Pascal’s Problem
I’ve always had a biog problem with Pascal’s Wager, and I am surprised how often it seems to be used. Often this is just a first line of approach by evangelists trying to get me to come around to their side of the fence. Of course a common argument that people use against Pascal’s Wager is that any omniscient god could easily see through a “saying you believe just to get to the good place” type believer. My issue is this, coming from the non-believer perspective, is that once you get someone over the god-hump how would you then convince them that you’ve got the right bead on the all-mighty? Considering that many religions like to lump those who in other religions in with non-believers (or do I go to a slightly more or less burney-pitchforky-kind of place? because I’m an atheist as opposed to a, for example, Buddhist?).
For the sake of my following, slightly math-related, rant I am going to actually give the faithful a *BIG* benefit of the doubt here and give a deity a 50-50 chance of existence (in all likelihood I’d say that given the total lack of and substantial evidence this chance is several orders of magnitude lower).
So 50% Chance there is a god and I better do what he/she/it says. 50% chance I’m already doing just fine enjoying the very real miracle that is intelligent life (thank you law-of-large-numbers!).
Now how am I to judge the likelihood that any of the “revealed truths” that humankind has ever believed in is the correct one? Once again giving the faithful a big leg-up in this example and ignore all the religions that no one follows anymore, although to be accurate I would have to include these, of course I’d also have to include the chance that some guy in west dumbfuckibad got the real revealed truth but was nailed to a tree by the first person he told… there’s really no way to count those. I’m also not including Scientology amongst the possible “correct” religions, nor small cults, tribalism, all the varieties of paganism, spiritualism, etc… But for the ease of the example I’m going to give those faiths that I do use all an equal chance of being “correct”.
- Christianity
- Judaism
- Hinduism
- Sikhism
- Islam
- Shintoism
- Jainism
- Zoroastrianism
- Cao Dai
- Confucianism
- Taoism
Now We also have to realize that amongst some of these religions there are sects who wholly believe that members of differing sects within the faith are also dammed, here I’m going to pick out some of the more major ones
- Mormonism – Christianity
- Catholicism – Christianity
- Protestantism – Christianity
- Sunni – Islam
- Shiite – Islam
- Orthodoxy – Christianity
- Orthodoxy – Judaism
- Reformed – Judaism
- Conservative – Judaism
And there are even sub-sects of the above… especially when it comes to Christianity, it’s ridiculous.
So we have a final of 18 faiths to pick from (in reality there are so much more and it’s why Pascal’s Wager is the biggest joke in evangelism) this gives you a 2.778% chance of having the “right” religion. Now let’s look at my 50% chance that atheists are right now we can add to that all the works based religions who pretty much don’t care that I don’t believe or who say belief is secondary to just generally being a good person as your key to the big eternal sky/reincarnation/whatevertheheck bliss. This gives us back 22.223% of the “Faith pie”, because as long as I’m not a total bastard I’m pretty much ok. So based on these very basic percentages If I choose whatever faith I’m being evangelized at about I’ve got ~3% chance for all that afterlife wonderfulness, a 22% that I choose your faith and it really didn’t matter, still get the cool afterlife stuff, a 25% chance of burning in hell, and a 50% chance that when I die it’ll pretty much be the same experience as I had before I was born. So instead of the 50-50 the faithful like to spout at you for the good ol’ wager, it’s more like 25%-75% and they’re asking you to take the 25%.
You’re asking me to play spiritual roulette… and every believer is betting. They’re sacrificing their time and money, they’re making other people’s lives miserable all because they think that 00 is where the marble is going to drop.
Sorry, I’m not playing your game.
In truth the chance that any single religious nutbag coming to your door is actually correct about any of these matters is as close to zero as makes no odds, to be fair we’d have to consider every religious belief held by anyone who has claimed the miraculous occurred because of their faith, because that’s all we have, claims.
I’ll take the evidence over the claims anyday.
I’m a teacher and a life-long skeptic, and I was recently caught off-guard in office hours by a first-year student with this argument. What’s funny is that my class has nothing to do with religion or theology — I teach argument, and our theme is comedy and media. We were actually discussing The Big Lebowski and how the Dude and Walter represent archetypes that emerged out of the Vietnam era.
I was trying to make the point that even though we see attitudes like theirs represented in mass American culture (granted, they’re caricatures), much of those archetypal qualities were constructed out of whole cloth in the 1950’s and 1960’s, first in response to the Cold War and the Soviets (Walter), and second in response to those Walter-like figures (the Dude). He wanted more examples, so I brought up the “under god” in the pledge and on our money as a response to the godless Soviets. Many today take those things for granted, as if they were always there since the founding of the nation. My student did, and he was surprised to learn they were relatively new.
He wanted more examples of that sort of erasure of history, so I paralleled the above example with how much of Christmas celebrations comes from pagan ritual, and the church used to not tolerate such elements during Christmas. Yet every Christmas we see all of these pagan adornments and practices brought right inside Christian churches, and people sort of go about their business as if Christmas was always that way. The same kind of situation holds for the hyper-nationalism Walter is a caricature of in the film.
I never should have used the Christmas example because I didn’t know the student was raised in a fundamentalist home, so he started asking me what I believe. I hedged, as I don’t think it’s my place to throw out my own beliefs on religion in a public university classroom, especially in a class that has nothing to do with religion. So he pulled Pascal’s Wager on me.
Trying to figure out how to respond without coming right out and telling him what I believe and don’t believe, I said if we take the student’s position and assume god both exists and created us, then we also know he gave us rational minds to work through problems and assumptions, plenty of bible verses that talk positively about using reason, but I’m not sure of the right one to pull out for this argument — need to find that.) We know that rational minds have produced a lot of good for the world (computers, agriculture, Stanley Kubrick films), so if it’s good, this must line up with a god-given faculty.
That means that if we DIDN’T use that god-given rationality to question the veracity of god, AND if god exists, then we’d be acting against god’s will. If god exists and you didn’t challenge that fact through one’s capacity for rationalism, imagine getting to heaven’s gates and being sent away because it was a sin to act only on faith and not on the tools provided by providence.
Then I threw in the bit about the word Israel meaning ‘to struggle with god,’ and how in Judaism the nature of god is argued all the time, kind of like in the Talmud. (I’ve been to Seders where the after-meal debate turned into a referendum on whether Moses just led the Hebrews out of a physical slavery and into a moral one, and if Moses was doing this on orders from god, that makes god something like a spiritually ambivalent and plantation owner.)
He dropped it there, and said he didn’t know how to argue that. Granted, he’s a first-year college student. I don’t know how that would work against more sophisticated apologists. That’s why I need to find the verses praising rationality, and throw the special pleading flag when they say the bible wants us to reasons for god’s existence, not against.