Arkady
President
Pascal's Wager is a piece of religious propaganda, put forward by mathematician Blaise Pascal, using the logic of gambling to argue in favor of acting as if God existed. Basically, the logic is that if God exists and you don't believe in him, you'll be infinitely punished, and if you do believe in him you'll be infinitely rewarded. Since the rewards and punishments if he doesn't exist are, by definition, finite, you're better off wagering that he does exist. Even if the probability of God's existence approaches zero, multiplying even an infinitesimal probability against infinity produces something larger than anything finite. So, the smart money should bet on him existing.
Yeah, I know. It is, in the words of Voltaire, childish reasoning.
There are at least three problems with Pascal's Wager. First, it assumes a non-zero probability for the existence of God, and we have no reason to assume the probability is not zero.
Second, it assumes that if God does exist, he would reward and not punish someone for a cynical, self-serving, mathematical exercise of going through the motions of faith. Might God not prefer an honest skeptic to someone who is merely selfishly hedging his bets in a cosmic wager?
Third, it rules out all the other supernatural, metaphysical, and spiritual possibilities. What if, for example, there is a god, but he's very different from the one you worship, and this other god is pretty laid back about atheists and agnostics, but treats worshippers of false gods as monsters? What if there's a god who actually favors atheists and agnostics (he chose to include no evidence of his existence in his creation, in order to force people to do the hard work of constructing meaning themselves, and so he finds it offensive that anyone would give up on that task and instead assume the existence of a deity)? What if there are multiple gods, and believing in just one wins you far more enemies than friends, and so you would have been better off not taking sides? What if there is no god, but there's some other spiritual path to Nirvana, and believing in a false God makes going down that path impossible? What if there is a God, but he only offers very small rewards and punishments, so you're giving up far more in your life, by believing in him, than you'll get in the afterlife? What if believing in a God is what brings him into being for you, and so believing in the God of the Bible opens up the possibility of being burned in a lake of fire forever, based on minor transgressions like having worked on Saturday, when refusing to believe in it would have kept that from even being a risk?
I could keep spinning out those possible scenarios all day. We can't ascribe a probability to any of those scenarios, since we lack any evidence. So, it points out the foolishness of thinking in terms of Pascal's Wager.
Anyway, I'm curious how believers here think about all those other possibilities. There are, at minimum, thousands of different religious systems mankind has devised since the beginning of recorded history, and doubtless many more in the tens of thousands of years that modern humans existed before history began to be recorded. There will, no doubt, be even more in the centuries or millenia to come for mankind. So, what are the chances that the one true faith really happened to be whatever one you just happened to be born into (which, of course, is more or less the religion the vast majority of people stick to throughout their lives)? Wouldn't you have been equally convinced you were practicing the one true faith if you'd been raised to worship Ba'al, thousands of years before anyone had ever heard the name "Jesus" or "Mohammed"?
Also, how do you deal with the idea that faith makes moral conduct impossible? If you act according to outwardly moral precepts, but only do so because you believe you're always being observed by someone who will reward or punish you, then you're a bit like a child who won't misbehave while he knows daddy is watching, if he also knows daddy is going to punish bad behavior with utmost severity, while rewarding good behavior with unimaginable generosity. The truly good child is the one who behaves well when he doesn't think he's being watched.
To put it another way, what if I plausibly offered you $1 million if you first gave $100 to a poor family that desperately needed it. If you did so, it would not indicate you were a moral person.... it would simply indicate you believed my offer and were acting in your own personal interest. If, on the other hand, you gave that same money with no hope of being rewarded for it, simply for the sake of the other people, that would be moral. How can you get around selfish motivations if you operate within a context of faith in reward for the good and punishment for the bad? Isn't it possible to argue that only non-believers are capable of genuinely moral behavior, because only non-believers can behave well without the assumption of observation and earning reward or punishment?
Yeah, I know. It is, in the words of Voltaire, childish reasoning.
There are at least three problems with Pascal's Wager. First, it assumes a non-zero probability for the existence of God, and we have no reason to assume the probability is not zero.
Second, it assumes that if God does exist, he would reward and not punish someone for a cynical, self-serving, mathematical exercise of going through the motions of faith. Might God not prefer an honest skeptic to someone who is merely selfishly hedging his bets in a cosmic wager?
Third, it rules out all the other supernatural, metaphysical, and spiritual possibilities. What if, for example, there is a god, but he's very different from the one you worship, and this other god is pretty laid back about atheists and agnostics, but treats worshippers of false gods as monsters? What if there's a god who actually favors atheists and agnostics (he chose to include no evidence of his existence in his creation, in order to force people to do the hard work of constructing meaning themselves, and so he finds it offensive that anyone would give up on that task and instead assume the existence of a deity)? What if there are multiple gods, and believing in just one wins you far more enemies than friends, and so you would have been better off not taking sides? What if there is no god, but there's some other spiritual path to Nirvana, and believing in a false God makes going down that path impossible? What if there is a God, but he only offers very small rewards and punishments, so you're giving up far more in your life, by believing in him, than you'll get in the afterlife? What if believing in a God is what brings him into being for you, and so believing in the God of the Bible opens up the possibility of being burned in a lake of fire forever, based on minor transgressions like having worked on Saturday, when refusing to believe in it would have kept that from even being a risk?
I could keep spinning out those possible scenarios all day. We can't ascribe a probability to any of those scenarios, since we lack any evidence. So, it points out the foolishness of thinking in terms of Pascal's Wager.
Anyway, I'm curious how believers here think about all those other possibilities. There are, at minimum, thousands of different religious systems mankind has devised since the beginning of recorded history, and doubtless many more in the tens of thousands of years that modern humans existed before history began to be recorded. There will, no doubt, be even more in the centuries or millenia to come for mankind. So, what are the chances that the one true faith really happened to be whatever one you just happened to be born into (which, of course, is more or less the religion the vast majority of people stick to throughout their lives)? Wouldn't you have been equally convinced you were practicing the one true faith if you'd been raised to worship Ba'al, thousands of years before anyone had ever heard the name "Jesus" or "Mohammed"?
Also, how do you deal with the idea that faith makes moral conduct impossible? If you act according to outwardly moral precepts, but only do so because you believe you're always being observed by someone who will reward or punish you, then you're a bit like a child who won't misbehave while he knows daddy is watching, if he also knows daddy is going to punish bad behavior with utmost severity, while rewarding good behavior with unimaginable generosity. The truly good child is the one who behaves well when he doesn't think he's being watched.
To put it another way, what if I plausibly offered you $1 million if you first gave $100 to a poor family that desperately needed it. If you did so, it would not indicate you were a moral person.... it would simply indicate you believed my offer and were acting in your own personal interest. If, on the other hand, you gave that same money with no hope of being rewarded for it, simply for the sake of the other people, that would be moral. How can you get around selfish motivations if you operate within a context of faith in reward for the good and punishment for the bad? Isn't it possible to argue that only non-believers are capable of genuinely moral behavior, because only non-believers can behave well without the assumption of observation and earning reward or punishment?
