Pascals Wager Summary

Heres Pascals Wager, with our criticisms of it.

Pascals
Wager
Consequences
of Gods
existing
Chances
of Gods
existing
Consequences
of Gods not
existing
Chances
of Gods
not
existing
Expected
Utility
You
believe
in God
Infinite reward
finite
amount f
Finite loss 1-f Infinite
You
dont
believe
in God
Nothing or loss
finite
amount f
Finite gain 1-f
Finite
gain or
loss
1. You should believe in God.
2. The chance that God exists is positive and finite.
3. If you believe in God and he exists, youll get an infinite reward. If you believe in
God and he doesnt exist, youll have only a finite loss.
[This may not be true, and even if it is true its not something that Pascal has any
right to claim.]
4. Believing in God has an infinite expected utility.
5. If you dont believe in God and he exists, youll either win nothing or else youll
lose something. If you dont believe in God and he doesnt exist, youll win only a
finite gain.
[This may not be true, and even if it is true its not something that Pascal has any
right to claim.]
6. Not believing in God has a finite gain or negative expected utility.
7. Believing in God has a much higher expected utility than not believing in God.
8. You should do that which has the higher expected utility.
[Maybe we shouldnt adopt beliefs on the basis of utility. And maybe its
impossible to do so, anyway.]
Pascal addresses our criticism of premise 8 by endorsing a type of indirect
voluntarism according to which, if we behave as though we believe in God, we will
eventually acquire this belief. The fact that this acquisition may be at the expense
of deadening our acuteness is of no concern to Pascal. His Wager, he thinks, has
shown the importance of believing in God for whatever reason and at whatever
cost.

1. According to Pascal, how much can be known about God?
God is so completely different from us that there is no way for us to comprehend
him.
We can know that He is, but
we cannot know what He is.
Ordinary human descriptions are futile and paradoxical when applied beyond the
bounds of everyday application when we say God is all-powerful, all-good, and all-
knowing. These predicates are beyond our experience.
2. Reconstruct Pascal's wager as carefully as possible.
Pascal does not think that the atheist or the believer would be convinced by his
argument. Instead, he directs the Wager to the curious and unconvinced.
I have a choice: either first I believe God exists or second I do not believe God
exists.
First, if I believe God exists, and God in fact does exist, then I will gain infinite
happiness. However, if I believe God exists, and God in fact does not exist, then I
will have no payoff.
Second, if I do not believe God exists, and God in fact does exist, then I will gain
infinite pain. However, if I believe God does not exist, and God in fact does not
exist, then I will have no payoff.
Thus, I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God, and I have
everything to lose and nothing to gain by not believing in God. On these grounds,
one would be foolish not to believe.
3. Explain whether you consider Pascal's wager a proof of God's existence or not.
Pascal's wager is at best a motive for believing, not a proof. Even so, the Wager
presupposes many conditions for the Wager to fit a rational decision theory model.
4. What major objections can you construct to the wager? Can these objections
be countered?
Two main objections are often raised to Pascal's Wager.
(1) To believe in God simply for the payoff is the wrong motive for belief. Such self-
seeking individuals would not properly serve the Deity.
(2) In order to be sure of a payoff, an individual would not know which God or gods
to believe in to cover the conditions of the wager. Would the Wager also hold for
Zeus, Odin, or Mithra? One would have to believe in all gods to be sure, but if there
were only one God in fact, then this strategy would defeat itself.
Pascal would argue that proper motive would naturally follow one's belief and that
one's conception of God simply depends upon one's level of understanding--so in
effect all persons conceive the same God differently according to each person's
understanding.
We come to have faith in God by "acting as if you believed." We, in effect, change
our attitude, not our reason.
Like Tolstoy would write much later, we learn from those who believe and become
like them. As a result of the Wager, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain
These possible responses are speculative.
5. Clarify the meaning of Pascal's sentence, "The heart has its reasons which
reason does not know."
The everyday beliefs we act on are the things we believe the strongest. We never
bother to prove these beliefs. We do not try to prove the existence of the external
world, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the floor will remain under our feet, or
that we are awake.
It is little matter that we can, or cannot, prove these beliefs, so likewise, it is little
matter that we prove God's existence. We simply assume life will go on, without
proof; otherwise, it would be disastrous to our everyday existence if we were
occupied with proving these ordinary things.
Human beings live not by reason alone. Without heart, feeling, emotion, life would
lose its value. Our uniqueness as a species might be the ability to think, but let not
that blind ourselves to the fact that our whole value individually or as a group is
not in reason alone.

