Sal Cordova mentioned Pascal’s Wager on the Randi thread, and I was surprised to find that there has never been a thread on that topic here at TSZ. Hence this OP.
Pascal was a brilliant guy, but his famous Wager is an irrational mess. (Religion can have that effect on otherwise bright people.) In the comments, let’s explain the Wager’s shortcomings to Sal.
To start things off, here is Wikipedia’s statement of the argument, using Pascal’s words:
The wager uses the following logic (excerpts from Pensées, part III, §233):
1. God is, or God is not. Reason cannot decide between the two alternatives.
2. A Game is being played… where heads or tails will turn up.
3. You must wager (it is not optional).
4. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
5. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (…) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.
6. But some cannot believe. They should then ‘at least learn your inability to believe…’ and ‘Endeavour then to convince’ themselves.
Have at it.
Here is Sal’s comment from the Randi thread:
And hope can?
How do you know that you must wager? Because of dogma? Actually, I can see little excuse to wager, unless you already smuggled in some dogmatic claims as “premises.”
That said, I’m not one who bothers one who believes and is happy to do so. But if Pascal’s Wager is the “argument,” no, it rests on assumptions that are in question, and resolving such questions doesn’t involve accepting them tacitly. The “infinite…gain” is one of the questions, and reason plus evidence really can allow us to assess the likelihood that it’s “real” versus being a good recruiting tool. God, too, looks suspiciously like a holdover from animistic beliefs.
And I think I’d really have to see some evidence that “God” made life before I could hang anything on the questions extant in that area. God is an easy resort for the human mind, but is believing God to be responsible for OOL really better than crediting thunder to a storm god was in the past?
Btw, I wonder what a person is to do socially if Pascal’s Wager is accepted? Should we enforce religion, burn heretics, because a few years on earth is trivial compared to “possible” eternal gains? We don’t know, but why take the chance that the heretics will burn in hell forever? I don’t see how Pascal’s Wager is restricted to individual wagering, rather it could have some serious social consequences, if truly believed. Fortunately, I think that most people find it to be kind of flaky, at best, so might accept it as a sop for themselves, while not wishing to base society on it.
Glen Davidson
The wager assumes that the only God possible is a God who will give you a happy eternity if you decide that He exists.
It does not, for instance, allow for the possibility that there is a God who will damn you to an eternity of torture if you gamble on His existence.
There are many other possibilities. The Wager commits the fallacy of equivocation, by equivocating between “God” as in “any supernatural being with control over our destiny after death” and “God” as in “the God, I Pascal, posit from a selective reading of the canonical Christian scriptures”.
So his binary isn’t binary.
Pascal’s Wager implicitly assumes that there’s exactly 1 (one) god to consider, and that 1 (one) god is the god of Xtianity. Of course, us humans have come up with lots more gods than just the god of Xtianity, all of which have pretty much the same crappy level of evidential support, as best I can tell. So if you’re taking the Wager seriously, you should thoroughly research all gods and all religions, with particular emphasis on which religions have the best heavens, and which have the worst hells.
I am always confused as to what this “wager” is asking me to do. We don’t believe or not believe things on the basis of which belief pays best. Belief just doesn’t work that way. You believe or not believe based on your (quite possibly biassed) assessment of the evidence and the wager is not saying anything about the evidence for or against a God. You might pretend to believe becauses it pays better. Many people have been forced to do that down the years. But such a pretence would hardly fool an omniscient God. As Richard Dawkins once said, if there is a God it might well take a dim view of hypocritically pretending you believe in it when actually you don’t.
Well, that was part of my point above. Exactly.
So, the subtle way to play the game is to wager that God values integrity over pretended belief.
A quick note: if you look at the Wager in context — in Pascal’s Pensees — it takes on a slightly different meaning. The Wager is not intended as a rational argument, since it takes place after rational argument has been exhausted. In context, the Wager occurs at a point when Pascal wants to believe in God but has already shown that reason alone cannot prove that God exists or that God does not exist. So the Wager comes to our assistance, so to speak, in showing us why it is not contrary to reason to believe in God.
