Wednesday, 29 April 2009

• Pascal's Wager and why you should stop wearing pants

  
  First, what is Pascal's Wager? It usually looks something like this:
  
  

  "If I believe in god, I have everything to gain (heaven) and nothing to lose (death is the end). If I do not believe in god, I have nothing to gain (death is the end) and everything to lose (I spend eternity in hell).  So why not believe it just in case it's true?"
  

  
  First thing to notice is that Pascal's Wager doesn't argue that Christianity is true or believable, it simply talks about hedging your bets.  This is suspicious because if someone had good reasons to believe, wouldn't they just offer them up?  But the main problem with Pascal's Wager, as it is advanced by believers in Christ, is that it assumes the choice is merely between Christianity and non-belief. It pits the really, really, really, really, really (ad infinitum) small chance that Christianity is true against only atheism and asks, "Why not believe it?"  This assumes that we can even choose to believe something by force of will, which I don't think we can.
  
  Of course, the choice to believe in "god" is not a game of one on one between Jesus and atheism. You'd have to start off by figuring out which Jesus you believe in. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, there are 33,820 different sects of Christianity as of 2001, so which one is going to keep you out of hell?
  
  Now we can start to add in Islam and other religions like Christianity; religions positing that non-believers will receive some horrible punishment for their skepticism. There are about 243,000 different religions on this planet, so at this point, you should expect to go to hell just on terms of basic probability. But now we can also start adding every possible god into our melting pot of consideration. After all, what if the real god has yet to be discovered? If faith is our selecting criteria, such that we must focus on hedging our bets in the hereafter rather than focusing on what is true or sensible, then we must consider religions that have not yet sprung into the head of some self-proclaimed prophetic mortal. Here's one:
  
  

  JTism!!!
  
  The belief that I, JT, in all My Holiness, am the One True God (tm) and unless you believe this with all your heart and refuse to wear pants, you are going to hell (bow down, bitch!).
  

  
  That's one out of an infinite number of possible religions, all as likely to be true as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or any other religion insisting you believe ludicrous things on no evidence. So, in playing by the rules of Pascal's Wager, and with an infinite number of choices, your odds of going to hell are infinitely certain. I hope it's becoming more and more apparent that Pascal's Wager has no safe bets. 
  
  So, as long as you're going to go to hell, shouldn't you just focus on pursuing the truth and not waste time or intellectual currency arguing over adopting a certain belief set because somebody said you'd suffer if you didn't? Indeed, can we really do anything else? We are slaves to evidence. If I offered you a billion dollars right now, no strings attached, and all you had to do was honestly believe that I have an invisible penguin on my shoulder - could you do it? No, you couldn't. Which is why it is positively mad to believe that god would rig a game in which we had to believe in something so outlandish as a man rising from the dead 2,000 years ago on poor evidence to avoid being cast into an eternity of suffering which admits of no possible increase. If it is true, then god is a monster.
  
  Pascal's Wager misses many things. Primarily, it assumes that concepts like reward or punishment have anything to do with what is true. They don't. You shouldn't believe in something just because you are threatened or offered a reward by someone. In fact, a wise man should always be skeptical of anybody relying on scare tactics and threats all the while insisting that you just have to believe, despite what common sense tells you. Where I come from, people who insist we should abandon our standard checks on gullibility because of threats are called the mob ("do what we want you to do and we won't break your knee caps"), and those who offer us a boon in exchange for our credulity are con men. I think a god claiming to be the embodiment of love should be able to do a more convincing job of it than the mafia or a con artist.  
  
  Swallowing the hook because someone promises you the moon is not hedging your bets, it's looking for an excuse to be gullible, and scammers prey on people who want to indulge their sense of wishful thinking so badly that they'll shut their eyes to reality.  If you think hedging your bets in this way is a good idea, how come you don't still believe in Santa Clause?
  
  

  
  

  
  Why should that standard change when we're talking about god?  And how strong can your belief be if this is the reason you give?  You're essentially admitting that you believe in god, not on evidence or reasoning, but just because you want the damn carrot.  You're a chump.
  
  There are so many one true religions out there that are irreconcilable with each other, and therefore, at most, only one of them could be true, to the exclusion of literally an infinite number of other myths - but in all likelihood they're all false. So why not just seek the truth fearlessly? Yeah, it might not be pleasant when you find it (nobody wants to die), but do you think believing in faeries will change that? Yet, that notion is the very core of Pascal's Wager.
  
  If you're going to claim to pursue the truth, then really do it - regardless of those who insist you must accept something as the truth lest you burn (and this is virtually all Christians). Unless, of course, you have a good reason to believe god wouldn't want you to chase down the truth in an honest fashion...
  
  (Proverbs 3:5 is not a good reason).
  
  ...otherwise, it's time to accept JTism: you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
  
  

  
  
  

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