Summary
One of the most popular-in part because it's one of the easiest to understand-
arguments in favor of the existence of God is known as "Pascal's Wager," named
after the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal who
formulated one version of this argument.
Anyone who has ever taken an Introduction to Philosophy class is likely familiar
with this argument, but for those who are not, here it is in its simplest, most
straightforward form:
Consider the advantages and disadvantages of believing in a God who will reward
those who believe in Him and punish those who do not after they die. There are
four possibilities.
* You believe and you turn out to be right, in which case you get the reward.
* You believe and you turn out to be wrong, in which case nothing happens and
you're just dead.
* You disbelieve and you turn out to be right, in which case again nothing happens
and you're just dead.
* You disbelieve and you turn out to be wrong, in which case you get the
punishment.
So basically if you believe, then you either get Heaven or nothing, and if you
disbelieve, then you either get Hell or nothing. (You don't even get the satisfaction
of being right if you disbelieve and there's no God, because you'll be dead and thus
won't know you were right.)

Therefore, the rational choice is to believe.
On the surface, it certainly does seem wise to play it safe and believe "just in case."
But there are at least two major problems with this argument.
The first is that it uses a decision theory approach which only makes sense when
applied to actions and not beliefs. I will illustrate with an analogy.
Let's say you walk into a casino and are offered the following wager: One die will
be rolled, and you must bet on either "even" or "odd." If you bet on "even" and a 2,
4, or 6 comes up, you win a million dollars, whereas if a 1, 3, or 5 comes up,
nothing happens. If you bet on "odd" and a 1, 3, or 5 comes up, nothing happens,
whereas if a 2, 4, or 6 comes up, you get taken out back, tortured mercilessly, and
killed.
Is there really any doubt which is the wiser wager? Of course you bet on "even," in
spite of the fact that an "odd" is just as likely to be rolled. Indeed, for that matter
the probabilities need not be equal. If you replace "even" with "6," and replace
"odd" with "non-6," then you should bet on the 6, even though you have only a
one in six chance of being right. Heck, let's go even farther. If it were a trillion-sided
die, and you could bet on a "6" and get a million dollars or nothing, or bet that a
non-6 will be rolled and get nothing or tortured and killed, then it's a no-brainer to
bet on the one in a trillion shot.
As long as there's a non-zero chance of rolling an even number (or whatever the
"million dollars or nothing" wager is), then that's the only bet that makes sense.
Not on "faith" or anything like that, but purely on the basis of a rational
assessment of the costs and benefits of the various outcomes.
OK, so we're fine so far.
But now consider an even more peculiar casino. The wager is the same as the
original "even" or "odd" one, but with one important difference. This time you
don't "do" something to make your wager (such as place some sort of marker on a
square that says "EVEN," or declare "I hereby bet on 'even,'"). Instead, the casino
employs a mind reader with supernatural, infallible powers, and your wager is
determined by what you believe. In order to wager on "even" for the million dollars
or nothing, you have to in fact believe the next roll will be a 2, 4, or 6.
Well now you're in a fine pickle. You have no idea what the next roll will be, and
worse yet, you know that you don't know. The mind reader will see that you
believe an even is no more and no less likely than an odd, and thus you won't be
able to make the advantageous wager.
Therein lies the problem: you can't "decide" to have a certain belief. You can say it,
you can act like you believe it, but that's different from believing it. And in this
case, it's believing it that matters.
Pascal's Wager, alas, is analogous to our second casino, not the first. So even if the
argument is correct that it would be advantageous to believe in God, knowing that
doesn't help you. By hypothesis in the argument, you're in a state of uncertainty-
you know that you don't know if there is or isn't a God, just like in the casino you
know that you don't know what the next roll will be.
Now, while this objection is an important one, it may not be a fatal one. Indeed,
Pascal himself recognized this problem and attempted to deal with it.
If the only problem with Pascal's Wager were this one, then the way around it
would be to find some way to believe there is a God despite your present
uncertainty. True you cannot simply will yourself to believe something, but perhaps
there's some more indirect way to achieve the same end.
Perhaps there are hallucinogenic drugs that render people more likely to have this
