You have to accept a very narrow version of god to accept Pascal’s Wager. Many religions in the world have different things that must be done in order to avoid calamity. Are you going to cynically “believe” every religion in the world just in case their god exists? No one does that, and in principle if you did, it would no doubt cancel out your possibility of reaching heaven in many of them, because many religions demand strict adherence to their god alone, and any belief in other gods is disqualifying. So it’s not as simple as trying to cover your ass, you have to pick the right god to execute the wager with. Not to mention, it views god as a rather neutral party, does one really think god is going to count someone cynically professing belief in a concept just to avoid punishment and get the actual cookies in the same way as someone with actual faith? I understand that it’s not an argument for god’s existence, but it’s such a narrow arbitrary set of circumstance where the Wager can even hope to make any sense, you have to establish a host of other conditions (which themselves are difficult to prove) in order to arrive at a place where the wager even makes sense to think about. Also, and this is only relative to me, but I personally call it Pascal’s Cowardice. I’m not an intellectual coward who’s going to think something for no other reason than I’ll get smacked if I don’t. So even IF I somehow landed in the position of considering the wager, I still wouldn’t do it as an act of rebellion against such a god who would set up such conditions in the first place. Sorry. It’s a good article, thanks for writing it.
Yep I agree with your first point, if all the most plausible Gods are exclusive you have to pick the one with the best odds and highest reward. It does depend on if God counts conversion through fear, but lots of people are religious because of fear of God! And this says you should try to make yourself believe it in a genuine way.
It definitely is Pascal’s cowardice. Because of game theory, it’s possible you should never give into threats like this because you’ll be taken advantage of. But I think there are many arguments that expected value is good and useful, so you’d have to argue against using it in some cases and why those cases it breaks down.
No, nobody says that God is rewarding someone *cynically* professing belief, at least, the proposed gods I'm most familiar with would not do that. Pascal's wager suggests instead that you should try to put yourself in the best possible position to come to actual belief in the religion most likely to be actually true.
It is pretty interesting that you so explicitly say, from a Christian perspective, "I would of course choose Hell over a God that tells me it's necessary I believe in him to achieve Heaven." I rarely see somebody put it so explicitly, but that's exactly how it is the Christian writers I like best tend to argue that Hell might come to be populated, even in the presence of an all-loving God. The doors to Hell are locked on the inside, and pride is the greatest of all sins.
See, this is why a modern interpretation of Pascal’s wager should not be reliant on a single worldview. We know better in 2025. So we should pick the common denominators out from world religions and mythologies. See Joseph Campbell, he studied just that. This turns out to be basically embracing life and following the golden rule. And I think that’s the context that Pascal’s wager should apply to people today. We don’t know if we’re being judged or punished by some higher power, maybe karmic justice, maybe whatever is on the other side of the simulation. Given the one way nature of death, we can’t know. So, makes sense to favor being “good” as much as we know how, especially given there is much more time outside our lifetime than in it.
I never thought Pascal’s Wager was a good argument to convince Atheists, but it’s a great argument to convince Christians, like me, to not entertain atheism. The Pascals Wager for me is that I can either keep doing everything I believe is right, never do anything I believe is wrong, keep going to a weekly club where all my friends are, and that I enjoy attending immensely, and I have a small chance of infinite happiness, or I could question all my beliefs, stop doing things I think are right, start doing things I think are wrong, lose my third place and all my friends, and I might get tortured for all eternity. I think atheists would understand I’d be clinically insane to choose option 2.
I wrote a bit about Pascal’s Wager a few years ago as part of a longer piece against nihilism. I think a modern interpretation of it should nix not just the Christian assumptions, but the theistic assumptions also. It should apply to karmic retribution also, and punishment in the form of reincarnation to lower life forms.
We cannot know what happens after death, like we cannot definitively know if there is a higher power. So for me, it comes down not so much to faith as it does to moral behavior relative to the golden rule. And I think it is compelling in this context. We don’t know if we are being judged, and that applies to the ‘living in a simulation’ scenarios too. So, it is rational to favor acting with decency, responsibility and goodwill, build rather than destroy etc
Sure, few of the theories on what might happen after death would fail to support being decent, responsible and of good will. But at least a couple of them say that's infinitely far from actually leaving yourself secure, so...
One thing I would say to maybe take some of the coerciveness off of Pascal's Wager is that an omniscient god knows exactly what it feels like for you to suffer in eternity, and the only way to do that is to suffer it itself. If your suffering is unbearable, its suffering is unbearable. In the nature of unbearable things is that they have to be rejected at some point. So perhaps you could be sentenced to an eternity of something more like vague lameness, but not excruciating torture.
My other cheerful thought about Pascal's Wager is that perhaps ASI would "fall for it". Perhaps there is a rational religion out there that ASI will discover, either convincing or just more convincing than any other contender, and hopefully that will entail letting us all live. A lot of versions of God out there seem human friendly. Perhaps in heaven we will see a giant paperclip factory, which is God keeping up his end of the agreement with ASI.
