The fallacy of Pascal’s Wager is that he assumes you’re betting nothing when you’re actually betting everything you have. If you change your life in order to demonstarte your belief in God, then in effect you’ve put your life on the table and are hoping the winning number comes up. (And if you don’t change your life then the whole argument is pointless.)
Pascal at one point presupposes that an infinite reward awaits - an eternal afterlife that far outweighs life on Earth. But at a different point he concedes there is no evidence that this afterlife exists. So in effect, Pascal is saying it makes sense to sell your house and car and everything you own and then sit down at a roulette wheel and bet it all on purple in the hope that there might be a purple slot on this particular wheel and it pays off a million to one.
Not all of them do, but I believe all of them posit an extant world that can be better or worse based on behavior–and remember, the wager is not merely about belief, but rather is about how one should act (“act” as in “do,” not as in “perform”) regarding the possible existance of god.
If you’re a jumped-up pompous buffoon, don’t be surprised to find Coyote coming after you to take you down a peg. That is, assuming that Coyote exists. Care to wager?
Is there any particular reason why you used this example with me?
It sounds like the Coyote’s punishment isn’t nearly as bad as Fundamentalist Jesus? Coyote is off of my worry list. For that matter, so is the Hindu pantheon. My life has been relatively good so I’ll take a slightly shittier one next time and a longer wait until Nirvana over an eternity in Hell. (Excuse my gross oversimplification here.)
Yikes! Not at all: Coyote was just the first one that came to mind (I know Kali can be an ornery bitch, but I’m not so sure what pisses her off specifically).
So it sounds to me as though you’re suggesting we wager based on the potential punishment the different Gods threaten us with, is that correct? That has a problem: generally speaking, the worse a punishment the Gods threaten you with, the more exacting and specific their demands of your behavior are. Mel Gibson’s god and Fred Phelps’s god are both gonna mess you up if you don’t follow them–but if you follow Gibson’s god and Phelp’s one is the right one, you’re still getting shafted, and vice versa. If you gear yourself toward the orneriest of gods, you have a really small chance of hitting the target.
Gear yourself toward the laidback gods, though, and you’ve got a better chance of things. Keep your head down low, be nice to folks, be loyal, and you won’t catch flak from Coyote, Kali, or the Pope’s god. You’re still hosed if Gibson or Phelps is right, but that can’t be helped.
That is correct and I understand your issue with it. It still has to figure though. If I’m in Vegas and making a bet on a table game, the potential reward is a large part of odds calculation and whether or not it is a “good” bet.
No, I agree it’s something to consider. Again, though, by betting on Phelp’s god (for example), you’re still likely to piss off all the rest of the Ornery God section, and you might also piss off a lot of the Laid Back God section. You end up with a very slightly smaller chance of avoiding a very bad fate than if you’d gone with the less Ornery Gods–and you significantly increase your chances of a plain crappy fate from any of the Laid Back Gods.
In balance, I figure it’s not worth it for that slight decrease of a chance of Hellfire.
That’s not a fallacy; that’s the whole point of his argument. According to Pascal, what you’re betting is finite; what you stand to win is infinite. So if there’s any probablity, no matter how small, that you’ll gain infinite happiness, any finite risk is worth it.
The other Jesuses (Jesii?) would be happy that you at least believed in Jesus. Most of Islam would be happy that you believed in one of the two second choices. The Hindu gods would be happy that you were at least a theist. The laid back Gods would do very little damage. Finally, you are avoiding the worst of the punishments.
Gibson’s God will almost certainly send Phelps to hell. Phelp’s god is going to send Pat Robertson to hell. Pat Robertson’s god is going to send Mel Gibson to hell. Which Fundy Jesus do you choose?
bin Laden is not going to be happy that you believed in one of the two second choices. While there are certainly plenty of Muslims who are laid-back, there are also plenty who consider Jews and Christians to be infidels. If their understanding of God is correct, and you’ve chosen Robertson’s god (and spent a lot of time condemning Islam), Allah’s gonna beat your ass down.
The other Jesuses aren’t going to be happy. If there are any Christians reading this thread, could you weigh in on how you think Pat Robertson is likely to fare in the afterlife? (I’m asking for rank speculation, not judgment here) Many, many Christians are mortified by the Mean Christians out there, and I know that a lot of them put a lot of emphasis on the “Love thy Neighbor” message, such that their versions of Jesus won’t be happy with hateful Christians at all.
The Ornery Gods will require you to oppose other religions very harshly. If you die and find your soul being weighed by Anubis, he is unlikely to be happy with you if you’ve spent your life calling his devout Devil Worshippers or worse. Chomp Chomp, he’ll say.
