Pascal's Pragmatism

Let me make you an offer. I have in one hand the details for a Swiss bank account with 5 million US$ in it. In the other, I have a loaded uzi. If you are ready to believe that the president of France is dressed in an Easter bunny costume right now you get the bank account, no questions asked, no strings attached. If you refuse to believe that, you will be shot dead.

You’ve got no good reason to believe it. There’s no evidence for you to believe that the president of France is dressed in an Easter bunny costume right now. However, assuming you want to live, and you want the money, it makes sense to believe that statement. It’s more likely to be false, but it’s prudent for you to believe it nonetheless. This is what Pascal argues.

Pascal’s argument is prudential: it gives you a reason, apart from evidence, to believe in God – in this case, increasing maximum value. Supposing there’s a lottery of 10000$. A ticket costs 1$, and there are 100 tickets. Should you buy a ticket?
We find the expected value – the average payoff you could expect – with the following formula:
(chance of failure X loss) + (chance of success X gain) = expected value
So if you enter the lottery, the equation is:
(99/100 X -1) + (1/100 X 10000) = 99.01
Your expected value is thus 99 times higher if you enter than if you don’t. The gamble seems to make sense here, the loss is relatively small compared to the large payoff you could win.

Now let’s apply this argument to God. Pascal claims that if you believe in God, and he exists, you will go to heaven and have infinite bliss. If he doesn’t, well, it’s not such a big loss – so you wouldn’t have gone to Church all those times. That’s all. Let’s say that there’s a 1 in a million chance that God exists. The expected value formula comes to this:
(99999/1000000 X –y) + (1/1000000 X ∞) = ∞

However, if you don’t believe in God, you will go to hell: eternal damnation. The equation becomes:
(1/1000000 X -∞) + (99999/1000000 X y) = -∞

Thus the expected value of believing in God is infinite bliss, and not believing in him is infinite damnation, regardless of what practising that belief means. Just like it would make sense for you to believe that the president of France is dressed in an Easter bunny costume in the situation I introduced, it makes sense to believe in God. I’ll present 5 objections to this argument, and invite you to come up with more, or with responses Pascal could give to these.

The first objection is called the Many Gods problem. Why should we believe in God when there are other omnipotent beings that shall grant us eternal bliss or damnation according to our belief in them: like the spaghetti monster. The expected values are the same for the spaghetti monster as for God, but we can’t believe in both. One could argue against the Spaghetti monster in a number of ways: one could present the social benefit argument, for example: there’s a larger community that believes in God than in the spaghetti monster, there’s some more material benefit to the former then. But the problem remains when we consider other religions. There’s more than one religion that states that one shall go to hell if one isn’t a member of that religion. It’s a pretty risky gamble now, seeing how there’s about 42000 religious beliefs in the world. Moreover, religions don’t have consensus within themselves regarding belief. We see Muslim leaders condemning terrorists who claim to be acting in the name of Allah – but what if these terrorists are right?

The second objection is against Pascal’s assumption that God will reward everyone who believes in him, and will punish everyone who doesn’t. That isn’t necessarily true – what if God will reward everyone who is hard-working and generous, despite your belief? Or what if, as Elliott Sober points out, God sends everyone to heaven except those who are convinced by Pascal? There’s no reason to believe that one can’t do good deeds without believing in God: there are many atheists who are good people.

Also, Pascal assumes that no mortal thing is of serious consequence, thus I’ve represented it as a y. Pascal would argue that what you stand to lose or gain in not believing in God is finite – your life is limited anyways. Going to church really won’t kill you. I could put a 10 in place of y.
My objection is that I could also put infinity in place of y: sure, going to church won’t hurt that much. But belief in God can be quite constricting. It’s living a life of devotion. It’s not being promiscuous before marriage. If you knew that God and the afterlife didn’t exist, wouldn’t you live your life differently? You’d live every moment to the fullest, because life ends at the grave. Seeing how your life is finite, if you believed in God and God didn’t exist, you’d have wasted you one and only chance to have fun. That’s as bad, I think – only there’s a greater chance that that will happen.

The above are all objections to the statement that believing in God will maximise expected value regardless of the evidence. The next two objections are against the fact that one should do what maximises expected value.

Firstly, how does one believe? Sure, it’s in your favour to believe that the president of France is dressed in an Easter bunny costume – it’s not so easy to believe though. Similarly, even if it’s in your favour to believe in God, it’s not always that easy. What if you’re a staunch Atheist?
Pascal suggests that the solution to this is to live among religious people. Their influence will rub off on you. I’m not convinced it would work as easily as that. Convictions are convictions, often regardless of people around you. If you’re a really adamant Atheist, no preacher is going to be able to change that.

Secondly, the fact that something is in your best interests doesn’t mean one ought to do it. Let me present another situation: I still have the Swiss bank account, but let me put the uzi away. Don’t worry about believing anything about the President of France anymore. I’ll double the money in the account if you’ll press a Big Red Button I present to you. This button will detonate an atomic bomb planted under a little-known town, killing all 10000 people in it. You don’t know these people, they have no effect on your life whatsoever. It’s your call: are you going to press the Button?
Here of course it’s in your best interest to press it. But it’s not in the general best interest. If those 10000 people had a say in it, I’m sure they’d be quite unhappy with the idea that you’ll kill them all for 10 million dollars.


I’ll leave these debates open-ended. Please respond to any of the points, raise your own objections or respond to the above objections.

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Supposing He Doesn't Exist
Metaphysics