Why is Pascal’s Wager invalid? Over in the Pit people are saying it is not worth discussion. Why not?
The Wager certainly does not prove God’s existence. I maintain there can be no such proof, but what is wrong with the argument itself?
I think I can go from memory and say the line of reasoning is something along the lines of, “Ought I to believe in God? Well if I do and I am wrong, I lose nothing. If I don’t and I am wrong I lose a great deal. Therefore I ought to act as if God exists in order to be safe.”
Because it’s a false dilemma. There are lots of other possibilities than the listed two. For instance, why shouldn’t we consider the possibility of a God that only lets people into Heaven who don’t believe in Him. After all, there is just as much evidence for that as for any other sort of god.
First of all, belief doesn’t really work that way – believing in god is different from playing it safe and acting as if there was a god.
Then, if you chose to believe in god, which one’s the right one? There’s all those gods and goddesses mankind has so far come up with to choose from, plus it’s entirely possible that nobody’s got it right so far, such that no currently available choice is correct.
Furthermore, it’s arguably not true that you ‘loose nothing’ – attached to most beliefs, there are losses of various kinds: material ones (donations, collect etc.), temporal ones (the free Sunday morning), spiritual ones (concentration on being rewarded in some afterlife for a life lived ‘properly’ – i.e. according to the (often restrictive) rules of the faith you ended up choosing --, rather than trying to live the life you have to its fullest); or, more overarchingly, it could be argued that a phony belief over an earnest – even if possibly wrong – disbelief is a loss in itself. Certainly, there’s always a possibility of a vengeful god – who will actually punish you for believing in him not on the basis of faith, but on the basis of playing the odds.
I’m not sure you can actually choose whether to believe something. You can certainly choose to act as though you believe or don’t believe, but whether or not you actually believe something isn’t - I don’t think - a conscious choice.
If I tell you something, you automatically know whether or not you believe it (or if you’re unsure), but I don’t think that you decide whether or not believe it.
Why does anyone have to “keep them coming”, if the “wrong god” problem pretty much does in Pascal’s Wager all by itself? It’s like asking why water flows downhill, and when the answer “gravity” is given, you say,“That makes sense-what other reasons are there?”
Pascal’s Wager only needs one flaw to be proven wrong. It has many, but listing them all won’t make it any wronger. If you haven’t already dismissed it as viable, how many fatal errors will convince you?
“Therefore I ought to act as if God exists in order to be safe” provides no guidance at all as to how to “act as if God exists.” E.g., it offers no grounds to choose between Catholicism or Lutheranism, nor between Christianity and Islam.
The wager also assumes – in fact, it is about the assumption – that God judges individual human souls after death, placing them in a desirable or undesirable afterlife according to their conduct and/or beliefs. That does not follow from God’s existence, nor from anything else for which you might construct an abstract, non-Scriptural philosophical argument.
Once you start considering the existence of an afterlife, there is no way at all of knowing what effect “choosing to believe” actually has. I think Pratchett’s mechanism in the Disc World books is a good example of this: on that world, what happens after you die is whatever you believe will happen to you. Which has serious implications given the kind of things people actually believe about afterlives.
I’m sure that I cannot choose to believe something or not. I don’t even know how I would go about convincing myself of something that I don’t believe in, unless new believable evidence come around.
Taking Pascal’s Wager to be an argument for the Christian God, there’s also the problem that you do lose out if you take any of the proscriptions seriously. You lose out on planned parenthood, the ability to loan at interest to other Christians (though this has been ignored), if you are a woman you lose out on the ability to disobey your husband (also ignored in modern times), if you are a homosexual you lose out on the ability to have sex with the person you love, you lose out on the ability to work on the Sabbath (also largely ignored in modern times), and of course you lose out on any and all money that you give to the church.
Obviously, many of these proscriptions can (and are) ignored by the general populace, but I would argue that that’s a demonstration of disbelief in what the Bible teaches. Pascal’s Wager is about believing what it does.
And perhaps there is some beneficial reason to mailing off half your income to a certain person in return for good luck the rest of your life. Nobody has any evidence that this is true, and we just can’t seem to pin down the name of the person you are supposed to mail the money to, but what the hell-go for it! What have you got to lose?
