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Pascal's Wager
Is it really a Safer Bet to be a
Believer rather than an Atheist ?
By Avijit Roy
Pic: Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662)
One of my Mukto-Mona members
forwarded a letter to my personal account yesterday stating the following
lines :
"Recently, the writer of a famous Bengali
movie “Shabuz-Shathi” asked me a question, which as follows, “There is a 50%
chance that there exists a God. Is it not? Our propensity is to go for the
“good” when we are given a chance of 50%, and in every case we do go for the
“good”; but why in the case of God some of us go for the “bad”?” That was
basically the main question he asked me;..."
The author of the above letter requested
me to respond to the topic from a rational point of view. Though, I remember
that I have already
addressed the
issue about four years ago while debating in other e-forum, and I
also remember, Aparthib shed some light on the same topic at that time in the
corresponding thread, still
such arguments demand "Immediate attention" time to time.
The statement comes from
a believer mind is typically as follows----
Ok, there is a
50-50 chance for existence of God. If God does not exist then we will not
face any problem after death. But if God exists you atheist people will go to
hell. So safe and most rational choice is believing, isn't it?
Arguments generally
float in
myriad Bangladeshi-e-forums in above mentioned style is called "Pascal's Wager"
(or Pascal's Gambit). Blaise Pascal
(June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) was the seventeenth-century French
mathematician and physicist, who once formulated
this pragmatic argument in philosophy. Pascal, inspired by profound
religious belief, constructed the argument aiming especially at such
persons who were not convinced by traditional arguments for the existence of
God. This Pascal's wager having been
debunked centuries ago by the Skeptics and Rationalists, it, however still
serves good incentive among some faithful minds. "Pascal's gamble", in a nutshell,
says that to believe in God is the best bet because if God exists, you'll go
to heaven and avoid hell. If you don't believe in God, you might lose all
this. If God does not exist, you'll have nothing to lose. So it's better to
believe in God than not to. In Pascal's word :
"If you believe in
God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing -- but if you
don't believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you will go to hell.
Therefore it is foolish to be an atheist."
The flaws in this argument
are legion - it is actually a rather poor piece of reasoning and not at all
appropriate for a thinker of Pascal's standing who is arguably considered as
the father of modern probability theory.
Which religion is "True Religion"?
The first problem lies in
defining "True Religion" and "True God" which Pascals' implicit yet
unstated assumption votes for Roman Catholicism. It is interesting to note
the fact that he used it as an argument for being a part of the Catholic
doctrine, but it is nevertheless used so often today by Protestants,
Islamists, Buddhists, Hindus-all, without recognizing the inherent fallacy
of the argument. The argument itself does not explain which religion a
person should follow. This can be described as the "avoiding the
wrong hell" dilemma. If you happen to follow the right religion, you may
indeed "...go to heaven and avoid hell." However, if you choose the wrong
religion, you will by no means be able to avoid hell.
Unfortunately,
most Believers are like Pascal and others simply assume that their own religion
is the right one, so it never occurs to them that they could be avoiding
the wrong hell. Pointing them from
this angle sometimes makes them stop and think, but it has been
experienced that they usually deny that the problem exists because they
firmly believe that the "right God" is "obvious" for all to see. It should
be clear from such statements that there are none as blind as those who
won't see. There are hundreds of religion in the market all
dogmatically claiming as the
true candidate of God; never mind what self-contradictory, unscientific strange
beliefs they hold. Many religions are offensive and totally antithetical
to each other. For example, Islam says that Christ was a man, but
Christianity says that he was a god. Christians generally believe in the
Trinity of God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. But if
Christianity is wrong, and Islam is correct, then it is expected that
Allah will punish all Christian believers with dreadful tortures.
He clearly specified it in the following Sura in Quran :
003.085
YUSUFALI: If anyone desires a religion other than Islam
(submission to Allah), never will it be accepted of him; and in the
Hereafter He will be in the ranks of those who have lost (All spiritual
good).
So if Allah is the true
god, all the Christians and the people of other faith except Islam will go
to hell not because of rejecting the God, but just for picking only
a wrong God. Again, Muslims believe in the single, indivisible deity
Allah, who is very different from the Christian concept of Holy Trinity.