I think it’s a bad argument because there are infinitely many possible scenarios where if you don’t believe that specific thing you get an infinite punishment, whereas the wager is always used to argue for like, some version of Christianity or whatever. Sorry, Christianity with infinite hell for nonbelievers is VERY implausible: I find it just as likely there’s a trickster god that infinitely punishes everyone except free thinkers, or a very harsh god of excellent epistemology who infinitely punishes everyone who believes things without good epistemic warrant. That makes more sense to me than an allegedly omnibenevolent god who assigns infinite punishments for finite sins. And there are any number of other possibilities. So I have no reason to act differently than I otherwise would, because there is no reason to think that different behaviour is less likely to result in infinite punishment than what I am currently doing.
You really believe the likelihood there’s a trickster god with no evidence is the same as Christianity, a religion with 2.1 billion believers? I think Christianity has a higher chance of being true than something I randomly made up, and I’m a pretty strong atheist.
But it doesn't really matter which one's more likely, does it? Because as long as there's a nonzero chance of the trickster scenario being the case, then they still both result in infinite value, and infinite values of the same "size", because mathematically n * k = k (where k is an infinite cardinal and n is some nonzero finite value) (https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Cardinal_Product_Equal_to_Maximum). Which I think just shows that this sort of expected value reasoning completely breaks down when infinity enters the picture.
Eh on the one hand I agree, but on the other hand measure theory seems more relevant to probability than set theory. (I may not be using those words correctly).
There's an important sense in which the line segment between 0 and 1 has the same number of numbers as between 1 and infinity, but another, also important sense where clearly 0 to 1 is a smaller segment.
Yes I do. Because a trickster god that inflicts infinite punishment for finite harms is at least self consistent, whereas Christianity with eternal punishment is obviously self-contradictory.
It's cute how you've managed to realize that Christianity, which drew the assent of all the smartest people in Europe and initially the Near East for several times longer than it's been since they all [no doubt via an act of simultaneous individual free thought] changed their minds at once, is not only wrong but *obviously* self-contradictory.
Strictly speaking it’s not Christianity that’s self-contradictory in the way I mentioned, just the versions that believe in eternal punishment. But ‘the smartest people believed it’ is a terrible, terrible argument. The smartest people also believed that the earth was the centre of the universe and that slavery was morally fine.
All Christians believe in Hell to one extent or another. Some people do claim that all will *necessarily* be saved, but this (universalism) was an extremely rare opinion until the last few generations and is a heresy to Catholics and most Protestants; I think it's probably a heresy in Orthodoxy too but Orthodoxy doesn't go to much effort to make clear exactly what it considers heretical. It's certainly permissible to hope that all will *contingently* be saved, though. Catholicism does not assert that there is in fact any particular person currently in Hell.
Geocentrism is a perfectly natural hypothesis that is impossible to disprove until you have telescopes, that's a crazy thing to criticize the ancients for. (They didn't know about the curvature of spacetime either, what idiots!) You don't need modern technology to know whether God came to Earth and told people what to do.
Yes, almost everyone was long mistaken about slavery, but the whole 1600-year history of abolitionism, from the first recorded published statement that slavery is wrong in general (Gregory of Nyssa) to the end of slavery in western Europe, the banning of the Atlantic slave trade, the American Civil War, and the major pressure from the West upon Islam to stop the Red Sea slave trade, is a Christian history. So it rather proves the point that the medievals were onto something with Christianity, even if we all must deeply regret that the Church failed to prevent the centuries of early modern African slavery.
The point is simply that the argument you provided was ridiculous. What would be actually helpful is explaining how all powerful good god could be justified in creating infinite punishment. I couldn’t care less if the belief is orthodox. If you take 2 seconds to consider other religions, it should be obvious that SOME religions sometimes endorse nonsensical views despite being held by millions of smart people. Why is eternal hellfire not one of those silly views some religions have?
Very good article, although unlike you, I think our common sense intuition that giving into Pascal’s mugging is definitely not a winning move and pretty stupid should be given great weight. So I continue to think that it’s instrumentaly rational not to believe in God, although I realise that this view has many bizarre conclusions. My view on this problem is kind of similar to my view on population ethics where I have some vague idea of what the correct theory should look like but don’t like any of the actual theories that people can think of, and don’t actually follow them because they all bite, ridiculous bullets. Yes, I am aware this policy is almost certainly leading to self defeating inconsistencies, but I think it’s better than any of the alternatives on offer.
In case anyone tries arguing that actually religion solves the mugging because it’s witchcraft I will just point out that our intuition has nothing to do with the possibility it’s witchcraft and everything to do with a sense that it’s stupid as a policy and will not be good for you. So the witchcraft argument doesn’t really resolve our intuition that it’s not instrumentaly rational to treat such low probability events as important, even when infinite utility is involved.
