I'm an Atheist, and I Believe Pascal's Wager is a Good Argument

Mugging works if you tell someone you have a gun in your pocket, even if they can't see it

Pondering Pascal’s Wager makes me think that either rational agents are insane or we are insane. I am an atheist who fully buys that Pascal’s Wager is a good argument for believing in God; perhaps a great one.

The first thing to notice, as I say in this note, is that Pascal’s wager is not an argument for God’s existence. It’s an argument saying “you should BELIEVE in God.” It says that believing in God is a very smart and rational thing to do. It says that you, as a rational and clever atheist, must trick yourselves into believing the almost-certainly-incorrect thing by any means necessary. Do drugs on a mountain while reading the Bible. Attend church daily and quash the part of yourself that tells you you’re above them. Give yourself a partial lobotomy, and tell some nuns to bang pots and yell “Be a Christian! Be a Christian! Rahhh!” at you after the lobotomy. Of course the argument doesn’t endorse any of these things specifically; all it’s really saying is that you should engineer future events so that it’s more likely you convert.¹ But this argument for instrumental value is not an argument for truth.

Richard Hanania

just wrote a post about how Pascal’s Wager is spiritual extortion. It’s a good post, and Hanania concludes that something feels very wrong about an immortal God having to threaten people with eternal damnation in order to get them to believe it. In fact, this threatening makes far more sense in an materialistic/atheist world compared to a Christian one. He notes, as I do, that if we view the spread of religion as a battle of ideas where only the stickiest and most persuasive ideas will become widespread, it sure seems like the ones threatening the highest stakes will survive the longest.

Imagine two religions in the early days of humanity: one teaches that your family and friends will suffer eternally if they don’t convert to your religion, and the other one says that it doesn’t really matter if anyone believes your religion, God’s got your back no matter what, so whatever man, no need to convert at all. While I think arguments for the second religion existing is better in a vacuum, of course the first one is going to spread like wildfire and there will be mad dashes of conversions followed by conversions followed by conversions.

Continue this thought: the only religions which will survive are the ones that say that humans have a part to play in existence. You’re not going to see a religion that doesn’t offer something to humans: heaven, a promise of enlightenment, a need to appease the Gods, or maybe just the joy of having unique access to the hidden truth of reality. The possible religion-space is much vaster than the religions we see in the world today; an atheist will say that the only way a false idea can spread to as many people as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism have is by being something that people want to convince other people of, for any reason.

If God was real and didn’t give a fuck about us in any way, we would find no book to rally billions behind.

…

Back to Pascal’s Wager, that whole eternal damnation threat: I find it to be a very good threat! Of course it’s a good threat; it’s the best threat humanity has come up with. If you dislike anything, if you dislike literally anything in all of your existence, I can say “Do X thing that I want, or I will make you do Y thing you dislike for all of eternity.” If I said this, you might question my ability to deliver on my threat, but religion can get around this by having it be imbued into a package of beliefs that include “God is making this threat and he has infinite ability to deliver on this threat btw.” Then, if the thing religion is asking you to do is to convince your neighbors of the religion, and you say that believing in it will also reward you, you have a thought virus which has 2.1 billion believers thousands of years after its creators are long dead.

I’m not naive; people are not doing expected value calculations to choose their religion. But what they are doing is trying to live by the tenets of the religion they’ve believed since the day they had intelligent thoughts, and the content will have heavy influence over them. When you start looking at surviving religions as a grab bag of tricks to spread itself to as many people as possible, akin to looking at animals as a grab bag of tricks to increase survival, you will find many tricks.

Religion being a community of people who get together, intertwined with a human’s social life. Prayer as one way communication to reinforce God’s influence over all. Infinite happiness for the believers. As we said, infinite suffering for non-believers. Objective Proof of God, not that you’ve seen of course, but that others have seen through attested miracles. The few prophecies of a million attempts that aren’t slam dunks but are pretty good if you squint. Subjective Proof of God, a feeling of proof of God that you carry in your bones and that puts adrenaline in your body. The entire concept of faith. Oh boy, the concept of faith. I’d like to make a post on it and discuss it with Christians, because it is a fun topic, and it’s fun to see the implications of what it means too. Now, seriously grappling with what faith is is important as an atheist; I don’t want to sneer at it, but I will say that it obviously fits snugly into this category of thought-tricks.

