Thought Experiment 78: Gambling on God

1/30/2017

What's trump again?

I've been blogging now about these philosophy thought experiments since March 2015—coming up on two full years. There have been many times during that tumultuous period when I've been tempted to give up this focus and start writing more forcefully about contemporary events. I've resisted for now, however, because I really do want to make sure I thoroughly cover the groundwork of philosophy. And then somewhat surprisingly, I almost always find that the "timeless" issues covered here are both important AND relevant too. Like the experiment we'll cover this week:

---------------------------------------------------
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.
---------------------------------------------------

At a time when the world is screaming about what to do over the divide between Christian and Muslim worldviews, atheists are looking at everyone and wondering, "Why can't we just drop this whole charade?" The gamble on gods is being lost in at least one very important way that Pascal did not foresee. Can you spot it? Tell me what you think in the comments below. I'll be back on Friday to place my bet.

7 Comments

John A. Johnson

1/31/2017 12:15:20 am

Pascal's wager, to my mind, fails in more than one way.

The first problem with the wager is that it assumes that belief is a matter of volitional choice. The wager invites you to choose between belief in God and disbelief in God, as if belief is something we can switch on or off. But that is not how belief works. My experience tells me that choice plays very little, if any, role in what I believe. My senses tell me things such as "This is a laptop computer in front of me." I can't willy-nilly decide to believe that this is true or not. My senses compel many, many of my beliefs. And the recurrent patterns I notice, such as alternating days and nights and that objects thrown in the air always return to earth also impress certain beliefs upon me. I cannot simply decide to disbelieve in the cycles of days and seasons, or to disbelieve in gravity.

When it comes to believing in God, I don't have sensory experiences driving my beliefs. The way that Pascal's wager is presented in this example makes it sound like God himself is actually offering me a choice to believe in Him or not. But if I am not mistaken, that's not how Pascal presented the gamble. The gamble was simply described in an abstract way. Now, if I heard what sounded like the voice of God in my real life, presenting me with choices to believe or not believe, the sensory experience of hearing the God-voice would be something that I would have to take into consideration. (Naturally I might also consider the possibility that someone was playing a trick on me or that I was hallucinating. Even sensory data are evaluated in the context of currently-accepted knowledge in order to be taken seriously).

Now, to date in my life, I have not had what seemed like direct experiences with God or experiences that point to or suggest the existence of God. I have had some remarkable, awesome, cosmic feelings of being one with the universe and the sense of other, ineffable dimensions of existence while inhaling nitrous oxide. I have also experienced some downright uncanny coincidences, what Jung called synchronicities, and I had one incredibly detailed precognitive dream http://www.issc-taste.org/arc/dbo.cgi?set=expom&id=00059&ss=1 that to my mind defies rational explanation. Still, these strange experiences are simply that: strange experiences. I feel no compulsion to believe in God. They do not help me accept Pascal's wager.

Even if someone appealed to my self-interest, pointing out how it is to my advantage to accept the wager, I can't believe in something without sufficient evidence just because I would benefit from the belief. Even if I wanted very badly to believe, that desire would be insufficient. Feelings and desires do compel beliefs sometimes, just like our senses compel beliefs. I know that people occasionally believe things are true because they want them to be true. For me, belief in God just does not work that way: wanting to believe in God to be on the safe side of Pascal's wager simply does not lead me to believe in God.

I might also add here that it is not simply the lack of evidence for God that makes it impossible for me to accept Pascal's wager. There is also the scientific evidence that explains religious belief in perfectly naturalistic terms as a cognitive error that persists because it provides some benefits.

But the deeper problem with Pascal's wager is that it presupposes a particular kind of God, similar to the God described by some Christians. But how in the world would I know if a God capable of sending me to heaven or hell would do the former if I accepted Pascal's wager? Maybe people who proclaimed belief in God to be on the safe side of the wager would be despised by God and sent to hell: "I do not want you believing in Me just to hedge your bets! Your belief must be genuine, not something proclaimed because it is in your self-interest! To Hell you go!" Whoops, the guy who accepted Pascal's wager chose poorly.

And, of course, there have been many Gods that have been proposed that don't even deal with heaven and hell. How do I know that the actual God isn't one of those, making Pascal's wager pointless? Or maybe the actual God (or Gods) has/have yet to be described? As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Or Shermer's version, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. Perhaps we are just simulations run by advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. That would mean that our existing concepts of God, heaven, and hell are just virtual realities. I submit that Pascal's wager fails.