I’m not saying it’s a particularly good line of reasoning — just saying that it’s not intended as an argument to compel rational assent in those who don’t already want to believe in God, so one shouldn’t criticize the Wager for doing a bad job at what it’s not intended to do.
the wager is pretty much common sense.
with all the modern discoveries of what actually happens within an organism, it is clearer and clearer that the probability life was designed in extraordinarily high.
so follows the conclusion that seeking the source of that creation and contemplating your relationship to that designing entity really wont hurt a bit.
but not seeking it could cost you.
yes, if you dont believe in the possibility of an afterlife, it doesnt matter either way. but that would only apply to the hardcore atheist.
The vast majority of humanity isn’t convinced there is nothing out there.
So Pascal’s wager makes a whole lot of sense to these people.
For me, my money is on a designing entity, willing a creation into existence in order to commune with it, as the best way to keep from getting bored.
God’s biggest task has always been how to create something that would not be robot like but could realize a nature not unlike his own, albeit not a carbon copy, which would be divine suicide.
I see no mystery in god’s silence. It’s his way of saying, ‘well if you want to know Me as I am, then shut up and listen, like I do’.
As KN points out, the wager takes place after logic has has been exhausted. The problem with the wager is as EL points out, it assumes a particular kind of god for the wager to be of value. You’re not making an even bet, you’re placing a bet within entirely unknown parameters – your bet could as easily harm you as help you. There’s no reason to place the bet.
However, both logic and evidence point not only to the existence of god, but point to the existence of a particular kind of god, so there’s no reason to be reduced to such a wager. There are beliefs of god that are pretty safe bets given the state of logic and evidence.
Kantian Naturalist,
My problem is I am not sure what job it is intended to do. As you say it is not a rational argument for the existence of God. It almost sounds like a bit of game theory – if you decide to do X or Y what the consequences if reality is A or is B. But can you decide to believe in something? If not, what other decision does he have in mind? Or maybe it is not a decision at all but just a reflection on the consequences if you are unlucky enough to believe wrongly.
That’s my position. No “subtle game playing” about it,
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honest.
Let’s not forget the rare insight of Homer Simpson:
““But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.”
Thank you for posting the discussion.
First off, Pascal is considered the father of Advantage Play in the gambling world and the notion of Expected Value (Expectation Value). Expected Value has a tremendous role in statistics and physics and finance. His contributions as a mathematician are highly foundational to math and science.
Casinos and skilled gamblers (called Advantage Players, or “APs”) exploit Pascal wagering ideas. Advantage is present if the probability-weighted payoffs and losses are advantageous. A trivial example is wagering on a coin being heads or tails. If the payoff is
0 for tails, bet on heads! In fact casinos occasionally offer such bets as promotional in the form of match play coupons:
http://casinogambling.about.com/cs/comps/a/matchplay.htm
I once went on a local gambling cruise that had tons of match play coupons and I realized their director of marketing created a vulnerability that could be exploited. I exploited the advantage for about
6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for 
4 million. Here’s how he did it.
…
Fifteen million dollars in winnings from three different casinos? Nobody gets that lucky. How did he do it?
….
It was a variation of Pascal’s wagering ideas.
With regard to casinos, the data are straightforward for the most part. To paraphrase Hamlet, “to bet or not to bet, that is the question.” — is answered by Pascal’s wagering methods.
As far as spiritual things, the distribution functions are not known and neither are the payoffs, they are only assumed. Pascal’s wager is only rational with respect to the underlying assumptions, and we don’t know if the assumptions are correct.
For the question of the Christian God, Buddha, Vishnu, JuJu, Atheism, etc. the wager is dependent on one’s assumptions. Pascal’s wager gives rationality to the wager with respect to the underlying premise, it says nothing of the accuracy of the assumptions. The assumptions could of course be wrong.
My assumptions are:
1. There is a chance the Christian God is real
2. There is a far lower chance other gods are real
3. There is no eternal payoff if the is No God
4. There is an infinite payoff if the Christian God is real and one believes in Jesus
5. There is an infinite loss if the Christian God is real and one disbelieves Jesus
From those unproven assumptions, Pascal’s wager is rational. Of course one could have a different set of assumptions. But I’m not willing to wager my soul that the Origin of Life is the result of a mindless process. The origin of life is far outside scientific expectation, and it counts as a miracle in my book.
