Rev

[Pastor Jennifer v2]

31. THE ARGUMENT FROM DECISION THEORY (PASCAL’S WAGER)
( R Goldstein)
1. Either God exists or God doesn’t exist.
2. A person can either believe that God exists or believes that God
doesn’t exist (from 1).
3. If God exists and you believe, you receive eternal salvation.
4. If God exists and you don’t believe, you receive eternal
damnation.
5. If God doesn’t exist and you believe, you’ve been duped, have
wasted time in religious observance, and have missed out in decadent
enjoyments.
6. If God doesn’t exist and you don’t believe, then you have avoided a
false belief.
7. You have much more to gain by believing in God than by not
believing in him, and much more to lose by not believing in God than
by believing in him (from 3, 4, 5, and 6)
8. It is more rational to believe that God exists than to believe that
he doesn’t exist (from 7)

Matrix of Decisions

|………………..………|.God exists.....|....God doesn’t exist…..|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|…..... Believer.…….…|…salvation…..|.....you’ve been duped....|
|..........Non- believer:..|…damnation…|……….you aced out…...|

This unusual argument does not justify the conclusion that “God
exists.” Rather, it argues that it is rational to believe that God
exists, given that we don’t know whether he exists.

FLAW 1:
The “believe” option in Pascal’s Wager can be interpreted in two ways.
One is that the wagerer genuinely has to believe, deep down, that God
exists; in other words, it is not enough to mouth a creed, or merely
act as if God exists. According to this interpretation, God, if he
exists, can peer into a person’s soul and discern the person’s actual
convictions. If so, the kind of “belief” that Pascal’s Wager advises
- a purely pragmatic strategy chosen because the expected benefits
exceed the expected costs- would not be enough. Indeed, it’s not even
clear that this option is coherent if one chooses to believe something
because of the consequences of holding that belief, rather than being
genuinely convinced of it, is it really a belief, or just an empty
vow?
The other interpretation is that it is enough to act in the way that
traditional believers act: say prayers, go to services, recite the
appropriate creed, and go through the other motions of religion.
The problem is that Pascal’s wager offers no guidance as to which
prayers, which services, which creed to live by. Say I chose to
believe in the Zoroastrian cosmic war between Ahura Mazda and Angra
Mainyu to avoid the wrath of the former, but the real fact of the
matter is that God gave the Torah to the Jews, and I am thereby
inviting the wrath of Yahweh (or vice versa). Given all the things I
could “believe” in, I am in constant danger of incurring the negative
consequences of disbelief even though I choose the “belief” option.
The fact that Blaise Pascal stated his wager as two stark choices,
putting the outcomes in blatantly Christian terms – eternal salvation
or eternal damnation – reveals more about his own upbringing than it
does about the logic of belief. The wager simply codifies his
particular “live options” to use William James’s term for the only
choices that seem plausible to a given believer.

FLAW 2:
Pascal’s Wager assumes a petty, egotistical, and vindictive God who
punishes anyone who does not believe in him. But the great
monotheistic religions all declare that “mercy” is one of God’s
essential traits. A merciful God would surely have some understanding
of why a person may not believe in him (if the evidence for God were
obvious, the fancy reasoning of Pascal’s Wager would not be
necessary}, and so would extend compassion to a non-believer.
(Bertrand Russell, when asked what he would have to say to God, if,
despite his reasoned atheism, he were to die and face his Creator,
responded, “oh Lord, why did you not provide more evidence?”) The non-
believer therefore should have nothing to worry about- falsifying the
negative payoff in 4.

FLAW 3:
The calculations of expected value in Pascal’s Wager omit a crucial
part of the mathematics: the probabilities of each of the two columns
in the matrix above, which have to be multiplied with the payoff in
each cell to determine the expected value of each cell. If the
probability of God’ existence (ascertained by other means) is
infinitesimal, than even if the cost of not believing in him is high,
the overall expectation may not make it worthwhile to choose the
‘believe” row (after all, we take many other risks in life with severe
possible costs but low probabilities, such as boarding an airplane).
One can see how this invalidates Pascal’s Wager by considering similar
wagers. Say I told you that a fire-breathing dragon has moved into the
next apartment, and that unless you set a bowl of marshmallows for him
every night he will force his way into your apartment and roast you to
a crisp. According to Pascal’s Wager, you should leave out the
marshmallows. Of course you don’t, even though you are taking a
terrible risk in choosing not to believe in the dragons, because you
don’t assign a high enough probability to the dragon’s existence to
justify even the small inconvenience.

[Brock]

On Feb 23, 9:05 pm, Pastor Jennifer v2

Again, the same limitations apply to this treatment:

* there is no one "THE ARGUMENT ...", rather it refers to a general
category of arguments, thus to defeat one specific example is not
adequate to dismiss the category
* the argument, to the degree it is a paraphrase, doesn't adequately
represent (either intentionally or accidentally) the argument as put
forward by a proponent, and faces the danger of being simply a straw-
man

Regards,

Brock