Pascal's Wager

 “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”  Edgar Allen Poe

Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) was a French physicist, mathematician, writer, inventor, and Christian philosopher.  He developed an argument in apologetic philosophy called Pascal’s Wager. The idea of a wager is not surprising given the fact that Pascal and Pierre de Fermat both were early developers of probability theory.  Keep in mind that probability is a measurement of how likely any event will occur,  and ranges from zero (impossible) to one (absolute certainty).  For example, the flip of a two-sided coin (one side heads and the other tails) has a probability of one-half (.5) of being heads and one-half (.5) of being tails. 

The expected value (E) of any event is equal to the value (V) of the event, times the probability (P) of the event occurring,  and can be expressed as E = V * P.   For example, if I bet a friend ten dollars that the next flip of a coin will be heads, V would equal ten dollars and P would equal .5.  In this case,  E = 10.00 times .5 = five dollars, thus making my wager very foolish. It would not be smart to risks ten dollars when the expected value is only five dollars.

Pascal used probability theory to argue that betting on the existence of God is the “best” bet.  At the heart of his argument is the idea the value (V) of heaven and everlasting life is infinite.  Therefore the expected value is also infinite because infinity times any non-zero probability is also infinite. Remember the probability of God’s existence cannot be zero since it is not possible to prove a negative.  For example, if a friend tells you that he saw and heard a talking snake in his garden, no one can prove that he did not.

According to Pascal it is smart for a rational person to live as though God exists and seek to believe in God because even if God does not exist, there is only a finite cost associated with believing, whereas there is an infinite cost (eternal damnation in hell) for not believing in the chance that God does exist.

The argument sounds reasonable. Right?  The major flaw can easily be seen by remembering that God is and must be omniscient (all-knowing).  An omniscient God will know immediately which “believers” are treating divine theology like a gambling parlor.  In other words how does one “live as though God exists and seek to believe in God?”  There is the additional problem of  knowing which God to believe in.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all quite clear about the fate of those not accepting their only true God.  In essence the salvation-seeker only has one chance in three of selecting the correct “God.” 

There is also the matter of  “only finite costs associated with believing.”  The time and monetary investments in religion are actually quite high. Many religious require a tithe of 10%,  and the cost to any society can be extremely high. The time and money invested in religion could be allocated to other endeavors such as education and public health. Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed relates how religion caused the total demise of the Norse settlement in Greenland.  These Norsemen settled in Greenland in the tenth century and their numbers peaked at four thousand inhabitants before they went extinct due to over investing in religion.  Ruins reveal that they had built sixteen churches at the expense of procuring and storing food for the long winter.

History provides ample examples of the high cost of religion.  What was the cost of all the crusades in blood and treasure?  What was the cost of 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon?  The dollar cost has been estimated to be more than thirteen billion dollars not to mention the 2,996 innocents who lost their lives.  Finite costs?  Yes,  they are both finite and incalculable.

There are also intangible costs of religion that are perhaps even greater than the monetary ones. William Blake noted that “Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.”  Blake’s point is that when people attempt to live by a code that is incompatible with their nature, bad things happen.  Mankind’s basic survival mechanism is logic and reason.  Accepting anything on faith both undermines progress,  and mental and emotional equilibrium. The idea that man was born into sin as an object to be sacrificed is a threat to his survival. Thomas Jefferson stated the idea very clearly when he said, “Mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs.”  Modern educated people are not bound by the superstitious ramblings of ignorant and illiterate bronze-age shepherds.

Atheists and skeptics standing on the backs of giants such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and Hawking all see further now and have no need for mysticism in any form.  They have replaced ignorance and superstition with knowledge, logic, and science.  Pascal was correct when he said, “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.” I would throw the net wider to include all the theistic religions.

Sources:

1.  Blog: Why Religion? (August 31, 2012) - Needlefish Chronicles

2.  Blog: Free Will (May 14, 2013) - Needlefish Chronicles

3.  Blog: The Gospel Truth (January 28, 2013) - Needlefish Chronicles

4.  Blog: The Origins of Religious Belief (April 17, 2013) - Needlefish Chronicles