Yes, absolutely - I agree on the merits of the threat, and that Hanania's take about spiritual extortion doesn't have a bearing on the degree of that threat.
However, Pascal's Wager is not a complete threat assessment: It assumes that should a God exists, it would behave like the Christian God, which is a wild assumption to make!
There's too many other possibilities, and these other possibilities nullify the threat. It just takes a bit of creativity -
Very interesting! But I can’t help but shake the arbitrary nature of Pascal’s wager. It ignores the equally plausible idea of a god who exists but punishes people for believing in them. Imagine this god intentionally made it hard to logically believe in them, and only wants people in heaven who will use logic and reason, so anyone who believes in him or any other god will go to an eternal torment, and everyone who was an atheist will end up in heaven.
In that scenario, Pascal’s wager is reversed - it’s way better to not believe than to believe. The nature of any given religion and their afterlife is so arbitrary and meaningless, this reversal is equally arbitrary and meaningless. It just doesn’t have a giant following of people who accept it as ‘real’ enough to actually wager on it.
But I think that’s a way the whole extortion thing can be exposed - it’s just a threat and a warning. ‘Be a real shame if something happened to you and you had to suffer in hell forever cause you couldn’t make yourself believe in me’ has strong mob boss energy. And it’s particularly absurd when the reverse scenario is just as plausible
The thing is that scenario is not equally likely given that there are not loads of smart people who believe in it, and there is virtually no evidence for that scenario even less than the evidence for normal religions. In general things like loads of people believing in something or claiming miracles, et cetera and presenting arguments for something is evidence for the truth of a proposition. Even if it’s not very good evidence given all the reasons against. Such evidence exist for normal religions, but not for your scenario.
Unfortunately, there actually is equal evidence for the option I proposed vs the one that Pascal’s wager is based on.
Christianity’s truth claims have shrunk to essentially fill the same gaps that my scenario fills. It’s an area of mystery, an area that we can’t answer questions definitively about.
Every different religion that tries to fill the gap of what happens when we die uses the exact same miracle claims, personal spiritual experiences, and confirmations of truth directly from god.
If the situation I described does exist, then this god would intentionally either stay quiet and let us figure it out on our own, or they would give spiritual answers to anyone, regardless of the religion they are part of. Maybe they do this as a temptation for the believers to see if they will prioritize individual personal experience instead of prioritizing reaching logical, measurable, observable, testable conclusions.
The fact that many people believe in something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true or more likely. Mormons believe extremely sincerely that they are the only true church of god on the earth, and there are only like 17 million of them (including the inactive ones).
Every. Single. Religion. Is just a slice of humanity. None of them have *any* reliable evidence to justify their metaphysical truth claims. They are just a bunch of equally likely and equally unlikely unknowable, unfalsifiable, metaphysical claims that people use to dictate how they live their known, physical, tangible life.
Hell, it’s possible that there is a god but the actual concept of this god is something humanity hasn’t thought up yet.
It's not just wrong but confused almost to the point of insanity to claim there is *equal* evidence for the opposite of the Christian God than for the Christian God. "Personal spiritual experiences" and "direct confirmations of truth" are almost exactly entirely irrelevant to the evidence Christians take as relevant to their faith. Some people care a lot about miracles, but the only miracle Christians all take as important is the Resurrection. The entire religion lies on the claim that its God entered the world, died to repair its state of sin, then got back up and hung out for forty days with literally hundreds of subjects of the emperor Tiberius before ascending into Heaven. Christianity is true if and only if that actually happened, and there is quite substantial evidence for it, whereas there is precisely no evidence for your preferred alternative, and not a single person has ever believed it.
1. What evidence is there for the resurrection? We have stories written decades after the fact from anonymous authors. Do you accept stories about Nero’s resurrection or Romulus ascending to heaven as a new god?
2. The situation I proposed fits *exactly* with what we observe. This god who doesn’t want us to believe in them would be tempting people to believe in any given religion through prayer and spiritual experiences. They would encourage stories that claim miracles but can’t be substantiated. In the end, they would only reward the people who recognized that there was no way to determine that one specific religion was more likely than the others. Those who refused to accept arbitrary truth would be sent to heaven while those who just believed what was taught to them as children as truth would be punished.
It’s all metaphysical and these kinds of things can be completely made up on the spot. We are filling in gaps in our understanding of reality with one god concept or another. But none of them have any real evidence and all of them have gods who are blamed for atrocities.