Discordians talk about the Hell Law. The Hell Law states that Hell is reserved for those who believe in it, and the lowest rung of Hell is reserved for those who believe in it on the assumption that they’ll go there if they don’t. If the Discordians are right, you doom yourself specifically by choosing the Ornery god. Want to wager that they’re wrong?
So, as I see it, worshipping an ornery god gets you a great reaction from that specific ornery god, an equal reaction from all the other ornery gods, a worse reaction from most of the laidback gods, and a really bad reaction from Eris. That sounds to me like a poor bet.
Okay, so I could turn it around and ask you and other atheists: do you consider your atheism to be a belief, or lots of different beliefs? After all, there are lots and lots of Gods and gods that you don’t believe in; did you have to decide about each one separately?
I dunno. My default state is to not believe in something, which I guess you could call a belief in its absence. If you bet me $5 on whether there’s a card with my name on it at the McDonald’s on Patton Avenue, I’ll bet against the card, even though such a card would be thoroughly unremarkable. But I don’t classify that as a belief separate from my belief that there’s no such card at the Hardee’s on Patton Ave, at the Arby’s, at the Krispy Kreme, and so forth.
There are thousands upon thousands of gods that I’ve never heard of. I don’t believe in them, and if you told me about them, I’d probably doubt their existence. Does it make sense to say that I have a belief about a God I’ve never heard of?
As an atheist, I say that I’ve never seen anything that leads me to conclude that any god exists. That doesn’t, I think, add up to thousands of disbeliefs in thousands of gods.
I’m not sure what this has to do with the question about which god one should believe in (stipulating that you cast your wager in that direction): could you clarify?
Pascal isn’t arguing you’re wagering a small amount - he’s saying you’re wagering nothing. There is a difference.
You can argue about whether or not it makes sense to buy a lottery ticket for a dollar. It’s a small but finite amount lost versus incredibly long odds of a huge winning. But if you get a lottery ticket as a Christmas gift, there’s no argument - you spent nothing to get the ticket and only have the admittedly still remote possibility of winning. There’s no reason not to “play” in those circumstances. What Pascal did was pretend that his wager was like the latter situation when it was really like the former.
And Pascal also equivocated on what belief entails. Do you honestly think Pascal was only arguing about changing your beliefs? Do you think he meant you could continue to murder and steal and have sex with farm animals but secretly believe in Jesus in your heart? Of course not. What Pascal was really taking about was practices not beliefs. He was arguing that people should live their lives in accord with Christian dogma.
So in effect, Pascal was suggesting it made sense to bet everything you have on a single throw of the dice without knowing what the prize is, what the rules of the game are, or even if the dice or prize exists, because the prize might be really big.
Well, I think that it’d be very safe to say that they are wrong. Certainly Muslims don’t believe Jesus is God, but they also hold Old Testament writings to be true. Anyone who says otherwise is being intentionally antagonistic and ignorant.
As to the OP, I think the problem is that Pascal assumes that there is one faith that is correct. In a world with a multitude of gods and beliefs, any one of which might or might not be true, it is clear that Pascal’s Wager holds no water.
It only works if you’re talking about only one god or set of gods, and then:
[ul]
[li]there actually is no god(s), in which case it doesn’t matter what you believe, or[/li][li]the specific god(s) do exist.[/li][/ul]
The only way Pascal’s Wager works is if you assume that one specific faith is dramatically more likely to be correct than any other. IOW, you must already believe that the Christian god is likely to exist (or does exist) for the Wager to be worth it in your own eyes.
Not at all. I believe that certain sections of the Bible are true, but I don’t worship the same God as the Baptists or the Muslims.
As an atheist, I see the Baptists claiming that their God (whom I believe is nonexistent) is different from the Muslim god (whom I also believe is nonexistent). I cannot figure out whether these two nonexistent entities are the same nonexistent entity or different ones; it’s as if two nerds are getting in a humongous nerdfight over whether the Batman from the Mask of the Phantasm is the same as the Batman from The Dark Knight Returns. (And no, fellow nerds, please don’t go there). Only in this case, nerds on both sides of the fight passionately believe in the Batman from their chosen work.
Perhaps–but it’s kind of a fun puzzle to figure out how to maximize your odds without assuming the dramatic likelihood of one particular faith. I think we all know that the wager is bogus, but we’re pretending it’s not, as entertainment.
Your example would be closer to Pascal’s wager if there were a huge amount of money in the card, which would be yours if you just went down and claimed it. If there’s even a small chance that that’s true, it’d be worth your while to go and check it out. (Say, for example, somebody told you it was true, and you think probably they were joking, but maybe they weren’t.)
Ah, but (following the idea of the thread), what if some people are telling you it’s at the McDonald’s, and some are telling you it’s at the Hardee’s, and some are telling you it’s at the Arby’s and others are telling you other places… and you can only check one place. Or maybe you have time to check one general area (say, all the places on Patton Avenue); which area should you check to have the best chance of finding the card, if it exists at all?