Further, as I’ve studied the evidence, I would wager my soul on evolutionary nor paleontological speculations. Even if the chance of the Christian God were 0.000001 being true, it would be a favorable bet in my book.
Everyone’s wager will be called one day in the very large roulette wheel of life’s choices. From an eternal standpoint, if the atheist view is correct, no bet would seem to have a substantially better payoff than any other. To quote my very favorite atheist/agnostic who was instrumental to my Christian faith:
Science told me the world is passing away. If atheism is true, I have nothing to lose anyway by trusting in Jesus, but if atheism is false and the Christian God real, I have everything to lose by not trusting in Jesus. So for me in the wager of Atheism vs. Christianity, Christianity is the superior wager.
stcordova,
But what does “wagering my soul” actually mean? What action do you take?
Not really.
That you must wager assumes the conclusion that a god exists and that this god requires belief or non-belief.
I resist “knowing” that I am an atheist precisely because I refuse to play this game.
I know as well as I know anything that religion is a man-made phenomenon, but to me, that says nothing about the existence or non-existence of god.
What is it about not knowing that raises so many hackles?
Not seeking what?
Whatever the status of a sentient creator, religion is obviously the creation of priests having a lot of power to gain by leading the gullible.
All you have to do to understand the position of the skeptic is to imagine yourself arguing with a follower of the most irrational religion or philosophy of which you are aware.
That’s how they all look to me. Religion is a social/political institution having nothing at all to do with the existence of a sentient superbeing.
It’s irrational to believe in any of the gods people have invented / described./ worshipped without evidence. (And, no, “evidence” of the presumptive “Design of Life” is NOT evidence for any one of the multifarious gods.) But it’s beyond irrational to believe in the god of the Christians, a deity who would reportedly doom me to eternal punishment merely because I fail to believe that he raped Mary and created a half-human son to save me from the “sin” I inherited from the non-existed Eve and Adam.
That’s bullshit.
If all christians are correct, and their god actually is THE GOD, and their god actually, as reported, does condemn me and all other decent human beings who are non-believers into eternal hell, then I still choose to not believe in it. Believing in that is the ultimate evil as far as I am concerned. I would sacrifice myself for eternity rather than bow to such evil.
Atheist mass murderers? Pol Pot? Stalin? Not a drop of blood in a bucket compared to their christian god, who (if it existed) is going to condemn uncounted billions of human souls to torment merely for the quite-human failure to believe in its 2000-years-dead messenger.
Pascal’s wager? Not on my life. I refuse to sully my moral self (what christians might call my soul) with hope of a reward in heaven for worshipping a deity who plans to torture (essentially all who have ever lived) my fellow humans. To accept Pascal’s wager I would have to lose my very soul.
When I would have to lose my soul in order to believe, suddenly Pascal’s wager doesn’t seem so one-sided in favor of “God” as Pascal claims that it is. No deal, sucker.
That’s Pascal’s wager.
That’s Pascal’s wager.
The options of the Pascal wage are not believe God just in case or not. The options are act as if God exist or not. Acting as if God exists means look for the faith a follow the “natural law”. From the catholic point of view of Pascal that it is not deceiving God, as for catholic church faith is a gift. No fault if you haven´t it.
That makes more people have the chance to “save their soul” even you hotshoe.
Not even for eternal life, Blas. Not if I have to “act as if” that monster god might really exist — outside the creation of hateful Catholic popes and priests.
I owe it to my decent human forebears and all our potential descendants to refuse to kneel to that monster. You also owe it to humanity to renounce your faith in that hideous god and the church which lied to you all your life “faith is a gift”.
Their god deserves nothing but scorn and resistance from any decent human being.
I recall hearing of Pascal’s Wager many decades ago and thinking, If I lose, I lose nothing, because I’m dead anyway.
But if I win, I get to spend eternity in the company of people who think Pascal’s Wager is really clever.
Visions of spending eternity in the company of Jerry Springer’s audience.
No thanks. I’ll take whatever’s behind door number three.
Yep.
Jerry Springer’s audience.
