It’s also called Pascal’s Wager, and
it’s possibly the surest way to make an atheist roll their eyes in frustration.
And believe me, that’s not frustration born from it being some deeply
insightful question without an answer. It comes from hearing it all the time,
despite it being a really, really bad argument.
The name “Pascal’s Wager” comes from
the mathematician Blaise Pascal, who made the most famous form of the argument.
The basic logic is that if God exists, then belief brings infinite reward and
nonbelief brings infinite punishment. Whereas if God doesn’t exist, belief
results in only finite loss and nonbelief results in only finite gain. Since
infinite things are always greater than finite things, you’re always better off
betting on belief.
This is a crap argument.
The first and most obvious problem
is one that Pascal recognized himself: betting the odds is not really the same
as believing. Pascal acknowledged this problem, and his solution was “fake it
‘til you make it.” He recommended that even if you don’t really believe it, you should go ahead and act as if you do as
rigorously as possible for as long as it takes to develop a believer’s habits
of thought, and perhaps sheer repetition turns the rote behavior into actual
belief.
Can you imagine a more cynical and dishonest
approach to belief? Why would you worship a god that is fooled by it? I would
think anyone who values truth at all would reject the argument, and even
believers ought to find the idea kind of insulting. It implies that the belief
has little or no truth value, and is simply a matter of will motivated by pure
self-interest.
But there are other problems that
Pascal never addressed. One example is the false dichotomy. See, it’s not
merely a question of whether you accept God or not. Humanity has worshipped
literally thousands of gods in its history, and the Wager offers little
guidance on which of them you ought
to believe in. At best, Pascal’s Wager suggests that you ought to believe in
the god whose religion threatens you with the worst punishment, which is
obviously not a path the truth at all. What if your personal idea of what
constitutes the “worst” is different from someone else’s? And what if the god
you choose ends up being the wrong one, and you’re ensuring your damnation in
the eyes of the real god? Everyone who believes in any god is taking that risk,
whether they admit to the possibility or not. There’s no way to avoid it.
I also disagree with the idea that
what the believer gives up, if a god doesn’t exist, is finite and therefore
trivial. This is the only life we know for certain we’re ever going to get.
This life may well be literally everything we will ever have the chance to know
or experience. As finite as it may be, to the individual experiencing it this
life is everything. And, depending
what version of a god you happen to believe in, your entire life may very well
be what they demand. This idea - that giving up your everything in support of
what appear to be unproven and unprovable impossibilities could possibly be a
trivial demand - is absurd.
But really, all dry philosophical
stuff aside, maybe it would help to look at it this way. Do you really think
you’re risking anything by going to bed every night without taking precautions
against the monster under your bed? I mean, if you’re wrong, one of these
nights you’re gonna be monster chow. Or your kids will be. Bed monsters love
children, after all. Why take the risk? Even if you believe in God… what if
your kids secretly don’t believe and the bed monsters get them before they come
around? And don’t go thinking God will protect children from bed monsters; he
doesn’t protect them from tigers, or bears, or childhood leukemia, so why make
special dispensation for bed monsters? Letting your child go to sleep in a bed
is risking not only their life, but their immortal soul!
Well, not really. I’m guessing you
don’t believe in the monster under the bed. There’s no reason to believe in it,
and the idea that monsters really exist who magically appear in the dark space
under the bed when you could clearly see they weren’t there in the light of day
is just patently ridiculous. Neither you nor I think it’s worth spending one
iota of effort protecting ourselves and our children from the monster under the
bed, because it’s a fantasy made up of our own fears of the dark and the
unknown. That’s how I feel about the risk that I’m going to be sent to hell for
not believing in anyone’s god.
I’m not saying this in an effort to
insult anyone or their beliefs, or the seriousness with which they take them.
I’m not comparing gods to monsters under the bed purely for the sake of
dismissing anyone’s faith as childhood superstition. Rather, I offer the
comparison as a window to why Pascal’s Wager is not convincing to myself or to
many other atheists. It is a dodge – an end run around any effort to find or
illuminate truth in order to appeal directly to fear – and we recognize it as
such. Believers should too, and not resort to it.