1. We have the evidence that a huge cult dedicated to the Resurrection erupted immediately after it occurred and grew explosively for three hundred years of illegality under both Jewish and Roman law, with many members willingly dying for the claim of the Resurrection even among the generation that witnessed it directly. It is generally agreed by even non-Christian scholars of Jesus that (a) Jesus was crucified (b) his disciples believes they saw him resurrected (c) His resurrection was proclaimed very quickly after his execution in Jerusalem (d) his cult somehow quickly converted skeptics included Paul-who-was-Saul. Romulus never even existed in the first place (in comparison, I would not mount a very vigorous defense of the literal historicity of Moses), and I’m not aware that anyone ever claimed Nero actually rose from the dead, just that he would return later, so those are truly ludicrous comparisons, to the point I’m not really eager to keep engaging with this.
2. I have no idea what, if anything, you think you’re talking about. You think a god whose main goal was *not* to be believed in—which makes no sense in the first place—would try to accomplish this goal by seeding many religions of varying levels of reasonableness without making any irresistibly convincing? Why not just make one completely convincing but wrong religion?
One critique of Pascal's wager that I'm fond of is that your expected value is infinite no matter what you choose.
No matter what you do--even if you actively try to *avoid* believing in god--there's still some finite chance that you will end up believing in god due to some fluke of psychology or circumstance. Since any non-infinitesimal probability multiplied by an infinite reward produces an infinite expected value, a strategy of choosing not to believe has infinite expected value, just like a strategy of choosing to believe. So, it's just as rational to choose not to believe.
I've posted this else where, but I'm curious: what do you think of Alan Hajek and Anthony Duff's view that Pascal's Wager really doesn't counsel anything since there is always some possibility that a person will end up believing God?
Well…because it’s true? I’m not sure what kind of answer you expect to get to a question like that to someone who actually believes their religion. Even in the comparative question, I don’t actually think I do know that many obviously nonsensical doctrines in major world religions, thought I know a few important ones I think are false—which is of course rather different from “nonsensical”. Maybe you can suggest one from a religion I don’t actually follow, for comparison.
I guess, let me just offer a little apologetics about Hell, in case that’s interesting to you.
“Created” is kind of a strong word for what God did with respect to Hell. The orthodox view is that Hell is the state of a creature permanently turning away from its God. This state is, tautologically, permanent, and, self-evidently, very painful; this choice also certainly merits punishment, if any choice does, although people vary widely on to what extent one should conceive Hell as retributive. I think to be orthodox one does need to allow for at least a bit of that. God really made you free, and if you really choose to be evil permanently, you actually deserve punishment for that. People will try to do expected utility calculations and stuff to prove that Hell is unfair but this is hopelessly inappropriate. We are not even told in what sense, if any, Hell is within time! People have theorized a lot about ideas like Hell being essentially a drying up of a soul into a mere agonized ash or residue of a soul, etc, etc; it’s a painful doctrine but it’s not rational to refuse to believe something true just because you dislike it, and so I tried to give some indication of how thoughtful people understand it.
I'm not sure why you restricted to such dramatic ways of trying to get yourself to believe in God in your examples, unless as a defense mechanism for your own sake. How about...attempting to pray? Reading a book by CS Lewis? Going to a few different religious services? All of these things are likely to move you closer to God if God exists and not likely to do much harm if not.
I don’t like eternal torment. “and you shall trample the wicked to a pulp, for they shall be dust beneath your feet on the day that I am preparing—said the Lord of Hosts.”
Firstly, the moment you start modifying beliefs based on utility, eg someone saying "I'll give you $10 to believe that the moon is made of cheese", then the rationality of your future decisions can't be trusted. This means sacrificing your rationality, and thus much of the value you could achieve by making rational decisions, in full generality.
But consider a version of pascal's wager where god doesn't want belief, just for you to go to church.
Now, second flaw. A truely rational agent, hoping for infinite reward, wouldn't take the possibility of god seriously. They would be focused on finding subtle violations of the laws of thermodynamics or something.
And thirdly, imagine the choice between a certainty of Grahams number torture, vs a 1 in Grahams number chance of infinite torture. Would you really choose the first option?
Under some computational ethics theories, running the same computation 2x isn't ethically different from running it once. (Based on though experiments about a kind of thick 2d chip that you could saw in half as it was running)
So, the infinite torture would hit the recurrence time. After some point, it would be an identical computation, done a second time. (The other option being that your mind gets ever more alien, no recurrence, but are you still you? Do you care what happens to a bizarre alien mind, even if that mind was formed by continuous modification from your current mind. )
Or alternatively, maybe it's rational to have time discounted preferences. To intrinsically care (somewhat) more about what happens today than tomorrow.