Okay, okay, this probably isn’t shedding any light on the discussion, but it’s an interesting analogy.
Okay, then maybe I’d better ask my question of a “hard atheist” who explicitly and deliberately denies the existence of God: which God?
Well, it’s maybe only tangentially related; maybe I shouldn’t have even brought it up in this thread. But my thinking was along the lines of:
Pascal’s wager is about a choice between two alternatives.
But (so goes the rebuttal) there aren’t just two alternatives to choose from; there are many.
If you look at it that way (so my thinking goes), doesn’t the difficulty of picking the one correct alternative, out of the many you could choose from, apply just as much to the atheist as to the person who chooses to follow one particular religion?
But that’s probably beside the point of the OP’s question, which is more like, Which choice, out of the many available, maximizes the expected value of happiness?
If you want to look at it mathematically (which is, after all, kinda what Pascal was doing), you’re comparing infinities, which you can’t really do.
Ok, but (to continue the Batman analogy, of which I am probably not qualified to dabble), even though people might bicker about which is the real Batman, what they are really talking about is which is the real interpretation of Batman. Er, I’m gonna jump back to god, because even if I don’t believe in one, I can talk about him a bit more clearly.
Baptists and Muslims (or Baptists and different Christian denominations, for that matter, or Baptists and Jews), believe in many of the same texts, while disputing the truth of other texts. The fact that a large body of these writings (really the core of their ‘mythos,’ as opposed to the core of their behaviour-guiding writings) are believed unanimously, ought to mean that all these faiths believe in the same diety, as they believe the writings equally, no? Moses is a prophet for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and experienced the same things committed by the same diety.
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Certainly. I just wanted to be clear that it seems to me like the fun puzzle works only because it’s a broken premise to begin with.
I’ve met your dad (and please forgive me if your dad is dead or otherwise incapacitated). He’s a guy, right? He speaks English, he likes to eat hamburgers, he a lot of TV, he’s got a paunch, he wears thick bottleneck glasses, he plays the ukelele in a rock&roll band, and his calf muscles are so powerful that he can and does jump across interstates to amuse himself.
Am I talking about your Dad here? Some of the things I said about your dad are almost certainly true, but some of them are certainly untrue. And the untrue ones are probably sufficient to convince you that I’m not talking about your dad.
The same thing goes for religious folks. The Muslims describe a God, and the Baptists hear them. Part of what the Muslims say corresponds to the Baptist understanding of God; but a lot of it does not. Enough of it doesn’t jibe that the Baptists say, “This Allah, he’s not the same as God.” For one thing, they believe that the Muslims are describing a being who doesn’t exist (much like the frogleg dad I described doesn’t exist), whereas the Baptists believe that God does exist.
Furthermore, the Baptists (and I should specify that I’m not talking about all Baptists here–I know there are plenty who disagree, but I’m talking about a sample group) believe that the Real God will send you to Hell for worshipping Allah. If the Baptist God is the same as Allah, that means the Baptists believe that you go to hell for worshipping the Baptist God. Which they clearly don’t believe. So it makes the most sense to say that they’re separate entities.
Since I don’t believe in any Gods, I’ve got no problem letting folks define their God however they want.
So why aren’t you down at McDonald’s right now? After all, there might be an envelope with ten million dollars in it there. There’s no evidence of this and the odds are pretty long but it’s possible. So drive over and look. The possibility of ten million dollars is certainly enough to justify taking a fifteen minute drive isn’t it?
Maybe there’s an envelope with ten million dollars in a McDonald’s in Wellington, New Zealand. The only way to be sure is to buy an airline ticket and go check. Sure the ticket’s expensive but it’s nothing compared to ten million dollars.
The reality is you “know” there’s not going to be ten million dollars waiting for you at McDonald’s. You believe this even though you know that ten million dollars actually exists in the real world. But the effort of driving to your local McDonald’s, much less flying to New Zealand, isn’t worth going to look for it.
If I had any reason to suspect there might be—like, if someone I know and trust told me they believed it was there—I would be there right now.
Right. Again, Pascal isn’t addressing people who already “know” whether or not God exists. He’s talking to people who aren’t sure which side to bet on.
I believe in reason above faith. Believing in God in the absence of proof would be an inconsistency in my ideals of reason. If I accept the existence of God, and at the moment of death, I find out there is no God, I will have abandoned my reason, and compromised my philosophy. Even if the recognition of my error results in only a pico-second of cognitive dissonance before I wink out for eternity, it is a fate I would not choose to endure. Therefore, I choose not to take that risk. Call me Bizarro-Pascal.