If Islam is wrong, and Christianity turns out to be a correct religion,
then the Christian God will eventually torture all Muslims for eternity
without any hope of mercy.
According to Christian
belief, the person who rejects Jesus Christ not only dishonors the Son of
God, but he also dishonors God the Father; therefore, he does not receive
forgiveness of sin and he must stand before the Judge who is none other
than Jesus Christ, the One he rejected. Let me quote from Bible:
John 12:47-48 And if any man hear my words, and
believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to
save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath
one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge
him in the last day.
Now, some religions like
Judo-Christianity and Islam are based on Monotheism; thus those thrust the
devoted followers believing in One God but Hindus, on the contrary,
believe in thousands of god and goddess. Muslims generally consider
idol-worship as a great sin (shirak) whereas Hindus perform that
ritual as a fundamental part of the religion They consider the idol is a
support for the neophyte. Muslims slaughter cows in
their religious festival whereas Hindus worship cows just as holy deities.
Hinduism, even having many self-contradictory bizarre beliefs within,
also proclaims that it is a true religion just as Islam or
Christianity demand:
"Sho-dhormo Nidhonong Sreyo, Poro dhormo Bhoyaboho"
(It is better to die in own religion, other
religions are just horrendous)
So if, by any chance,
Hindu God is the true god, then all the Muslim brothers, with no offence,
will be pushed to hellfire on the judgment of the voluminous track records
of slaughtering cows in their religious festivals. Thus, it can be
easily comprehend that many devoted believers and god-loving people
will go to hell not because they are Atheists but because of their
unfortunate devotion in wrong God. This clearly depicts the vagueness of
Pascal's Wager.
Aparthib refuted Pascal's
wager logically in his piece (eshomabesh
: message/2587 ) about four years ago:
"What does the construct "us" have 50-50 probability
of the "fact" that there might be life after death really mean? First of
all, for a believer the probability is a certainty, 100%. For the
non-believer it is 0%. For agnostics, mild believers it is anywhere from
0-100%. Whatever the percentage, these percentages indicate the various
levels of BELIEF among various humans in life after death, NOT THE
ACTUAL PROBABILITY OF LIFE AFTER DEATH, because the probability
[calculated as such] itself
is a faith, which cannot be objectively proven or calculated. So any
logic or argument that presupposes 50-50 (Or any other breakup)
probability of Life after death is a fallacious one, as arguments should
only be based on objective truths or evidences as premises.
It assumes a 50-50 probability of life after death
(an invalid premise as I pointed out) and then advises one of the merit
of believing in it and the danger of not believing in it. It is amusing
that this Pascal's wager having been debunked centuries ago still
survives among some in the dawn of the third millennium. The other
aspect of the fallacy of Pascal's wager is that even if it turns out
that there is indeed life after death, it does not make religion-X true,
since there are other religions (Y,Z..etc) which also postulate life
after death. So using this "logic" to scare someone into one's favored
religion-X is nothing but a naive attempt to attract gullible souls
suffering from indecision."
A believer does not wish
to fathom the inconsistency of the Pascal's argument as described above,
rather tends to believe blindly in "uniqueness" of his/her own dogma
just imperiously considering it as "True". Pascal's wager thus
can be said to suffer from the logical fallacy of false dilemma/false
dichotomy/bifurcation, as it relies on only two alternatives: "My own God"
or "No God" scenario, where in fact other alternatives can exist. Both Pascal (whose implicit
belief was in Roman Catholicism) and a Muslim faithful (described in the
top), even following two self-contradictory and opposite ideologies, claim
to win the bet (i.e. achieve heaven and avoid hell) ignoring the
severe incongruities of the bet.
Betting in vague topic which has no
specific criterion:
One cannot "bet" on the
general concept of "theism" vaguely; he has to pick specific doctrines.
Theism is just a broad construct which includes all possible and
self-contradictory beliefs and is not at all meaningful in the sense of
logic. If you are going to really bet on something, you must define that
criterion - which means picking of something. If you pick nothing or
something that is vaguely defined, then your "belief" is literally empty
and your status remains no more than an atheist. So, a person who picks risks picking the wrong
god and avoiding the wrong hell.
