← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffphilosophy.net Today's Bet yout Pascal's Wager Imagine that God exists, but not the God of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other religion. This God is perverse. He hates it when people believe in his existence, maybe because he's shy, or because he thinks it's ridiculous that people would believe in God without sufficiently good evidence. So when religious believers die, he sends them to hell for an infinity of torment. When atheists die, by contrast, there'll be bad news and good news. The bad news is that they were wrong to be atheists, because God does exist. The good news is that atheists, and only atheists, get to go to heaven, where they will experience an infinite and eternal reward. Now, there isn't much, if any, reason to believe that this perverse God exists. But isn't it just possible that he exists? And given this possibility, however slightly, wouldn't it be better to be an atheist, just in case? After all, it's the only way to have a chance at that infinite reward and to avoid the infinite damnation reserved for those who have religious faith. When your religious friends invite you to church, you'd better tell them that it just isn't worth the risk. This line of thought is a topsy turvy parody of Pascal's Wager, one of the most famous things to come out of the philosophical and religious literature of the 17th century. The wager is proposed in Pascal's Pensee, in a section that is really more a set of unfinished notes. It's been described as two pieces of paper covered on both sides by handwriting going in all directions, full of erasures, corrections, insertions, and afterthoughts. The passage takes the form of a dialogue in which Pascal is trying to convince an interlocutor to stop wavering and start wagering. It is, he argues, in our interest to believe in God, the basic reason being that if God exists and one believes in him, one has at least a chance at infinite reward in heaven. Also, there's nothing, or almost nothing to lose. The worst that will happen to you is that you'll waste some time going to church, praying, and so on. Hence the heading Pascal gave to this bit of writing, namely infini Royal infinity. Nothing. The potential reward for believing, has the negligible cost of doing so. This argument has inspired an extensive literature among contemporary philosophers of religion. And you can see why. It's an argument for belief in God, but one very different from those we are familiar with from medieval philosophy. Instead of trying to prove that God exists, the Wager says that you should believe in God without proof, even without any evidence at all. In putting forth the wager, Pascal also helped to initiate a new way of thinking about decisions in general. You should always do whatever has the best chances of maximizing your reward if things go well and minimizing your penalty if things go badly. Nowadays, there's a whole branch of philosophy called decision theory, which sees all human choices as involving at least implicit calculation of probabilities. If I cross the street to the bakery to buy an almond croissant in the background, I'm judging that the risk of getting hit by a car is very low and is offset by the relatively high probability of the bakeries being open, still having croissants on sale, the croissants still being fresh, and so on. Then there's the interesting twist that Pascal wants us to believe something. Based on this kind of reasoning, it's easy to see why you might cross the road because you think it's in your interest. But suppose I offered you $100 to believe that a chicken also crossed the road. I don't tell you that I saw one or give you any evidence. I just offer to pay you if you can manage to believe it. Would you be able to do so? Before getting into all these issues, let's pause to think about how exactly Pascal's Wager should be formulated. Usually it's presented as a menu or table of four possibilities. Either you believe in God and he does exist, or you believe in God and he doesn't exist, or you don't believe in God and He does exist, or you don't believe in God and He doesn't exist. Pascal says the first option is the one you should hope for, since this is where you get the infinite reward that God offers to those who believe in Him. The other extreme, the fourth option, where you correctly adopt atheism, seems to have no cost, but also no benefit. The two middle cases are more interesting. The third option, where you bet against God and He does exist, is potentially disastrous because you might go to hell. Surprisingly, Pascal doesn't say that, perhaps because he doesn't need to make that assumption. Maybe unbelievers just stop existing when they die, rather than going to hell or heaven. But in any case, there's no payoff to denying the existence of a real God. And that will be enough for Pascal. As for the second option, where you do believe in a non existent God, this would be disappointing for sure. But how bad would it be? One philosopher has raised the concern that it would be very bad indeed. I only have one life, and to spend it in the service of a God who turns out not to exist is bound to be a tragedy and not merely a calculated risk. Even if the cost is significant, though, it is still finite. As Pascal puts it elsewhere in the I should be much more frightened of being wrong and finding out that the Christian religion was true than of being wrong in believing it to be true. By contrast, the potential payoff waiting in heaven if God does exist would be infinite. So it still makes sense to wager on