argument outside of its original context with a very high frequency. Not only that, but the context seems to be irrelevant. If we are speaking logically, it makes no sense to say the only possibilities in Pascal's time were Protestantism or Catholicism. Atheism, paganism, and every other religion you can invent or discover were still logical possibilities--they are possibilities at any time.
The argument, then, fails in any context. What reason is there for thinking it rational to believe if the whole argument is based on a faulty assumption of certain logical possibilities.
To say that the argument works "in context" seems to be equivalent to one arguing that it is rational to believe in square circles in a context of a madhouse, where the patients all disbelieve in the law of non-contradiction. But I think we can all agree that the "context" that felt Protestantism or Catholicism were the only choices was thoroughly wrong--and therefore any argument rooted inthis context would also be wrong.
I hear right wing Christians calling for definitive proof that humans are causing global warming before they'll agree to act. Never mind mounds of scientific evidence. They say if one cannot prove something with certainty, it's only a theory and should therefore be discounted.
There's a hell of a lot more evidence that global warming is occurring than there is evidence that Christianity is the one true religion. Why aren't right wing Christians environmentalists? It's a safer bet.
First, I don't see how the context is relevant, since the argument is proposed as a purely 'logical' one. Second, I think the statement that the wager was to help decide between Protestantism and Catholicism is just wrong, and wouldn't lead to a conclusion in any case.
Finally, an additional often overlooked factor is the cost of belief in a potentially false religion. If it is one of the wrong ones, and it says I need to, say, cut the fingers of my left hand off to get to heaven, then believing has additional costs, and these are certain, independent of whether the 'payoff' of eternal salvation actually comes or not.
Pascal's Wager was definitely supposed to be an argument for belief over atheism. Pascal devoted the latter part of his life searching for empirical proof of God's existence. In this he clearly failed, because whether or not God exists is not something which can be proven. His "Wager", however, holds up as an argument that belief in God can in fact be rational.
Even if we expand the Wager to include other faiths, and assume an equal probability that each one is right, atheism looses out. The Wager is essentially early Game Theory. No matter how many religions you consider, the payoff for each one will be strictly positive, while atheism's payoff remains 0 (in the event that God does exist. If God does not exist, then all options are equal at 0). Thus, while there is no single 'stable' equilibrium, any religion becomes an equally valued Nash Equilibria, but atheism remains the one choice that looses out.
Essentially, a rational person can argue that having any faith is a better bet than having none.
It should not be a case of just Heaven or Hell.
What about Purgatory the half-way stop for undecided souls, which is part of the Catholic belief system?
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