Plus every christian gay-hater, witch-burner, child-rapist, ghetto thug, culture-destroying missionary who ever lived — as long as they died in a spirit of grace having accepted the word of the lord.
It would be like spending eternity in a sewer overlaid with Strawberry Air Freshener.
Praise the lard!
Other sources of possible relevance:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/pascals-wager.htm
keiths:
How so?
Interesting that atheist call irrational mess the wager when Kant took the wager. Many atheist take it them but denying they are.
I don’t think so, Blas. What seems to me “irrational” is the Wager as commonly reported, not least because we don’t choose to believe things irrespective of reasoning – we believe them because we think they are true.
If you told me that if I believed the moon was made of green cheese, and it turned out to be true, I would have eternal life, nothing other than actual evidence could make me believe it, even if I wanted to. If I said “I believe the moon is made of green cheese” I’d be lying.
Same thing with belief in God. If I thought that believing God existed would get me to heaven if true, but make no difference if false, I still wouldn’t be able to do it. I could say “I believe God exists” in order to get my prize, as it were, but God (if He existed) would, presumably, know I was lying anyway, and, even if not, it wouldn’t be true.
Atheists do not “deny” that they believe that God exists, nor do they pretend that they don’t believe. They just don’t believe it. You can’t make someone believe something they don’t, just because it’s in their interests (or might be) to do so.
But which God? A God that says that homosexuality is evil? A God who commands genocide? A God that says Love your neighbour as yourself? A God who will withhold salvation on the basis of what we believe, not how we act?
I try to act as though there is a God that says “Love your neighbour as yourself” but I don’t have to believe there is such a God to decide that that is the best way to act, nor would it make any difference to my decision if someone was to tell me that actually, God Hates Fags.
Elizabeth,
The wager do not ask for believe but for act that is what Kant did.
It is perfectly rational to treat others as you would yourself.
It’s also perfectly rational not to.
I agree. There are arguments both ways. But, I’d say, that overall, people’s own best interests are served by being part of a society in which the rules are to treat others as you would be treated, and to withdraw membership in some way from those who violate those rules.
So even under a fairly narrow definition of “rational acting” as “acting in a way that furthers your own best interests” there is a good argument for “treat others as you would yourself”, unless you are living in a society in which all rules have broken down. And even then, there are perfection good reasons for acting in a way in a way that will promote a society in which that basic rule is upheld, both for your own interests and for others.
Plus there evidence that most people are happiest when they feel they are useful. So acting in a way that benefits others appears to be a good way of ensuring our own happiness.
I agree there’s a good, rational argument to treat others as you would prefer to be treated, but there’s also a good, rational argument for treating others however it best suits your personal interest. There are perfectly good reasons for taking advantage of others and treating them as a means to your own preferable ends. It just depends on whatever premises you begin with.
EL said:
I’ve personally never noticed any actual connection between acting in general for the benefit of others (or even treating them as I would wish to be treated) and increased personal happiness.
I don’t think that any linear causality can be described that can possibly link one person’s behavior, good or bad, to any particular societal result. It’s far too chaotic a system. Behaving badly, so to speak, could result in a net increase in the happiness of others simply due to the unseen, chaotic nature of outcomes.
I think the better argument is that for the average individual, there’s just no way to assess how their behavior will ultimately affect general social happiness, and especially cannot be determined to eventually result in their own increased or decreased happiness. After all, you can treat others very well all the time, and then you get a disease that puts you in incredible pain all the time. Or a loved one dies and your grief is unbearable. Or, some weird turn of events frames you up as the bad guy in some incident and all your friends drop you and you’re marked for the rest of your life.
I think that most moral-subjectivist attempts at moral apologetics, where they try to argue for some kind of reason-based “good” that generally matches theistic-based “good”, fails the most basic problem: There’s really no significant reason to care. Outcomes are arbitrary and happenstance. It may help society how you think it may help society; it may not. It may result in increased personal happiness; it may not. It’s a haphazard crap shoot at best.
William:
I can believe that.
Rationally speaking (and, I think, from a common-sense point of view), if treating other people as you would wish to be treated makes you happy, then you are actually treating other people in a way that makes you happy to treat them.
