On one occasion, a very loud host on Fox News asked a theological expert, "This latest scientific research is tampering with the will of God. What does the bible have to say about this?"
The theological expert responded in a rising volume, "The liberal left don't want to hear this, but they are clearly risking damnation and the fires of hell for our world by ignoring the sacred words of God handed down to us from the prophets. Now THAT is a global warming I think we really ought to be afraid of."
A secular atheist had been offered up to the show as a punching bag for the audience. Rather than face the non-sequiters of his attackers, he asked a simple question. "If your orthodox policies led to everlasting heaven for your followers, but their lack of inclusive, cooperative progress led to the extinction of the species and the loss of untold billions of future beings, would god be happy with that?"
The theological expert replied with great certainty, "God works in mysterious ways and we must serve him no matter what the price is as the cost of entry into his kingdom of love."
The secular atheist told him, "Then go and do likewise with your flock."
Keep this in mind as we go through this week's thought experiment.
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And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, and though you have no proof I am who I say I am, let me give you a reason to believe that will appeal to your fallen state: a gamble based on self-interest.
"There are two possibilities: I exist or I don't exist. If you believe in me and follow my commands and I exist, you get eternal life. If I don't exist, however, you get a mortal life, with some of the comforts of belief. Sure, you've wasted some time at church and missed out on some pleasures, but that doesn't matter when you're dead. But if I do exist, eternal bliss is yours.
"If you don't believe in me and I don't exist, you have a free and easy life, but you will still end up dead and you won't live with the reassurance of belief in the divine. If I do exist, however, it's an eternity of hot pokers and torment.
"So, gamble that I don't exist and the best is a short life, while the worst is eternal damnation. But bet that I do exist, however unlikely that is, and the worst is a short life, but the best is eternal life. You'd be mad not to."
Source: Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, 1660.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 232.
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Known more famously as Pascal's Wager, the original text of this thought experiment "is long-winded and written in somewhat convoluted philosophy-speak, but it can be distilled more simply:
- If you believe in God and God does exist, you will be rewarded with eternal life in heaven: thus an infinite gain.
- If you do not believe in God and God does exist, you will be condemned to remain in hell forever: thus an infinite loss.
- If you believe in God and God does not exist, you will not be rewarded: thus a finite loss.
- If you do not believe in God and God does not exist, you will not be rewarded, but you have lived your own life: thus a finite gain."
It's true that Pascal's Wager is considered "groundbreaking because it charted new territory in probability theory, and marked the first formal use of decision theory," but it was written over 350 years ago. We therefore shouldn't be surprised that it has plenty of faults.
The most obvious fault comes from the error of trying to calculate probabilities when infinity and imagination are both involved. Like the simulation hypothesis (which I have heard far too much about already — seriously scientists, stop putting actual probability numbers on this!), there are an infinite number of other possibilities that demand your wager if you are being serious about betting your finite life on an afterlife. Besides any number of new alternative hypotheses still waiting to be invented (more flying-spaghetti monsters please!), there have already been many other gods invented, which readers pointed out in the comment section to Monday's post. Baggini also explained this fault clearly when he wrote:
The wager makes sense only if there really are two possibilities, but, of course, there aren't. There are many gods to believe in and many ways of following them. Evangelical Christians, for example, believe that you will go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ as your saviour. So if you place your divine bet on Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, or any other religion, you still lose if Christ turns out to be king of heaven. The stakes remain the same, of course: eternal damnation is one possible outcome of making the wrong choice. But the problem now is that you can't insure against this highly improbable eventuality, because if you pick the wrong religion, you're damned anyway.