@EdGibney link

1/31/2017 03:59:43 pm

Thanks for the long reply Dr. J! You've attacked some of Pascal's assumptions very well, but I'll still go a different direction with my argument later. As for the main point you are making, I know you are more of a determinist than I am with regards to free will, so I'm not sure how far we'll get in this discussion, but I overwhelmingly agree with much of what you say anyway. I was going to ask you what your religious background is, but I read through the precognitive dream story you linked to and found your other pages on "My First Experiences with the Paranormal" and "DrJ's Current Thoughts about Religion and Spirituality". (A brief aside - I'm from eastern PA and consider the greatest celebrity sighting of my life to be seeing Dr J (the 76er) playing ping-pong at a coffee bar in Los Angeles. Also, the first great love of my life was named Amy too. So, we've got some nice ties.) Anyway, I agree that *I* don't see any evidence for any of the gods of the major religions, but it wasn't always that way, and we humans are very susceptible to motivated reasoning. Unlike you, I was raised in a very religious household — I went to Catholic schools up through high school, was an altar boy with my brother, my parents were heavily involved in our church's masses and community activities, and my family even experimented with charismatic catholicism where you get "healed" and people speak in tongues during ceremonies. (I wrote about this in my short story "Judgment" by the way.) To teenage me, there was lots of "evidence" that God existed — at least in the form of the beliefs, actions, and reports of most of the people in my life. After I went off to college, expanded my circle, and studied science and engineering, that all slowly fell away, but the fact that there is no proof that gods *don't* exist largely leaves the question of belief up to the individual who has to choose what kinds and sources of data they want to accept. In your own story about your encounters with the paranormal, you wrote:

"I wanted to believe I could read (tarot cards), so I did, despite lack of enthusiastic feedback from persons for whom I read."

Didn't you choose, upon some reflection, to have this belief? I get that you may now think this reasoned reflection was determined for the person that you were as the 20-something Dr J, but my point is that this same type of belief towards Pascal's god is definitely available to people if they are looking for it. His wager is still an open question to many who have doubts about an uncertain situation.

By the way, I was fascinated by your tour through the various mystical beliefs. I looked into many of them when I was falling away from the church, but I was already looking very scientifically and skeptically at things by then so they didn't hold me for very long. Have you read Richard Dawkins' book, Unweaving the Rainbow? He had an excellent section in there about coincidences that I thought you might like. It's summarised in this Petwhac section of the wikipedia entry for the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unweaving_the_Rainbow#Petwhac

John A. Johnson

1/31/2017 05:25:55 pm

I greatly look forward to your own argument on Pascal, Ed, and I am glad you took the time to peruse my pages on my religious and mystical experiences. And lucky you spotting the famous Dr J playing ping pong!

To my mind, there is something unique about the Catholic rituals--the exotic, intense, archetypal images, sounds, and scents--that leave a permanent mark upon a young child. I attended a few masses as a child when we visited my mother's family in Hamtramck, Michigan, and I've never forgotten the feelings of being overwhelmed by the experience. My mother, with her rigorous scientific education at the University of Michigan, was able to free herself from much of the Roman Catholic dogma, but, despite that education, she insisted on retaining portions of it in her personal religious worldview. The same is true of a brilliant Detroit cousin of mine. I daresay that there is something like the ethological concept of imprinting that occurs in religious education during the first five years of life. There's a stamp that cannot be totally erased.

Concerning my wish to believe that I could read Tarot cards, yes, I had moments where I thought, "Yes, I can do this." But these moments were greatly overshadowed by doubts created by the lack of verifying feedback from the few people whose cards I read. The wish to be able to read remained more a wish than a belief because I saw no evidence of gaining insight into others' lives through card reading. I could choose to continue to read cards and I could choose to *try* to believe in my abilities, but in the end I could not choose to believe that I could read because the evidence suggested otherwise.

I find rather curious your phrase "to choose what kinds and sources of data they want to accept." To me, accepting experiences as valid evidence or not valid evidence does not feel like a choice. Rather, the process of acceptance or rejection seems to happen automatically. I automatically accept nearly all of my sensory experiences as valid evidence unless something strange happens. My acceptance of others' knowledge claims depends on their "reasonableness" (and my calculation of reasonableness happens automatically), coherence with what I have already accepted as knowledge (again, this happens automatically). When I say "automatic" I don't mean that the process is always instantaneous (although sometimes it is). It might take time for me to examine the logic and evidence supporting the claim. And sometimes I feel I lack the knowledge to accept or reject a claim, so I do neither. In any case, I do not feel I have the power to choose, arbitrarily, what counts as evidence and whether a knowledge claim is true.

I can go a bit further with my argument about beliefs not being chosen by asking a few simple questions.

Can you choose at this moment to believe your name is Cthulhu rather than Ed?

Can you choose at this moment to believe that 2+2=5?

Can you choose at this moment to believe that you are dead?

Regarding Richard Dawkins, I have read nearly all of his books, including Unweaving the Rainbow. I think that his books have been one of the things that has prevented me from reading too much significance into my mystical and strange experiences.