God. Pascal goes further, suggesting that wrongly believing in God could actually lead to reward instead of a tragedy, namely that one will lead a good life. Religious people are virtuous, are true friends, and avoid corrupt pleasure. This makes the wager seem especially attractive. If God does exist, it's obviously better to believe in him. But even if he doesn't exist, then it's still better to believe in him, because one will lead a better, happier life than if one is a hedonistic atheist or, in the language of the time, a libertine. This means that belief in God is always the right strategy, whether or not he exists. Things will go better for me if I believe than if I don't. In a way, though, it doesn't matter what results from the other three options apart from the best one. If belief in God has any chance of getting you an infinite reward, then of course you should believe. It doesn't even matter how likely we think God's existence is. At first, Pascal seems to suggest it's a 5050 chance, presumably just because there are only two possibilities, either God exists or he doesn't. But then he says that even if we deem God's existence very unlikely, we should still bet on his existence. As he puts here, there is an infinitely happy infinity of life. To be 1:1 chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing, and what you are staking is finite. That removes all choice wherever there is infinity, and where there is no infinity of chances of losing against one of winning, there is no scope for wavering. You have to chance everything. You're betting your life for the chance of winning an infinity of lives. Given the prospect of an infinite payoff, God's existence could be as unlikely as you want, and the wager would still make sense. The thought would be something like my expected value for any decision is the probability of success multiplied by the amount I will win. For instance, suppose I play a game where I flip a fair coin and get $1 of its heads, nothing of its tails. The expected value is 50% of $1, namely 50 cents. What Pascal suggests then is suppose the amount I can win is infinite. Then my expected reward is also infinite, regardless how low my probability of winning is, because infinity multiplied by even the smallest probability is still infinity. But this turns out to be a dangerous thought for Pascal and for anyone else who is a proponent of Pascal's wager. Think again about the perverse God who rewards atheists and punishes believers. We presumably think it's incredibly unlikely that there is such a God. But if his existence has any positive probability at all, then the wager will work in favor of the perverse God just as well as the Christian God. Of course, we could think of any number of other scenarios that have tiny but still positive probabilities and could lead to infinite payoffs. Philosophers have come up with ridiculous hypotheses like a God who saves only people who wear a certain shade of purple slippers. If these hypotheses have a non zero probability, the wager should work for them too. Or consider this. Instead of trying to believe in God, I could just go bowling. After all, maybe, just maybe, while bowling, something will happen that leads me to adopt belief in God so that I wind up going to heaven. I might, for instance, strike up a conversation with a modern day equivalent of Pascal, who happens to be in the next lane and is very persuasive in converting people to Christianity. Admittedly, bowling is a very low percentage way of getting into heaven. But Pascal was just saying that it doesn't matter how low the percentage is. If the payoff is infinite, then the expected reward for any course of action that might get me that payoff is infinite. Given this assumption, believing in God, going bowling or buying a lottery ticket and promising to believe in God if I win are all equally good strategies. Clearly something's gone wrong here. The question is whether the mistake is lethal to the wager. Fortunately for Pascal, the answer is no. Here are a couple of ways to escape the problem. First, forget the thing about infinite payoffs and just say that the reward awaiting us in heaven is finite but enormous. On that assumption, the probability of success is very important because we won't be multiplying by infinity to calculate the expected reward. My chances of getting the huge finite reward of salvation are presumably much better if I believe in the Christian God than if I go bowling or believe in some bizarre God devised by a philosopher who has too much time on their hands. This is an easy solution, but violates something that clearly mattered a lot to Pascal, namely the infinity of the reward awaiting the faithful believer. So here's a second say that probabilities do remain relevant yet even if the potential payoff is infinitely large. Imagine you go into an especially metaphysical casino and find that there are two games you can play. One game is a coin flip. You have a 50% chance of winning an infinite reward. The other game involves picking a tile at random out of a very large bag. If you get the right tile, you will again win an infinite reward. The catch is that there are a trillion tiles in the bag and only one is the winner. Here it's just obvious that you should play the coin flipping game. Decision theorists need to explain why that is the right decision, and we can leave the mathematics of that to them. The point will be that so long as the Christian God is much more likely than the perverse God or the other gerrymandered deities like the purple slipper loving God, it will make more sense to wager