Hello Pascal's Wager.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager#Criticisms
Criticisms
Pascal's Wager has been the target of much criticism, starting in its own day.
Voltaire, writing a generation after Pascal, rejected the wager as "indecent and childish... the interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists."
[11] But Voltaire, like many other critics, misunderstood the Wager. Pascal did not offer the wager as a proof.
[12] It is merely a conclusion to his arguments against certainty that relies on the notion that reason is untrustworthy and that discerning God's actual existence appears to be "a coin toss." If reason can be trusted on the question of God's existence, then the wager simply does not apply.
[edit] Argument from Inconsistent Revelations
Since there have been many religions throughout history, and therefore many potential gods, some assert that all of them need to be factored into the wager, in an argument known as the
argument from inconsistent revelations. This would lead to a high probability of believing in the wrong god, which destroys the mathematical advantage Pascal claimed with his Wager.
Denis Diderot, a contemporary of Voltaire, concisely expressed this opinion when asked about the wager, saying "an
Imam could reason the same way".
[13] J. L. Mackie notes that "the church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the
Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the
Anabaptists or the
Mormons or the
Muslim Sunnis or the worshipers of
Kali or of
Odin."
[14]
Pascal himself didn't address the question of other religions in his section on the wager, presumably because throughout the rest of
Pensées (and in his other works) he examined alternatives, like
stoicism,
paganism,
Islam, and
Judaism, and concluded that if any faith is correct, it would be the Christian faith.
Nonetheless, as this criticism has surfaced,
apologists of his wager counter that, of the rival options, only the ones that award infinite happiness affect the Wager's
dominance. They claim that neither Odin's nor Kali's finite, semi-blissful promise could contend with the infinite bliss offered by
Jesus Christ, so they drop out of consideration.
[15] Also, the infinite bliss the rival god offers has to be mutually exclusive. If Christ's promise of bliss can be attained concurrently with
Jehovah's and
Allah's (all three being identified as the
God of Abraham), there is no conflict in the decision matrix in the case where the cost of believing in the wrong god is neutral (limbo/purgatory/spiritual death), although this would be countered with an infinite cost in the case where not believing in the correct god results in punishment (hell).
[15]
And furthermore,
ecumenical interpretations of the Wager
[16] argue that it could even be suggested that believing in an anonymous god or a god by the wrong name, is acceptable so long as that god has the same essential characteristics (like the
God of Aristotle). Proponents of this line of reasoning suggest that either all of the gods of history truly boil down to just a small set of "genuine options",
[17] or that if the wager can simply bring one to believe in "generic theism" it has done its job.
[18] Critics respond by stating that the wager must account for all potential gods and goddesses, without specifying whether they belong to a historical religion or not.
[19]
[edit] God rewards belief
Pascal's Wager suffers from the logical fallacy of the
false dilemma, relying on the assumption that the only possibilities are:
- a benevolent god exists and punishes or rewards according to one's belief, or
- a benevolent god does not exist.
God could either be malevolent or not reward belief. In this view, a benevolent god, by definition, would give priority to the belief of the individual in determining rewards or punishments, rather than basing rewards on the basis of the individual's actions, such as rewarding kindness, generosity, humility or sincerity. Perhaps instead God rewards honest attempted reasoning and indeed might punish blind or feigned faith.
[20] Also see the
Atheist's Wager as examples of assuming a different set of possibilities.
Richard Carrier expands this argument as such:
“ Suppose there is a God who is watching us and choosing which souls of the deceased to bring to heaven, and this god really does want only the morally good to populate heaven. He will probably select from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. For all others are untrustworthy, being cognitively or morally inferior, or both. They will also be less likely ever to discover and commit to true beliefs about right and wrong. That is, if they have a significant and trustworthy concern for doing right and avoiding wrong, it follows necessarily that they must have a significant and trustworthy concern for knowing right and wrong. Since this knowledge requires knowledge about many fundamental facts of the universe (such as whether there is a god), it follows necessarily that such people must have a significant and trustworthy concern for always seeking out, testing, and confirming that their beliefs about such things are probably correct. Therefore, only such people can be sufficiently moral and trustworthy to deserve a place in heaven — unless god wishes to fill heaven with the morally lazy, irresponsible, or untrustworthy.
[21] ” This would render the initial 4-box set inaccurate, because it does not include the possibility of a god who rewards honest unbelief or punishes dishonest belief. A revised set, would look like this:
God rewards theists God rewards atheists No God Belief +∞ (
heaven) Undefined No result Disbelief Undefined +∞ (
heaven) No result Apologists reply that hypotheses such as these lack the backing of tradition that genuine religions have, and thus should be disregarded (although see
Argumentum ad populum). More precisely, these other hypotheses should be assigned zero (or perhaps infinitesimal) probability, so that they do not upset Pascal's expectation calculations. The debate then turns on what exactly rationality requires of one's probability assignments.
[15]
[edit] Anti-Pascal wager
Richard Dawkins argues for an "anti-Pascal wager" in his book,
The God Delusion. "Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc."
[22] Pascal addressed this criticism in his original account, as mentioned
above.
[edit] Assumes that one can choose belief
The wager assumes that one can consciously decide. Critics argue that they cannot do this, and therefore Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. In addition, an omniscient God would presumably see through the deception.
[23] Richard Dawkins writes "Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest skepticism?" However, Pascal explicitly addresses inability ("impuissance") to believe. If the Wager is valid, inability to believe is irrational, and therefore caused by the passions: "your inability to believe, because reason compels you to [believe] and yet you cannot, [comes] from your passions." Therefore, this inability can be overcome by diminishing the passions through the practice of belief: "Learn from those who were bound like you. . . . Follow the way by which they began: that is by doing everything as if they believed, by taking holy water, by having Masses said, etc. Naturally, even this will make you believe and will dull you ["vous abêtira"]."
[24]
