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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My only credence in such Christianity is that I might be mistaken about what is self-contradictory, which is pretty darn low
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.