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WillowOne's Positions

Pascal's Wager

Overview

Pascal's Wager is the argument, made by Blaise Pascal in the Pensées (published 1670), that one should believe in God as a matter of prudence. If God exists and you believe, you gain eternal reward; if God exists and you do not, you suffer eternal loss; if God does not exist, you lose little either way. The expected value of belief is therefore infinite, and a rational gambler should believe.

Why it fails

  1. It is not an argument that God exists. It is an argument that believing would be advantageous. Whether a belief is useful has no bearing on whether it is true (Appeal to Consequences).
  2. Belief is not a choice. I cannot decide to believe something I find unconvincing, any more than I can decide to find a joke funny. Pascal's own answer was to act as if one believed until belief followed, which is a recipe for self-deception rather than for truth.
  3. Which god? The wager assumes a single candidate. With many mutually exclusive religions, each promising damnation for believing the others, the expected-value calculation does not favour any one of them, and betting on the wrong god may be worse than betting on none.
  4. It assumes a god who rewards calculated belief. A god who could see the wager being made might reasonably prefer honest doubt to prudential faith.
  5. The costs of belief are not nothing. A life spent on a false religion has real costs in time, money, freedom, and in the actions the religion commands.

Notes

  • As a child I ran a version of this wager for about a day before losing interest; see Atheism. The concept of Hell is what gives the wager its force, and the wager is one reason the concept persists.

Also see