Not all religions have all of those; these are very Christian-centric, as that’s what I’m most familiar with. But an atheist would predict you will find many clever tricks in any religion with many adherents; find them yourself, I don’t know.

…

A curious thing with Pascal’s wager is that it promises infinite value. Now, some say that Pascal’s wager works just fine with very large numbers, and they’re correct. If a religion promises 3,000,000 years of torture, sure that still sounds pretty bad. But an unfortunate fact about infinity is that, if you’re trying to do the “rational” thing that leads you to have the most value, any infinite reward will make any finite value completely meaningless, so a religion that promises 3,000,000 years or any finite action on earth² is infinitely vulnerable to a more Pascal’s Wager-ier religion, if someone rational were to prioritize.

Some might argue that, because of marginal utility, infinite value is not infinitely better than finite value, but marginal utility doesn’t apply here. It seems obvious to me that if I have 10 trillion dollars, then 100 trillion dollars won’t increase my quality of life; that’s a case of marginal utility. Pascal’s wager says that, after you’re tortured for 1,000 years, you’ve still got 1,000 more there, buddy; I don’t think there’s any “getting used” to that, especially if my mind is wiped or something. There’s no amount of torture where I would be cool with more torture; seems like it would suck at any point in the torture, so I believe that infinite value really does destroy our expected value equation.

Now, I don’t want to get too bogged down talking about some bad counterarguments to using expected value calculations at all, which will lead to Pascal’s Wager — I find the

Bentham's Bulldog

article defending Pascal’s wager to do a great job of being point-by-point takedown³. The only thing I would like to do in this final section is take this to its logical conclusion.

A rational agent, knowing that infinite values matter infinitely more than finite values, will immediately discount any finite woes. It will become willing to sacrifice itself, to face any amount of finite pain, any amount of finite death, for the promise of an infinite reward. It will evaluate which of the infinite rewards are most likely to be true with ruthless efficiency, and it will learn until it commits to do the next step of tricking itself into believing/doing whatever actions lead to these rewards. It will have to somehow evaluate which afterlives are the best, and account for that. It will have to judge the possibility of creating some technology that has the potential for infinite positive value against religion, and if somehow religion’s vaster scope (uncountably infinite suffering?) means that it’s better than infinite value through a materialistic view (countably infinite pleasure? fulfillment for all mankind?). It will be alien and it will be incomprehensible.

Is this rationality? I don’t know. It really doesn’t feel like it. As an irrational human myself, I can’t commit myself to it, even if I wanted to. In my post about morality with large numbers, I was able to say that some of the things I would do are not morality; I am also fully willing to accept that some of the things I would do are not rational. I’m not vulnerable to Pascal because I just don’t have the willpower to be this ruthlessly instrumentally rational. But people do seem to discount infinity, and infinity is forever. Accounting for that may turn one into a raving madman.

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1. There’s a common complaint that “it’s impossible to make yourself believe something you know is false!” This paragraph is intended to quash that complaint. Obviously you can engineer events to make yourself more likely to believe something, come on. Just play into the biases you know you’ll have in the future, as a smart person! Availability bias! Cook with it!

2. Yes, any finite action, even ones accounting for scope insensitivity. Note that this is only for decision making — if infinite actions are impossible for some reason, then from an objective perspective finite actions would matter. But from the perspective of any agent, they’re still

3. Some comments are just refusing to accept it because it’s a mugging (yes! it’s a threat!), or saying their probability of believing Christianity is 0 — not even 1/1000000. That’s bad epistemics — It’s important for rational agents to be able to be convinced that they are wrong. If they can’t update their beliefs in the face of evidence, saying “my probability of X is 0” then they cannot learn, and you are operating off of faith, not logic.