that the Christian God exists. Of course, strict atheists might insist that that the Christian God is vanishingly unlikely too. They might even claim that the probability of the Christian God is zero, for instance, because the existence of such a God is incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering, so we can actually be certain that he does not exist. Or atheists might allow that they are not sure how likely it is that the Christian God exists, but that the probability just might be zero. Still, at least the burden of argument would be on the atheist to explain the why they think the Christian God is very unlikely or even impossible. In the meantime, the wager will work for anyone who thinks that the Christian God is more likely than the ridiculous ones we've been considering. This leads us to another problem, one that has probably already occurred to why does it need to be the Christian God to think of rival candidates? We don't need to retreat into the creative fictions of philosophers. The real world has presented us with quite a few religions, some of which have vast numbers of adherents, just like Christianity does. Pascal's wager does not tell us which religion to bet on. This so called many gods objection goes back to near the time of Pascal himself. Diderot remarked that an imam could reason just as well this way. In other words, that a Muslim version of Pascal could use the wager to motivate belief in the God of the Quran sometimes. It's suggested that from Pascal's perspective, this objection would simply not arise because in his culture, Christianity was the only religious option on the table. But that can't be right. At one point in the Pensee, he all but raises the problem himself. I see several opposing religions, all except one of them false. Each wants to be believed on its own authority and threatens those who do not believe. He's at great pains to argue that Islam in particular is untenable and far less worthy of belief than Christianity. Alongside these attacks, he offers positive arguments in favor of Christianity. His favorite evidence is that the coming of Christ was foretold in the Old Testament, so that signs and prophecies point to the truth of his own chosen religion. More generally, he says that all belief rests on miracles, and that the miracles that prove Christianity are both earlier and more trustworthy than those claimed by other religions. This shows both that Pascal appreciated the force of the many gods objection and that he did have something to say in response. Since the Pensee was never organized into its final form, it's impossible to know how Pascal's overall rhetorical strategy was intended to work. But it seems likely that the Wager was intended as only the first step in a two step strategy. First, get the reader to see that it would be in their interest to bet on God. Then go on to convince them to bet on the Christian God, or even more specifically, God as understood within Jansenist Catholicism and not the one envisioned by, say, Jesuits or Protestants. Unfortunately, the considerations Pascal found so convincing are unlikely to move the modern day person who is, like Michael Stipe from REM choosing their religion. But modern apologists could think of different arguments. Alternatively, they could deploy the wager strategy at the second stage too, reasoning that the choice between religions should not be treated differently than any other decision problem. Imagine that you're choosing between 10 religions and you just want to maximize your expected payoff. You can consider what sort of reward the various religions promise in the afterlife, how difficult they make it to get at that reward, how onerous the religious practices would be in this life, and so on. The potential believer would effectively be saying to the religions of the world, okay folks, make me an offer. This attitude may seem squalidly mercenary, but then that worry applies just as much to the original Wager. Voltaire said that Pascal's approach seems a bit indecent and childish. That notion of gambling, of losses and winnings, does not suit the gravity of the subject. More threatening still is the Prospect raised by 19th century American philosopher William James Author of the relevantly titled book Will to Believe. He suspected that anyone who arrives at religious belief out of self interest would not get what they were after. If we were ourselves in the place of the deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward. One might think of this as a more realistic version of the perverse God hypothesis. A very plausible God indeed. The Christian God might well look down at someone who believes in him just because of Pascal's wager and think, nice try, my gambling friend, but you are going to hell. If divine wrath seems a likely response, it might be because belief in God is not just any belief. We expect the devout to worship God reverently, not out of self interest. And Pascal would surely have agreed. One of the reasons he gave for the superiority of Christianity is that it is the one religion that teaches us not just self love, but also self hatred, because it recognizes the deeply sinful nature of humankind. There's a broader issue here, though, about whether it's ever acceptable to form beliefs out of self interest. Around the time William James was thinking about the possibility of willing oneself to believe, the philosopher W.K. clifford said that it is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. And Clifford's intuition seems reasonable enough. As responsible believers, our job is to think things