Another common objection to Pascal's Wager is what reader John A. Johnson and I had a long discussion about in the comment section to Monday's post. This is something that Pascal called "the inability to believe." Like Pascal, I think that people who are currently unconvinced either way about God's existence might possibly be able to change their beliefs by deciding they wanted to believe. Today, we know this as the fallacy or phenomenon of motivated reasoning. It can be used in either direction—and I prefer to show the motivation for disbelief—but Pascal exhorted such people to:
Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. (Pensées, Section III, Note 233)
In addition to these two most common objections, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes several others that have been made, including: problems with the decision matrix; the probability assigned to God's existence; the expectation that utility ought to be maximized; the logical validity of the argument; and moral objections to wagering for God. Really, any of these defeat Pascal's Wager (which, by the way, he didn't actually say was convincing), but I think there is one more objection from an evolutionary philosophy perspective that needs to be added. The crux of that objection can be seen in the refutation of this premise:
"...bet that I do exist, however unlikely that is, and the worst is a short life"
As you can see in my parable written above, "a short life" is NOT the worst thing that can happen by following a belief in a vindictive God who punishes disbelievers with eternal hell. Following such a God can conceivably lead to extinction. We could get there through nuclear war with infidels, through runaway global warming because faith trumped facts, through ecosystem collapse after actions that relied on God's Word telling us man has dominion over all the Earth, or lots of other religious-fed potential calamities. Any of these doomsday scenarios would lead to the loss of an infinite amount of well-being in the world, so Pascal's Wager is no longer simply a tradeoff between finite sacrifice and infinite gain. The finite sacrifice could lead to infinite loss as well.
This point was hinted at a few weeks ago when Sam Harris met with Richard Dawkins for two evenings of conversation in a sold out auditorium in Los Angeles. Each night, they took questions from the internet and from the audience for 90 minutes, and there was one question during the second evening that was particularly relevant to the point that I'm making. Here is the transcript from that question, which occurred at the 1 hour 8 minute mark:
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Q: On religion. There are so many people throughout the ages where you can picture a man, he lives his life, he makes his meaning based on the religion he's been presented with as a young person, and he finds peace in that. For a lot of the dogmas and beliefs of the religion he's presented with, he may not really subscribe to them and he may not read all the texts—he just doesn't think about it all that much. But he finds peace in that. So my question for you is, what's the harm? I know beliefs have impact and beliefs have consequences, but my question for you is, what's the harm of an individual, or so many people throughout the ages who live their lives finding peace, having religion, who live and die and believe as they do?
[Audience Member: Read their books! (Applause)]
SH: Well, actually there is something that will be familiar to many of you that I think is worth saying at this point, which is, the problem with dogmatism is that you actually can never be sure what the harms will be. They can be astonishingly bad all of a sudden. And the state of being dogmatic—the state of believing things strongly despite an absence of evidence or even in the face of counter-evidence—that is the state of having no error-correcting mechanisms in your worldview. I mean, you're simply not available to reality, so you are just going to continually bump into hard objects wherever you go. My favourite example of this, I've said this several times but it's just worth pondering, is that you can have a dogma which on its face may be the most benign and life-affirming dogma there is. So, take the dogma that life starts at the moment of conception and all human life is sacred. All of it is sacred. We just have to privilege the human being from the moment of conception as being an entity that has to be treated as an end in itself and never as a means. Now what harm is going to come from that? That's the most life-affirming and most careful disposition you could possibly have. But then we get something like embryonic stem cell research. Or then we have the family-planning needs of women and girls who get raped. And all of a sudden the people who are sure, based on pure dogmatism, that a soul—which if you could hold it in your hand would be invisible to you, if you could hold a thousand in your hand they'd be invisible to you—those souls in those fertilised ova are just as important as the souls in this room. That's a dogma that is responsible for an immense amount of harm and yet you wouldn't have foreseen it. So the problem is, to have a way of thinking about the world that doesn't allow you to reliably navigate, because you are not basing your worldview on evidence and argument. That's the problem, and it's always surprising.
RD: By the way, a good way to tease people who think that the soul enters the body at conception is just confront them with monozygotic twins. Which twin has the soul? [Laughter] And which twin is the zombie? [More laughter] Sam is, of course, perfectly right that there are all sorts of unforeseen evil consequences. But I have another answer to this very well thought out question, which is that I'm not really all that sure that I really care whether it does harm or not. I care about whether it's true. [Applause] And even more strongly than that, I care that children are brought up denied access to the very, very beautiful truths which we are uncovering, which science in particular has been uncovering over centuries. We live in a wonderfully privileged century from this point of view. We live at a time when not everything is known, but an enormous amount is known. And it's a great privilege for those who live, who are born in this century, to be told what we do know about the world, about the universe, about life, and about how we've come to be here. But it almost makes you weep to think of children who are being deprived of this by ignorant, bigoted parents who are teaching them nonsense because, I don't know, because it's comforting, or because it comes down through the families, their tradition, or it's in the Holy Book. I mean, what a tragedy for the children concerned, to live their lives deprived of the wonder of knowledge.