However, if treating other people the way you would wish to be treated doesn’t actually make you happy (in and of itself), then all you’re doing is hoping that some happenstance sequence of events triggered by how you treat others comes back to you and makes you happy.
I’ve found that it’s a much more direct route to treat others in a way that immediately and directly makes me happy, whether or not it happens to be the way I would personally prefer to be treated.
It doesn’t seem to me to be very rational to treat others some way and then just hope happenstance sequences of resulting events come back around to increase your happiness, when you can just directly increase your happiness by treating them however makes you happy in the first place.
See the logic there? 🙂
William:
William,
For those of us who are wired for empathy, it isn’t a simple matter of discarding our ’empathy premise’ and replacing it with a ‘take advantage of others’ premise.
We can’t do that, and we wouldn’t want to even if we could.
Well, I’d say it depends on what your goals are. If we start from the premise (with which most people I think would start from) that a rational act is one that furthers the actor’s goal(s) (it’s hard to see what would be rational about an act that tended to frustrate one’s own goals) then different rational actions will tend to result from different goals.
So if your goal is to maximise your chances of immediate pleasure, your actions may be different from those you would take if your goal was to maximise your chances of long-term happiness.
Evidence suggest that the best way of achieving the latter is to treat others as you would yourself.
So it’s worth regarding that principle as being one that tends to further your long-term interests. Which we generally express as doing what we “ought” to do in the face of our immediate “wants”.
Exactly. So the Golden Rule arises pretty naturally out of human nature.
William,
For those of us who are wired for empathy, treating others well does have a direct and immediate impact on our own happiness.
Then you are treating them in a way that makes you happy.
EL:
So does “might makes right”. So?
William,
So?
EL saud:
I doubt that.
That all depends on what your long-term interests are. There are certainly long-term interests that are not best achieved by treating others the way you would prefer to be treated.
In any event, as I pointed out, might-makes-right can be just as perfectly rational a mode of behavior as the golden rule, and can also be the best (most logical) means to serve one’s long-term interests. The rationality of the golden rule doesn’t make it any better than might makes right as a principle guiding ones behavior.
Long time! One of my favorite internet personalities.
SHORT ANSWER:
Now, if you have even a 1% belief Christianity is correct, and 99% belief atheism is correct, and 0% for other ideas, Pascal outlined what the rational wager should be. Jesus command in that case is to “seek and you will find.” I interpret that to mean something as simple as sincerely calling on the name of Jesus when you are in distress, and to persist even when it seems there is no answer. The simplest action is therefore, even with what little faith you might have, to sincerely call upon His name and to also ask Christians to sincerely pray for your faith. That is what I did when I was an agnostic and found my faith almost non-existent. I think the prayers of others, moreso than my own, changed my heart.
That was probably easier for me than you because, unlike you, I was never 100% convinced ID and Christian creation were false. By way of contrast I’m convinced 100% Mormonism and Mohamadism and JuJuism are false.
But if you believe 100% that atheism is correct, I really don’t have an answer.
=========================
PS
I take no offense if you choose not to read my long answer…
LONGER ANSWER WITH SOME THOUGHTS
The actions are actions consistent with someone who has decided to trust in claims with incomplete, little, and no direct evidences. The Greek word for faith in the New Testament is more akin to “belief and trust”, “belief and fidelity”, “belief and loyalty”. I believe processed sugar is bad for me, it is quite another thing to act upon that belief. Even with doubts, such as often the case in real world decisions, we commit to actions though not persuaded 100% of its rightness.
From what you have said, you have said you simply don’t find the idea of God believable. That is from your sample of experiences and the lens from which you view information. My sample of experiences are different. I think if we took a poll of Christians vs. atheists, you’ll see a very high correlation with Christians claiming they believe they’ve seen either miracles or had prayers answered in a special way.
I believe in most cases that belief are likely rooted in insufficient sampling, much like unskilled gamblers having a lucky streak and thinking they are experiencing acts of God.
But even granting that most people’s belief in miracles is rooted in poor inference, I don’t think the numbers agree that any ordinary process created the first life. It is way outside expectation. For me that is evidence of a miracle. I consider life an evidence of a miracle.