belief. Perhaps some lobotomy-like surgical procedure. Perhaps some kind of
brain-washing program. Perhaps associating exclusively with people who already
believe and shunning those who don't. Perhaps reading only books and other
material written by believers and avoiding any other reading.
It's at least possible that empirical investigation will show that the belief in
question is more likely to be held under certain circumstances than others, so in
order to give yourself the best chance to believe, you would want to put yourself in
those circumstances. You can't choose the belief directly, but you can make
choices that indirectly maximize your chances of believing down the road.
(I can hear believers shouting objections. "Never mind all that 'brain-washing' and
such; if you want to believe, just open your mind and heart. The evidence of God is
abundant, both in nature and internally in the way we feel when we open
ourselves to him." But the problem with that is, if such evidence is indeed available
and does indeed justify a belief in God, then Pascal's Wager is superfluous. You
should believe based on that evidence if it exists, not on the basis of Pascal's
Wager. Pascal's Wager is only relevant in cases of uncertainty, where you do not
know, and realize you do not know, if there is a God or not.)
So "choosing" the more advantageous belief turns out to entail a lot more than just
checking a box to "be on the safe side." It means possibly altering your brain or
your circumstances significantly to overcome your realization that you don't know
if there's a God or not. It means finding some way of "tricking" yourself out of
uncertainty, with no guarantee you'll even succeed.
Still, if Pascal's Wager is correct, presumably it's worth doing anything and
everything to bring about that advantageous belief in ourselves (and others if we
care about them), because remember that payoff-basically a value of positive
infinity or nothing if you believe, and negative infinity or nothing if you don't.
But it turns out the second of the two major objections to Pascal's Wager is a fatal
one.
Unfortunately for Pascal's Wager, if it justifies believing there's a God who rewards
those who believe in him and punishes those who don't, it equally justifies
believing anything and everything else that there is a non-zero chance will have the
same sort of payoffs, including some that contradict each other.
For example, what if we were to use the same approach as Pascal, but to the
question of what to do if we are in a state of uncertainty as to whether there exists
a God who provides an infinite reward to people who wear hats and an infinite
punishment to those who don't? You don't know for certain that such a God exists
or doesn't, so shouldn't you wear a hat just in case?
How about a God who's gung ho about rationality, and who has contempt for
people who believe things on "faith"? He might reward all the people who were
intellectually honest and simply admitted that they didn't know one way or the
other, and punish all the people who bought into Pascal's Wager and tried to find
some way to believe in spite of the uncertainty. Should you be an agnostic to "be
on the safe side"?
What about a jealous non-Christian God, who rewards all believers in all other
religions, and even non-believers for that matter, and only punishes Christians?
Should you hasten to dump all your Christian beliefs "just in case"?
Do you know for sure that there isn't a race of alien superbeings about to arrive on
Earth who will provide limitless unimaginable benefits to all virgins, and massacre
everyone else? Maybe you should think twice about having sex, you know, just to
be safe.
The point is there are an infinite number of things you can potentially believe or do
based on there being some non-zero chance they'll turn out to be the key to some
great reward. But you can't do all of them.
If your response is that those are all quite silly things, and the belief in the
conventional God differs from those in there being sound evidence and arguments
in its favor, then again you're missing the point of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager
only applies in situations of uncertainty. You're not saving it by citing other
evidence and arguments; you're bypassing it. By all means if there is evidence and
sound arguments for your preferred theological beliefs, then have at it. But Pascal's
Wager can have no use for those considerations.
In summary, there are two main flaws that prevent Pascal's Wager from being
cogent. One, it uses a decision theory that's applicable to actions and not (except
possibly in a very indirect, convoluted way) to beliefs. Two, it commits the fallacy of
false dilemma by claiming uncertainty yet positing that the only two possibilities
are a God who rewards believers and punishes non-believers or nothing at all,
when in fact there are an infinite number of other possibilities that have some non-
zero likelihood.







ALCARAZ, Eileen M.
INTFILO