Whereas believing in the wrong god might get you eternal damnation.
All deities aside, there’s the example of the St. Petersburg Paradox where a game has a theoretically very high expected outcome but in real life the odds don’t feel as good.
Game Theory and human psychology are often incompatible.
Interesting that the OP mentions avoid getting mugged. There this called Pascal’s Mugging that doesn’t seem to be the same thing the OP is talking about.
As would believing in no God. But again, that misses the point. The point is that if you “bet” on no God, and there is no God, you win nothing, and the guy who “bet” on yes God loses nothing.
But you aren’t just “betting on a god”. Unless the god you are betting on is an absolute imbecile(or just doesn’t give a shit), you will probably be expected to obey the rules and regulations and whatnot that your particular deity has supposedly put down. Time, effort and probably money will be spent in following this deity and(if your particular deity can read minds) your very thoughts will have to be monitored and/or controlled.
We follow rules and regulations, and donate (or are taxed) money to various causes and entities as part of being in a civilized society anyway. It’s not an onerous burden.
Note that Pascal didn’t originally present his Wager in isolation, but it the context of a larger defense of Christianity (which was never actually completed in the form Pascal intended, but whose fragments formed the Pensées).
The context of the Wager was (or was going to be) Pascal saying, basically, “I’ve presented my case for Christianity, but I haven’t proved it beyond all doubt. You’re going to have to decide to accept or reject it on incomplete evidence. Now here’s why it makes sense to accept it even without 100% proof.”
- Before asking one to lay down a bet, it is proper to state exactly how much one is expected to lay down.
- There are thousands of deities out there-which one(s) do I pay this burden to…and how do I avoid pissing off all the others?
The real problem here is that no matter what choice you make, you have a 99% chance of going to hell.
You can avoid the infinity problem by realizing that in the long run heaven is infinitely good and hell is infinitely bad, but at any point in the future they are finitely good or bad - since two weeks in hell is worse than one week.
So the bottom line is that you need to make an informed choice, based on evidence. Which is what Pascal’s Wager is trying to say you don’t have to do. And which religions in general are not too fond of. Thus faith.
We have to follow some rules and pay some money to be part of a civilized society. We don’t have to follow a religion - those who do end up “double billed” because in addition to the regular rules and taxes everyone else pays they have to spend an additional day (or more) doing things they may not normally choose to do, deprive themselves of things they do want to do, and give up another 10% of their income. Having something like your income tax rate doubled seems like a burden to me.
This is a version (at least the dollar wagering aspect of the OP) of the Expected Utility Hypothesis used in economics, which states that
There are a number of proposed solutions on the linked Wikipedia page. I’m on the move right now so can’t type much.
What you’re describing sounds like Keight’s Wager, a spoof of Pascal’s Wager. “Keight” is pronounced like “eight”. It’s not exactly a religion, more of a justification for a hypothetical religion.
This. The OP suggests a scenario where I have a 99.9% chance of being miserable because I lost all my money and 0.1% chance of being temporarily very happy because I just got rich, possibly followed by miserable after all when I either lose it all and declare bankruptcy or have to get a bodyguard to prevent my own kidnapping. That’s a pretty lousy outcome from a utility point of view.
Since utility never increases faster than money does (earning twice as much money never makes you twice as happy/healthy/safe/secure), it follows that Expected Utility is always smaller that Expected Value. It might be true that the probability of winning the jackpot times the size of the jackpot itself outweighs the value of the ticket, but the probability of winning times the utility of the jackpot will always be smaller, often by several orders of magnitude.
Simply put, the concept of Expected Value doesn’t work very well with large numbers. The larger the numbers, the more out of whack your results become. Trying to apply it to infinite numbers is just ludicrous and Pascal should have known better.
The rules and regulations and taxes we impose upon ourselves in secular society are expected to produce a benefit that’s apparent in secular society.
Where’s the benefit in following the rules and regulations and taxes of a religion? They will supposedly be given to us in another existence - which we have no evidence exists.
So you’re being asked, to give an example, to give up the pleasure of eating cheeseburgers for your entire life in exchange for a promise that you will enjoy far greater pleasures in Heaven. But if Heaven doesn’t exist then you gave up those cheeseburgers for nothing.
If that argument makes sense to you, then consider the proposal I made in an earlier post. If you were offered a place in Heaven, would you refuse it due to the possibility that there might be something better than Heaven and that you can only gain that greater reward by denying yourself entry into Heaven? What’s the difference between giving up cheeseburgers to get into Heaven when you have no evidence that Heaven exists and giving up Heaven to get into someplace better than Heaven when you have no evidence that better place exists?
I’m not sure what kind of churches you’ve been too, but the people there don’t feel burdened at all. It’s a voluntary experience full of people who are there because they want to be. It’s not like the preacher goes up to the pulpit and people start mumbling “Oh brother, not this crap again.” Also if a person doesn’t tithe 10%, it doesn’t mean they go to Hell.
As for the “rules and regulations”, even if I were “allowed” to murder, steal, cheat on my wife, lie, etc etc I would not chose to do them anyway. I didn’t do those things before becoming a Christian. As I would assume, you don’t either?
Nice try Little Nemo, but it’s turtles all the way up.
Then it’s not Pascal’s Wager. Those are things you planned on doing or not doing anyway for your own personal reasons. Pascal’s Wager is about doing something that you would not otherwise do because it might cause you to gain access to a better afterlife.
Are you sure about that? The church says you should tithe 10%. Are you willing to take a chance that not doing what the church tells you to do will end up with you going to hell?
That’s the whole point of the wager.
And if you weren’t “allowed” to express your love of someone of the same gender? I assume that that is not something that you would have to give up, but your experience is not universal. If the church told you that you may not be with your wife, would you be with her anyway, even if it risked going to hell?
The church has also in the past, asked people to murder and steal. If those are things that you didn’t do before becoming christian, would you do them after, when the church tells you to?
Are you a cafeteria christian, only following the rules and teachings that you agree with, or do you follow all of the rules and teachings in the bible? For a cafe follower, it’s easy to make pascal’s wager. You don’t change anything about you or your life, and you just maybe show up at a location and time of your choosing to sing some songs, break some bread and drink some wine. You may even donate a couple of dollars, but probably not 10% of your pre-tax income.
If the church actually asked things of you that you didn’t want to do, if the church told you to stop doing things that you did want to do, would you keep following them? Would you withdraw your wager as the stakes get higher, or do you go all in?
And sometimes negative. The example my daughter uses when teaching this is the ice cream cone. Eating one is good. Eating two is probably also good, but not twice as good. Eating eight is significantly less good than eating one.
However I’m not sure expected utility is the way to refute the wager, since heaven has infinite value by definition in terms of the Wager.
Except there arent 100 mutually exclusive religions of significant size. Many religions are not mutually exclusive , and there arent that many significant sized faiths.
Not all sects of Christianity are mutually exclusive- many believe Jews can go to heaven- perhaps their own heaven, yes, but they don’t get the "fast pass’ so to speak.
Allah is the Christian god. And the jewish god.