You have to accept a very narrow version of god to accept Pascal’s Wager. Many religions in the world have different things that must be done in order to avoid calamity. Are you going to cynically “believe” every religion in the world just in case their god exists? No one does that, and in principle if you did, it would no doubt cancel out your possibility of reaching heaven in many of them, because many religions demand strict adherence to their god alone, and any belief in other gods is disqualifying. So it’s not as simple as trying to cover your ass, you have to pick the right god to execute the wager with. Not to mention, it views god as a rather neutral party, does one really think god is going to count someone cynically professing belief in a concept just to avoid punishment and get the actual cookies in the same way as someone with actual faith? I understand that it’s not an argument for god’s existence, but it’s such a narrow arbitrary set of circumstance where the Wager can even hope to make any sense, you have to establish a host of other conditions (which themselves are difficult to prove) in order to arrive at a place where the wager even makes sense to think about. Also, and this is only relative to me, but I personally call it Pascal’s Cowardice. I’m not an intellectual coward who’s going to think something for no other reason than I’ll get smacked if I don’t. So even IF I somehow landed in the position of considering the wager, I still wouldn’t do it as an act of rebellion against such a god who would set up such conditions in the first place. Sorry. It’s a good article, thanks for writing it.
Yep I agree with your first point, if all the most plausible Gods are exclusive you have to pick the one with the best odds and highest reward. It does depend on if God counts conversion through fear, but lots of people are religious because of fear of God! And this says you should try to make yourself believe it in a genuine way.
It definitely is Pascal’s cowardice. Because of game theory, it’s possible you should never give into threats like this because you’ll be taken advantage of. But I think there are many arguments that expected value is good and useful, so you’d have to argue against using it in some cases and why those cases it breaks down.
Good comment.
No, nobody says that God is rewarding someone *cynically* professing belief, at least, the proposed gods I'm most familiar with would not do that. Pascal's wager suggests instead that you should try to put yourself in the best possible position to come to actual belief in the religion most likely to be actually true.
It is pretty interesting that you so explicitly say, from a Christian perspective, "I would of course choose Hell over a God that tells me it's necessary I believe in him to achieve Heaven." I rarely see somebody put it so explicitly, but that's exactly how it is the Christian writers I like best tend to argue that Hell might come to be populated, even in the presence of an all-loving God. The doors to Hell are locked on the inside, and pride is the greatest of all sins.
See, this is why a modern interpretation of Pascal’s wager should not be reliant on a single worldview. We know better in 2025. So we should pick the common denominators out from world religions and mythologies. See Joseph Campbell, he studied just that. This turns out to be basically embracing life and following the golden rule. And I think that’s the context that Pascal’s wager should apply to people today. We don’t know if we’re being judged or punished by some higher power, maybe karmic justice, maybe whatever is on the other side of the simulation. Given the one way nature of death, we can’t know. So, makes sense to favor being “good” as much as we know how, especially given there is much more time outside our lifetime than in it.
I never thought Pascal’s Wager was a good argument to convince Atheists, but it’s a great argument to convince Christians, like me, to not entertain atheism. The Pascals Wager for me is that I can either keep doing everything I believe is right, never do anything I believe is wrong, keep going to a weekly club where all my friends are, and that I enjoy attending immensely, and I have a small chance of infinite happiness, or I could question all my beliefs, stop doing things I think are right, start doing things I think are wrong, lose my third place and all my friends, and I might get tortured for all eternity. I think atheists would understand I’d be clinically insane to choose option 2.
I wrote a bit about Pascal’s Wager a few years ago as part of a longer piece against nihilism. I think a modern interpretation of it should nix not just the Christian assumptions, but the theistic assumptions also. It should apply to karmic retribution also, and punishment in the form of reincarnation to lower life forms.
We cannot know what happens after death, like we cannot definitively know if there is a higher power. So for me, it comes down not so much to faith as it does to moral behavior relative to the golden rule. And I think it is compelling in this context. We don’t know if we are being judged, and that applies to the ‘living in a simulation’ scenarios too. So, it is rational to favor acting with decency, responsibility and goodwill, build rather than destroy etc
Sure, few of the theories on what might happen after death would fail to support being decent, responsible and of good will. But at least a couple of them say that's infinitely far from actually leaving yourself secure, so...
One thing I would say to maybe take some of the coerciveness off of Pascal's Wager is that an omniscient god knows exactly what it feels like for you to suffer in eternity, and the only way to do that is to suffer it itself. If your suffering is unbearable, its suffering is unbearable. In the nature of unbearable things is that they have to be rejected at some point. So perhaps you could be sentenced to an eternity of something more like vague lameness, but not excruciating torture.
My other cheerful thought about Pascal's Wager is that perhaps ASI would "fall for it". Perhaps there is a rational religion out there that ASI will discover, either convincing or just more convincing than any other contender, and hopefully that will entail letting us all live. A lot of versions of God out there seem human friendly. Perhaps in heaven we will see a giant paperclip factory, which is God keeping up his end of the agreement with ASI.
That's a good thought. Trying to convert an ASI to Christianity does seem like as promising a route as anything else.