One may argue, “we don’t have all the facts.” Agreed, most real-life wagers and real life decisions aren’t made based on having all the facts. I’ve flown airplanes based on probability that the instruments are functional. It’s a pretty awful feeling when you can’t see the horizon because of poor visibility and your body says you are straight and level but your instruments and warning horns are screaming you’re approaching a stall! One doesn’t have time to diagnose whether the instruments are functional, you’re taught in flight school that unless otherwise indicated, to have faith. I found many real world decision are often forced upon us before we can have as many facts in hand as we would like…
I respect your viewpoint. I’m obviously a militant atheist with respect to Mormonism, Buddhism, Mohamedism, etc. I’ve effectively assigned a zero probability (actually far lower probability than Christianity) to those theologies.
I probably am far more friendly to atheist than most Christians because I think atheists have put forward highly reasonable questions and objections to evidences of the Christian faith. On the other hand, like playing for Royal Flushes in Advantaged Video poker, the most unlikely events with high payoffs drive the wagering decisions (see below).
I think there were two major unlikely events in history. Origin of Life and Christ’s resurrection. If one believes the OOL was miraculous, it becomes easier to believe in more miracles.
Now, having played in casinos, I see all sorts of superstitions arise because the human mind has such limited memory capacity and tends to see correlations or miracles when none are justified. I was training my partner in the art of using Video Poker to hustle marketing vulnerabilities in the casino. When on a win streak, she tended to believe her luck would be good, and when on a losing streak, she tended to believe her luck would be bad. I said in so many words, “you have to fight the natural psychological tendency to extrapolate recent past experience. The psychological tendency is overwhelmingly powerful, but it is the frailty of the human mind that you tend to recently remember 20 or 30 hands when the valid sample size should be in the millions of hands. If you’re brain could process it, you’d see the patterns as they really are, and they are random. Play the hands according to expectation, not intuition. Advantage play is counterintuitive.” Of course those weren’t my exact words, but that essentially the meaning I was communicating over the hours I was teaching her to distrust “women’s intuition” and make mathematically optimal decisions.
I’m quite confident belief in miracles is often rooted in poor statistical inferences, but I’m won’t go so far as to say there are no miracles, nor will I insist my limited sample of experience nor even that of humanity throughout history, if hypothetically almost miracle-free, must be extrapolated to universal scale for all time and eternity. In a statistical sense, such reasoning, though absolutely understandable, is potentially flawed.
For example in Jack’s or Better 9/6 Video Poker, probability of royal flush is 40,388 using a particular holding strategy:
I don’t like playing the video poker too much except to hustle marketing promotions (luxury hotels, meals, occasional extra cash etc) because it takes so many rounds to converge on expectation. I’ve heard some horror stories where some players never hit a royal flush until 120,000 hands! They eventually recovered their quarter million dollar losses, but they had some deep pockets and time for such endeavors…
The point is, it might have been easy to presume “no royal flush exists” through experience with limited sample sizes unless the underlying mechanism were known. By way of extension, it is easy to presume, even after a lifetime of samples, that no miracles exist. But it could be the wrong inference. It is the classic, “no black swans exist” paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
Perhaps the only way in our world to deduce such miracles, short of the Intelligent Designer making an appearance in one’s life, is via inference, and that with incomplete information. A certain level of faith is needed at some level. I just don’t think any ordinary process created life, and so much so, I would call it a miracle. Whether the miracle entails the Christian God is not a matter of formal inference, but faith, and short of that, Pascal’s wager.
I don’t claim that the effect is linear. I think it’s highly unlikely to be linear, actually – much more likely are positive feedback loops, and I’d argue that that’s what we actually observe.
But chaotic (non-linear) systems aren’t necessarily unpredictable at higher levels of analysis (which is why we can predict that it will be colder in winter than summer, better than we can predict the weather next month). Survey data suggests that levels of happiness in societies in which there are relative small differences in wealth between richest and poorest, which are fairly law-abiding, and in which there are good societal safety nets are higher than in societies with big wealth discrepancies and laissez faire attitudes to welfare.
Can you suggest some?
As I said, it can work where societal rules are broken, but then, only for a few (if by “might makes right” you mean “if you can do it, do it”). So it’s a risky strategy unless you are born to power.