are true because we have good reason to think they are true, not because it would be convenient or profitable to do so. Then, too, leaving aside the question of whether we should believe things just out of self interest, one might wonder whether we can believe things just out of self interest. Think again of simply willing yourself to accept that a chicken crossed the road without any evidence of any kind, just because I pay you to believe it. That doesn't even seem possible, never mind morally acceptable. And yet we know that people manage to choose their beliefs all the time. Think of someone willfully ignoring telltale signs that their spouse is cheating on them, or of how athletes use all kinds of techniques to get themselves to believe that they are going to perform well and win. We don't see that as a project that's doomed to failure. On the other hand, perhaps athletes can't just decide to believe that they will win. They do have to use those techniques, like positive visualization, rehearsing their own strengths and the opponent's weaknesses, and so on. Again, Pascal was already onto this point in his discussion of the wager. Toward the end of the dialogue with the hypothetical interlocutor, he tells the interlocutor not just to believe, but but to take actions that might facilitate conversion to religious faith. We know how people come to faith, he says, by taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That will make you believe quite naturally. This also helps to deal with the charge of hypocrisy and mercenary calculation. Pascal doesn't expect anyone to believe in God out of sheer self interest. Rather, we should use self interest to motivate ourselves to do things that will lead to belief in God. Still here, one might have misgivings. This strategy sounds a little like trying to trick oneself into religious faith. Just go to church and pray, and eventually you'll have a belief so sincere that you'll forget why you decided to start going in the first place. But there could be versions of the strategy that don't involve so much self deception. One suggestion has been that we could adopt the existence of God as a kind of pragmatic assumption. This would be like assuming that a friend who has been lost at sea is still out there somewhere, so that it makes sense to keep looking for them. You don't necessarily believe the friend is still alive. Indeed, you might understand that, tragically, they have almost certainly drowned. But you still act as if your assumption were true, because it might be. A similar recommendation would be to have faith, or at least hope that God exists without actually believing it. In short, there are various mindsets that one can adopt in response to the wager that fall short of belief, but could make it more probable that one will believe in the future. Pascal's use of this strategy has a lot to do with his audience. As I noted last time, the Pensee is reminiscent of Montaigne's essays, which is no accident, because Montaigne was a big influence on Pascal. The works are similar, not just in their wittiness and penchant for skepticism, but also because of their thematic diversity and lack of coherent organization. But for Montaigne, that was by design. Pascal, by contrast, hoped to marshal his material into a coherent and powerful argument, one that would lead readers to deeply held Christian faith. The readers he was addressing were, to his mind, sunk in sin and in need of divine grace. As a Jansenist, Pascal was in fact the last person who would think that those readers could win salvation just by deciding to believe in God. For him, nothing that humans can do will merit salvation, since it is up to God whether to offer it as freely bestowed, an inevitably effective grace. For some critics, this amounts to yet another flaw in his wager. What's the point of offering people this, or really any consideration in favor of religious belief? If it is really up to God to bring us to Him. It's a theological version of a problem that has confronted determinists since antiquity, when the Stoics opponents presented them with the so called lazy argument. Since it's already faded. Whether or not I will recover from my illness, there's no point going to the doctor. The answer the Stoics gave is the same one Pascal could whatever instruments are brought into play will be part of the divinely fated course of events. Hopefully I am fated to recover and and I may do so precisely because I wind up going to the doctor and taking my medicine. Likewise, Pascal's Wager and the Pensee as a whole may be used by Pascal's God who moves in the most mysterious of ways to move a few more humans to acknowledge him and accept his grace. This podcast usually moves in ways that are much less mysterious, and so it is now, because we're going to move on to the subject that naturally follows from what I just said. Pascal was indeed an important voice in the Jansenist cause, and wrote a series of letters to defend the man who was that movement's leading philosophical mind, Antoine Arnault. He's the figure we'll be tackling next, but I'm betting that first you'd like to hear a bit more about the moves and counter moves that today's philosophers of religion are making in their discussions of Pascal's Wager. If so, then you can expect a big payoff, since we'll be talking to one of the most acute and prolific philosophers to address the wager in recent years, Liz Jackson. You stand to lose nothing and to gain a large, though finite, number of insights. If you join me and her for the next episode of the History of Philosophy without any guess.