I think it’s a bad argument because there are infinitely many possible scenarios where if you don’t believe that specific thing you get an infinite punishment, whereas the wager is always used to argue for like, some version of Christianity or whatever. Sorry, Christianity with infinite hell for nonbelievers is VERY implausible: I find it just as likely there’s a trickster god that infinitely punishes everyone except free thinkers, or a very harsh god of excellent epistemology who infinitely punishes everyone who believes things without good epistemic warrant. That makes more sense to me than an allegedly omnibenevolent god who assigns infinite punishments for finite sins. And there are any number of other possibilities. So I have no reason to act differently than I otherwise would, because there is no reason to think that different behaviour is less likely to result in infinite punishment than what I am currently doing.
You really believe the likelihood there’s a trickster god with no evidence is the same as Christianity, a religion with 2.1 billion believers? I think Christianity has a higher chance of being true than something I randomly made up, and I’m a pretty strong atheist.
But it doesn't really matter which one's more likely, does it? Because as long as there's a nonzero chance of the trickster scenario being the case, then they still both result in infinite value, and infinite values of the same "size", because mathematically n * k = k (where k is an infinite cardinal and n is some nonzero finite value) (https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Cardinal_Product_Equal_to_Maximum). Which I think just shows that this sort of expected value reasoning completely breaks down when infinity enters the picture.
Eh on the one hand I agree, but on the other hand measure theory seems more relevant to probability than set theory. (I may not be using those words correctly).
There's an important sense in which the line segment between 0 and 1 has the same number of numbers as between 1 and infinity, but another, also important sense where clearly 0 to 1 is a smaller segment.
Of course it matters. A 20% chance of infinite utility is obviously better than a 2% chance.
This is not in fact obvious. What is larger: infinity or 2 * infinity?
Why not take surreal-number-valued utilities, so the answer is the obvious one? I see no great reason not to.
Not familiar with that set of numbers, so I can’t say either way
Hey, that’s a good point
Yes I do. Because a trickster god that inflicts infinite punishment for finite harms is at least self consistent, whereas Christianity with eternal punishment is obviously self-contradictory.
It's cute how you've managed to realize that Christianity, which drew the assent of all the smartest people in Europe and initially the Near East for several times longer than it's been since they all [no doubt via an act of simultaneous individual free thought] changed their minds at once, is not only wrong but *obviously* self-contradictory.
Strictly speaking it’s not Christianity that’s self-contradictory in the way I mentioned, just the versions that believe in eternal punishment. But ‘the smartest people believed it’ is a terrible, terrible argument. The smartest people also believed that the earth was the centre of the universe and that slavery was morally fine.
All Christians believe in Hell to one extent or another. Some people do claim that all will *necessarily* be saved, but this (universalism) was an extremely rare opinion until the last few generations and is a heresy to Catholics and most Protestants; I think it's probably a heresy in Orthodoxy too but Orthodoxy doesn't go to much effort to make clear exactly what it considers heretical. It's certainly permissible to hope that all will *contingently* be saved, though. Catholicism does not assert that there is in fact any particular person currently in Hell.
Geocentrism is a perfectly natural hypothesis that is impossible to disprove until you have telescopes, that's a crazy thing to criticize the ancients for. (They didn't know about the curvature of spacetime either, what idiots!) You don't need modern technology to know whether God came to Earth and told people what to do.
Yes, almost everyone was long mistaken about slavery, but the whole 1600-year history of abolitionism, from the first recorded published statement that slavery is wrong in general (Gregory of Nyssa) to the end of slavery in western Europe, the banning of the Atlantic slave trade, the American Civil War, and the major pressure from the West upon Islam to stop the Red Sea slave trade, is a Christian history. So it rather proves the point that the medievals were onto something with Christianity, even if we all must deeply regret that the Church failed to prevent the centuries of early modern African slavery.
The point is simply that the argument you provided was ridiculous. What would be actually helpful is explaining how all powerful good god could be justified in creating infinite punishment. I couldn’t care less if the belief is orthodox. If you take 2 seconds to consider other religions, it should be obvious that SOME religions sometimes endorse nonsensical views despite being held by millions of smart people. Why is eternal hellfire not one of those silly views some religions have?
My only credence in such Christianity is that I might be mistaken about what is self-contradictory, which is pretty darn low
Majesty of Reason (Joe Schmid) interviewed Dr. Liz Jackson four years ago on Pascal’s wager. It’s the best thing out there on the topic.
Very good article, although unlike you, I think our common sense intuition that giving into Pascal’s mugging is definitely not a winning move and pretty stupid should be given great weight. So I continue to think that it’s instrumentaly rational not to believe in God, although I realise that this view has many bizarre conclusions. My view on this problem is kind of similar to my view on population ethics where I have some vague idea of what the correct theory should look like but don’t like any of the actual theories that people can think of, and don’t actually follow them because they all bite, ridiculous bullets. Yes, I am aware this policy is almost certainly leading to self defeating inconsistencies, but I think it’s better than any of the alternatives on offer.