Chuck Schneider

1/31/2017 02:34:27 am

I agree with the two areas 1 Choose to believe is unrealistic, 2. Which God should i choose.?
In today's world it could matter a lot Christian, Jewish, Muslem, or a host of others. Most ,require that I follow some ,so called, moral code. So choosing a particular God carries some non-trivial consequences as to my lifestyle and worldview.
Seems to me DeCartes had a better alternative to ,hedge his bet on existence of God. (Of course, DeCartes presumed that any God would care how he lived.) My humanist updated version of the agnostic stance is,
I Don,t know whether a higher intelligence exists or not, but I will try to live my life is such a fashion that if discovered by such an intelligence I would not be embarrassed.

@EdGibney link

1/31/2017 04:14:02 pm

Thanks, Chuck, that's funny. But how do you know what counts as embarrassing behaviour? I'm guessing we overwhelmingly agree on the behaviours, but I'm just pushing back to try and get a definition or reason why they are embarrassing or not.

@EdGibney link

1/31/2017 06:47:15 pm

Well, you're speaking to someone who may or may not have lied his way through a polygraph test once so I'm not sure you're going to like (or believe) my answers. : ) Seriously, the polygrapher asked me, "How many times have you been drunk in your life?" Since that was an undefined state of being—even after I asked for clarification—I had no good answer. I decided, introspectively, to define drunkenness in such an extreme way that my answer was...8. Is that really the right answer? Hell no. Or at least I don't *know* that it is. I chose that number because it sounded plausible. But I passed the test so it was true enough for me at the time.

What I really believe though is that choices exist where sensory / emotional cues are contradictory. Those three example questions you gave me have no such ambivalence in them so I don't think I could *really* believe in them. (Although I bet I could pass a polygraph about my name being Cthulu.) However, the existence of gods (in their least intrusive forms) is the kind of question where evidence exists on both sides so the emotions aren't clear. When I said we could "choose the type of data we *want* to accept" I was hinting at the fact that the emotional *want* is what usually drives this process unconsciously — exactly as you say. If I'd have met a nice Catholic girl who would have married me, I imagine I might have remained in my earlier state of theistic belief because I'd have wanted it to be true for so many other important reasons. Maybe that's what drove the examples of your two family members. As a wannabe philosopher though who moved beyond his small initial world, I've been trained now to distrust these emotional urges without really examining their rational causes. So, a new desire — the fact that I *want* to be a rational person — has supplanted the old one. Whether by choice or by some chaotic level of determination, that's where I am now.

Like I said, I didn't know how far we'd get before bumping into our free will assumptions, but I'm just trying to make the case that Pascal's Wager is indeed an open question for anyone open to the emotional dilemma going on inside them. Their reason, as slaves of their ever-changing passions, can make a conscious decision (or an unconscious one depending on their training, or your free will assumptions), about whether to decide to take the leap of faith and believe in God or not. Jesus said, "believe and then you will see." He was right about that. But it works both ways. If someone really *wants* it to.

Maybe this explains something. Rather than being a-theistic, you and I seem more to be *apertu-theistic*. That's a new word I just invented to say that we're *open* to the possibility that theism exists (as one must be for all knowledge claims really). We just haven't seen it yet. And we've seen too much to explain away the evidence that other people accept. So maybe you and I couldn't really change our beliefs about Pascal's Wager, but lots of other people still could because they are still struggling with the choice and don't have enough information to move their emotions decisively one way or the other. What do you make of that?

John A. Johnson

1/31/2017 07:38:47 pm

Ha-ha, that is why polygraph results are inadmissible in many states (including Pennsylvania) and are generally inadmissible in federal courts as well. The current opinion in the community of psychological scientists is that polygraph results are unreliable to the point of being useless.

I take your point about Pascal's Wager being an open question for *some* persons, viz., those who are experiencing contradictions among their sensory and emotional cues. Perhaps for them there is a choice here (whether free or not). Of course if their choice is not free, but determined, some of these folks will be forced to reject the wager and be subject to hell, even though they could not help choosing nonbelief. A god who would do this doesn't seem very nice to me. Perhaps this is why the concept of free will was invented--the ancients realized that it isn't fair to damn people who can't choose to believe or disbelieve.

And then there are people like us, who can't force belief in God because too many of our experiences have swung the balance to nonbelief. If only God had given us a little more evidence of His existence, this evidence could have swung us at least to a state of uncertainty. (If the evidence had made us a believer, Pascal's wager would be irrelevant.) Again, God will damn us for eternity, even though we can't help that we didn't have enough pro-belief experiences to at least be in a state of emotional uncertainty. I am reminded of the lyrics of The Who's song, Christmas: "And Tommy doesn't know what day it is / He doesn't know who Jesus was / Or what praying is / How can he be saved / From the eternal grave?"

I will continue to identify as an a-theist (someone who currently lacks theistic beliefs), but I would also accept the label apertu-theist, open to the possibility of belief in some sort of God. But not open to any of the gods that have been described to me so far because none of these descriptions passes my tests of reasonableness and coherence.

Thought Experiment 78: Gambling on God

Leave a Reply.

Subscribe to Help Shape This Evolution

Blog Philosophy

Archives