This leads to a second
problem: namely, that it isn't actually true that the person who bets
loses nothing. If a person bets on the wrong god, then the "True
God" might punish them for their foolish behavior. What's more, the "True
God" might not mind that people don't bother believing in stupid and
inhumane stuff when they use rational reasons - thus, not picking at
all might be the safest bet. You just cannot know ! That's why Richard
Carrier pronounced in his article "
The End of Pascal's Wager: Only Nontheists Go to Heaven"
"Therefore only intellectually committed but critical
nontheists (nonbelievers) are genuinely good and will go to heaven.
Therefore, if a god exists, his silence and allowance of evil
are explained and justified by his plan to discover the only sorts of
people who deserve to populate heaven: sincere nontheists. And this
makes perfect sense of many mysteries, thus explaining what theists
struggle to explain themselves."
Similar argument has been
provided by Massimo Pigliucci in his "Pascal's
Wager: Is It Safer To Believe In God Even If There Is No Proof That One
Exists?" :
"Many Agnostics, for example, have evaluated
all the "proofs" for God's existence, and all of the "proofs" of God's
non-existence. They conclude that neither belief can be substantiated.
They feel that they can not rationally believe in the existence or
non-existence of God; they must remain Agnostic. Under these conditions,
a person can only believe in God if they violate their honesty. And God
might punish a lack of honestly more severely than not being able to
believe in God.
It can also be argued that if people believe
something on insufficient evidence, that the result is the promoting of
credulity -- something that harms society. Again, that could be a sin
that God is particularly concerned about punishing."
Test of God?
One might also argue that a
false, evil image of God has been forced to trust where God engages to test
the blind obedience or faith, and justifies His Gödel acts thru
threats, coerce and/or promises of heavenly reward. Aroj Ali Matubbar in his
book Shotter Shondhaney (Quest
for truth) uttered -
"It is said that nothing happens without the
permission of Allah. Not even the leaf of a tree can tremble without his
consent. Indeed, if something can happen against His will or without His
consent His omnipotence will be called in question. But if everything
happens according to His will what is the fault or sin of the offender?"
From the above point of
view, some might argue that an insincere wager is worthless. God, being
omniscient and omnipotent, knows all our motivations. If a person decides to
be atheist or non-believer, he is somehow fulfilling God's plan and wish,
one may argue. Obviously, no one can go against his will otherwise His
omnipotence will be in question. So the tests and bets all becomes
meaningless on this point of singularity!
Should such "Racist God" be
worshipped?
One final issue needs to
be mentioned: the conclusion of the argument is supposed to be for the
person to believe in a god because it is the choice that offers the most
benefits and least dangers. However, this requires that the god in
question not mind that you believe in it merely in order to gain entrance
to heaven and/or to avoid punishment in hell. But this means that this god
isn't actually a just or fair god since a person's eternal fate is not
being decided upon based on their actions, but merely on their decision to
make a pragmatic and selfish choice of religion. I don't know
about the believers, but that certainly isn't the sort of god a rational
person would ever consider for worshiping.
If we believe in such
"Racist God" what actually we got to lose, one might ask. Pascal will
obviously assure you with heavenly bliss - "You lose nothing". However,
this is a questionable premise whether such parochial view is acceptable
on the basis of sound ethics and morality. In his book
Atheism: The Case Against God, George H. Smith exposed the fallacies
by saying this:
What have we got to lose? Intellectual integrity,
self-esteem, and a passionate, rewarding life for starters. In short,
everything that makes life worth living. Far from being a safe bet,
Pascal's wager requires the wager of one's life and happiness
(Prometheus Books, 1979, p. 184).
In conclusion, it should
have become abundantly clear over the course of this essay that
Pascal's
Wager simply fails as any sort of reasonable or rational argument in favor
of theism. No sensible person or freethinker should either use it or be
swayed by it.
So,
rational choice is not believing, but disbelieving, IMO.
Sunday July 26, 2009
Avijit Roy, Founding Moderator of Mukto-Mona writes from Singapore. He can
be reached at: charbak_bd@yahoo.com
Response in MM:
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