In case anyone tries arguing that actually religion solves the mugging because it’s witchcraft I will just point out that our intuition has nothing to do with the possibility it’s witchcraft and everything to do with a sense that it’s stupid as a policy and will not be good for you. So the witchcraft argument doesn’t really resolve our intuition that it’s not instrumentaly rational to treat such low probability events as important, even when infinite utility is involved.
Agree, imo, there isn’t a position on this issue that doesn’t involve biting some though bullets
"I find it to be a very good threat!"
Yes, absolutely - I agree on the merits of the threat, and that Hanania's take about spiritual extortion doesn't have a bearing on the degree of that threat.
However, Pascal's Wager is not a complete threat assessment: It assumes that should a God exists, it would behave like the Christian God, which is a wild assumption to make!
There's too many other possibilities, and these other possibilities nullify the threat. It just takes a bit of creativity -
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/im-not-a-polytheist-but-i-believe
So please - no no no don't be an atheist and accept Pascal's Wager, be agnostic and reject it!
Very interesting! But I can’t help but shake the arbitrary nature of Pascal’s wager. It ignores the equally plausible idea of a god who exists but punishes people for believing in them. Imagine this god intentionally made it hard to logically believe in them, and only wants people in heaven who will use logic and reason, so anyone who believes in him or any other god will go to an eternal torment, and everyone who was an atheist will end up in heaven.
In that scenario, Pascal’s wager is reversed - it’s way better to not believe than to believe. The nature of any given religion and their afterlife is so arbitrary and meaningless, this reversal is equally arbitrary and meaningless. It just doesn’t have a giant following of people who accept it as ‘real’ enough to actually wager on it.
But I think that’s a way the whole extortion thing can be exposed - it’s just a threat and a warning. ‘Be a real shame if something happened to you and you had to suffer in hell forever cause you couldn’t make yourself believe in me’ has strong mob boss energy. And it’s particularly absurd when the reverse scenario is just as plausible
The thing is that scenario is not equally likely given that there are not loads of smart people who believe in it, and there is virtually no evidence for that scenario even less than the evidence for normal religions. In general things like loads of people believing in something or claiming miracles, et cetera and presenting arguments for something is evidence for the truth of a proposition. Even if it’s not very good evidence given all the reasons against. Such evidence exist for normal religions, but not for your scenario.
Unfortunately, there actually is equal evidence for the option I proposed vs the one that Pascal’s wager is based on.
Christianity’s truth claims have shrunk to essentially fill the same gaps that my scenario fills. It’s an area of mystery, an area that we can’t answer questions definitively about.
Every different religion that tries to fill the gap of what happens when we die uses the exact same miracle claims, personal spiritual experiences, and confirmations of truth directly from god.
If the situation I described does exist, then this god would intentionally either stay quiet and let us figure it out on our own, or they would give spiritual answers to anyone, regardless of the religion they are part of. Maybe they do this as a temptation for the believers to see if they will prioritize individual personal experience instead of prioritizing reaching logical, measurable, observable, testable conclusions.
The fact that many people believe in something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true or more likely. Mormons believe extremely sincerely that they are the only true church of god on the earth, and there are only like 17 million of them (including the inactive ones).
Every. Single. Religion. Is just a slice of humanity. None of them have *any* reliable evidence to justify their metaphysical truth claims. They are just a bunch of equally likely and equally unlikely unknowable, unfalsifiable, metaphysical claims that people use to dictate how they live their known, physical, tangible life.
Hell, it’s possible that there is a god but the actual concept of this god is something humanity hasn’t thought up yet.
It's not just wrong but confused almost to the point of insanity to claim there is *equal* evidence for the opposite of the Christian God than for the Christian God. "Personal spiritual experiences" and "direct confirmations of truth" are almost exactly entirely irrelevant to the evidence Christians take as relevant to their faith. Some people care a lot about miracles, but the only miracle Christians all take as important is the Resurrection. The entire religion lies on the claim that its God entered the world, died to repair its state of sin, then got back up and hung out for forty days with literally hundreds of subjects of the emperor Tiberius before ascending into Heaven. Christianity is true if and only if that actually happened, and there is quite substantial evidence for it, whereas there is precisely no evidence for your preferred alternative, and not a single person has ever believed it.
1. What evidence is there for the resurrection? We have stories written decades after the fact from anonymous authors. Do you accept stories about Nero’s resurrection or Romulus ascending to heaven as a new god?
2. The situation I proposed fits *exactly* with what we observe. This god who doesn’t want us to believe in them would be tempting people to believe in any given religion through prayer and spiritual experiences. They would encourage stories that claim miracles but can’t be substantiated. In the end, they would only reward the people who recognized that there was no way to determine that one specific religion was more likely than the others. Those who refused to accept arbitrary truth would be sent to heaven while those who just believed what was taught to them as children as truth would be punished.