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Sam and Richard are right. Very right. But religion is not going away in its entirety any time soon. Nor would there be a desperate need to get rid of it if only religion were to reform a few fundamental things. As evidenced by its long history and worldwide diffusion, religion is a very complex, all-encompasing, shape-shifting worldview that has managed to do plenty of good. As such, it has resisted all previous efforts to throw it away, including recent high-profile attempts made by several best-selling books in the years since 9-11. The so-called "unholy trinity" of New Atheists have thoroughly pointed out the many faults of religion in books such as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. These books have proved to be powerful and persuasive to many skeptical questioners, but there are still billions of faithful people who stand by their religious views. Why is that?
I believe a list of religion's virtues, both real and claimed, both justified and unjustified, can help explain what motivates their motivated reasoning. Based on many personal experiences with this subject, and a bit of focused research, I've come up with the following list of things people value about their religion. By organising the entries according to which of the six branches of a philosophy they fall under, it becomes easy to see that religion comprehensively has answers for everything:
RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS BENEFIT FOLLOWERS BY:
1. Epistemology - What do I know?
- Explaining gaps in the knowledge of nature*
- Simplifying life*
- Promising that God (and prayers to Him) can change the world*
- Being a source of unquestioned knowledge and authority*
- Giving a permanent argument that is never wrong*
- Explaining the origins of the universe
- Explaining what happens after death
- Providing moral codes
- Encouraging a long-term focus (on the next life or the afterlife)
- Providing hope for immortal life
- Giving comfort in the face of death
- Imparting humility in the face of the sublime
- Encouraging charity towards the less-fortunate
- Inspiring virtue from the biographies of saints, sinners, prophets, and holy men
- Venerating wisdom over folly
- Giving courage and inner strength to act for beliefs
- Providing reasons to act boldly and take leaps of faith into the unknown
- Encouraging love towards others
- Imparting the discipline of regular practice
- Creating magical wonder in the universe
- Being a permanent source of love, affection, and attachment
- Connecting people to beauty through songs, art, and architecture
- Giving meaning for life
- Teaching history
- Reminding us throughout the year to rest and reflect
- Giving opportunities to gather with others
- Promoting communal cooperation
- Defining in and out groups
- Guaranteeing invisible, all-seeing justice
- Offering forgiveness for past mistakes
- Compelling obedience to authority figures
- Promoting social stability
- Providing traditional rituals and ceremonies for traditional events of life
- Describing methods for political governance (especially non-Christian)
- Challenging corrupt secular hierarchies
That is a long list of benefits for a worldview. No wonder people are resistant to give up their religion! And almost all of these entries are laudable (even though many are stuck and partially misdirected). The only entries that I think are completely wrong are the ones with the asterisks next to them, which all happen to be confined to the epistemology and logic of religion. Since religion draws its authority from revelation, faith without evidence, and eternal dogma, this is not surprising. But all of the good that has come from the accepted dogma is hard for many people to argue with. I personally think that every single one of these other benefits can now be replaced by mixtures of evolutionary philosophy, secular humanism, sacred naturalism, scientific inquiry, and other rational pursuits. But that can only happen if the mistaken epistemological and logical foundations of religion are discarded. There are many mysteries in the universe and there are things we may never be able to discover answers to—our accounts of knowledge must be open to this fact and be willing to evolve. If a religion were to acknowledge this and give up any claim to unquestioned authority, perhaps the rest of the good that religion can do would be better aimed and more easily accepted. If only someone would say, "We don't actually Know, with a capital K, but here is what we think will work based on all the wisdom of the ages."
What do you think? Is my list of religious benefits comprehensively made and accurately categorised? Could they all be replaced if current authoritarian religions reformed their fundamental flaws or just disappeared? Will that ever happen?
Do you want to make a bet on it?