It’s all metaphysical and these kinds of things can be completely made up on the spot. We are filling in gaps in our understanding of reality with one god concept or another. But none of them have any real evidence and all of them have gods who are blamed for atrocities.
1. We have the evidence that a huge cult dedicated to the Resurrection erupted immediately after it occurred and grew explosively for three hundred years of illegality under both Jewish and Roman law, with many members willingly dying for the claim of the Resurrection even among the generation that witnessed it directly. It is generally agreed by even non-Christian scholars of Jesus that (a) Jesus was crucified (b) his disciples believes they saw him resurrected (c) His resurrection was proclaimed very quickly after his execution in Jerusalem (d) his cult somehow quickly converted skeptics included Paul-who-was-Saul. Romulus never even existed in the first place (in comparison, I would not mount a very vigorous defense of the literal historicity of Moses), and I’m not aware that anyone ever claimed Nero actually rose from the dead, just that he would return later, so those are truly ludicrous comparisons, to the point I’m not really eager to keep engaging with this.
2. I have no idea what, if anything, you think you’re talking about. You think a god whose main goal was *not* to be believed in—which makes no sense in the first place—would try to accomplish this goal by seeding many religions of varying levels of reasonableness without making any irresistibly convincing? Why not just make one completely convincing but wrong religion?
One critique of Pascal's wager that I'm fond of is that your expected value is infinite no matter what you choose.
No matter what you do--even if you actively try to *avoid* believing in god--there's still some finite chance that you will end up believing in god due to some fluke of psychology or circumstance. Since any non-infinitesimal probability multiplied by an infinite reward produces an infinite expected value, a strategy of choosing not to believe has infinite expected value, just like a strategy of choosing to believe. So, it's just as rational to choose not to believe.
So an atheist and a coward.
I've posted this else where, but I'm curious: what do you think of Alan Hajek and Anthony Duff's view that Pascal's Wager really doesn't counsel anything since there is always some possibility that a person will end up believing God?
Well…because it’s true? I’m not sure what kind of answer you expect to get to a question like that to someone who actually believes their religion. Even in the comparative question, I don’t actually think I do know that many obviously nonsensical doctrines in major world religions, thought I know a few important ones I think are false—which is of course rather different from “nonsensical”. Maybe you can suggest one from a religion I don’t actually follow, for comparison.
I guess, let me just offer a little apologetics about Hell, in case that’s interesting to you.
“Created” is kind of a strong word for what God did with respect to Hell. The orthodox view is that Hell is the state of a creature permanently turning away from its God. This state is, tautologically, permanent, and, self-evidently, very painful; this choice also certainly merits punishment, if any choice does, although people vary widely on to what extent one should conceive Hell as retributive. I think to be orthodox one does need to allow for at least a bit of that. God really made you free, and if you really choose to be evil permanently, you actually deserve punishment for that. People will try to do expected utility calculations and stuff to prove that Hell is unfair but this is hopelessly inappropriate. We are not even told in what sense, if any, Hell is within time! People have theorized a lot about ideas like Hell being essentially a drying up of a soul into a mere agonized ash or residue of a soul, etc, etc; it’s a painful doctrine but it’s not rational to refuse to believe something true just because you dislike it, and so I tried to give some indication of how thoughtful people understand it.
I'm not sure why you restricted to such dramatic ways of trying to get yourself to believe in God in your examples, unless as a defense mechanism for your own sake. How about...attempting to pray? Reading a book by CS Lewis? Going to a few different religious services? All of these things are likely to move you closer to God if God exists and not likely to do much harm if not.
I don’t like eternal torment. “and you shall trample the wicked to a pulp, for they shall be dust beneath your feet on the day that I am preparing—said the Lord of Hosts.”
Firstly, the moment you start modifying beliefs based on utility, eg someone saying "I'll give you $10 to believe that the moon is made of cheese", then the rationality of your future decisions can't be trusted. This means sacrificing your rationality, and thus much of the value you could achieve by making rational decisions, in full generality.
But consider a version of pascal's wager where god doesn't want belief, just for you to go to church.
Now, second flaw. A truely rational agent, hoping for infinite reward, wouldn't take the possibility of god seriously. They would be focused on finding subtle violations of the laws of thermodynamics or something.
And thirdly, imagine the choice between a certainty of Grahams number torture, vs a 1 in Grahams number chance of infinite torture. Would you really choose the first option?
Under some computational ethics theories, running the same computation 2x isn't ethically different from running it once. (Based on though experiments about a kind of thick 2d chip that you could saw in half as it was running)
So, the infinite torture would hit the recurrence time. After some point, it would be an identical computation, done a second time. (The other option being that your mind gets ever more alien, no recurrence, but are you still you? Do you care what happens to a bizarre alien mind, even if that mind was formed by continuous modification from your current mind. )
Or alternatively, maybe it's rational to have time discounted preferences. To intrinsically care (somewhat) more about what happens today than tomorrow.