Why pascals wager is wrong

He also assumed that he can rationally decide to believe. Improve this answer. Phira Phira 1, 10 10 silver badges 18 18 bronze badges. There have been many Gods in the past, and there is no particular way to think that God is supposed to like what Pascal had in mind.

Bob Some interpretations of the Wager argue that it could be suggested that believing in a generic God, or a god by the wrong name, is acceptable so long as that conception of God has similar characteristics of the conception of God considered in Pascal's Wager.

I think that "many religions" is a valid flaw, as most Gods aren't tolerant of other religions, but I'm sure there are many other flaws : — John Lyon. You cover inauthentic belief well, but are there any other logical fallacies in the wager?

Perhaps an argument from inconsistent revelations? And are any of the assumptions Pascal made false? In item 1b, the infinite reward is sufficient. Pascal did not mention eternal torture. But then all of item 1 is simply an attempt to rephrase the Wager and I don't see how it is a fallacy at all. Perhaps you are looking for the false dilemma fallacy? You missed one. He also assumed that there was only one God. Show 7 more comments. The very introductory statement to his argument shows that Pascal concedes that God cannot be proven in the Aquinian sense : If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us.

He summarized the argument by making this precise point: The end of this discourse. This discourse transports me, charms me," etc. Community Bot 1. Jon Ericson Jon Ericson 6, 4 4 gold badges 32 32 silver badges 64 64 bronze badges. Exactly, Pascal's wager is something akin to 'the beginning of wisdom' not the end all convincing argument.

Do I understand you right that Pascal's Wager wasn't really meant as an airtight logical argument, but rather a strategy to get people to join his belief?

His goal was not intellectual point-scoring, but simply persuasion, even if it involved some logical slight of hand?

JonofAllTrades: Because Pascal's thoughts were organized posthumously, it's hard to tell what he planned to do with the Wager. However the translation I have, it comes right after a series of thoughts on how we avoid contemplating our own mortality and seek any distraction.

Pascal implies that we owe it to ourselves to take the possibility of life after death seriously if only because of the relative payouts.

Not contemplating eternal things turns out to be a bad bet even if the odds such thing exist is very low. Well put. And you convince me to read or, at least, finally acquire a copy of Pensee. I take the wager to be the original use of probability as refutation of skepticism, as Berkeley used "materialism. Add a comment. Here's my problem with it: Choose a group of self-described Christians and call them Group A.

Dori Dori 3 3 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. But surely there aren't multiple deities allowed by the original Wager. I belief you are suggesting the Wager is an example of the false dilemma fallacy. Also Pascal would be amused to know that critics seem to assume he was unfamiliar with divisions within Christianity.

Dori: Isn't that a form of begging the question? The argument sets up a dichotomy between the monotheistic God and the possibility of no god. You are free to reject the argument because the dilemma it presents is false, but you are not free to reject it because it's false. Unless there is some flaw you have not mentioned. To a monotheist, there is one God and some or rather all people have false beliefs about Him. Diversity of belief results from a defect in humanity i.

Please see my answer. Dori: I think not. Suppose I offered my guests vanilla ice cream with their pie or just the pie. One of them replies, "Well, I'll have Neapolitan. You can't have Neapolitan since the only available option is vanilla. That might be a valid answer in an ice cream shop, but it's not at a dinner party with limited flavors. My criticism of your answer is that Pascal has invited you to his dinner party and you are treating it like an ice cream shop.

Again, my answer to this question may be useful to you. I can't buy them all, and saying I just want "vanilla" still means rejecting n-1 vanillas. Dori: It saddens me that you seem unwilling to engage the question with your answer.

Let's hear from Pascal himself: "If there is a god, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is But that's entire beside the point.

Show 8 more comments. Although I agree with your line of reasoning I'm not sure this is a "logical flaw" so much as a flaw in imagination. Pascal's conception of God likely precludes "Bad God". Mike I suppose it could go either way.

The other answers have argued that precluding "Bad God" is a mistake. For the record, I believe this answer amounts to: "Pascal's Wager is a false dilemma". That's a valid critique, but it does not require the idea of a "Bad God". A lenient God, who rewards people regardless of their actions would be sufficient. But I think this line of reasoning misunderstands what Pascal was trying to accomplish in the Wager. Forth option: There are several gods. Why do everyone forget that option? So if non-belief is a conceivable route to heaven, it's the logical option.

As is believing in the FSM, or Thor, ad infinitum. Ethel Evans Ethel Evans 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges. On the issue of weak faith, Jesus didn't exactly set the bar high: "For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.

Which is why considering Christianity only a prudent Wagerer would ask God to give them faith. He's merciful and all-powerful, right? He can give me whatever evidence I need to believe, or He can just "touch my heart" in some mystical manner and make me believe.

If I am wrong and You exist, please give me enough faith that I can go to Heaven instead. If He's pleased, I may get rewarded. If he doesn't exist, I wasted a few seconds. There are also critics of the Wager who, far from objecting to infinite utilities, want to see more of them in the matrix. For example, it might be thought that a forgiving God would bestow infinite utility upon wagerers-for and wagerers-against alike—Rescher is one author who entertains this possibility.

Or it might be thought that, on the contrary, wagering against an existent God results in negative infinite utility. As we have noted, some authors read Pascal himself as saying as much. Suppose, for instance, that God does not exist, but that we are reincarnated ad infinitum , and that the total utility we receive is an infinite sum that diverges to infinity or to negative infinity.

The matrix should have more rows. Perhaps there is more than one way to wager for God, and the rewards that God bestows vary accordingly. For instance, God might not reward infinitely those who strive to believe in Him only for the very mercenary reasons that Pascal gives, as James has observed. One could also imagine distinguishing belief based on faith from belief based on evidential reasons, and posit different rewards in each case. The matrix should have more columns: the many Gods objection.

If Pascal is really right that reason can decide nothing here, then it would seem that various other theistic hypotheses are also live options. By excluded middle, this is a partition. Since then, the point has been presented again and refined in various ways. Although there may be ties among the expected utilities—all infinite—for believing in various ones among them, their respective probabilities can be used as tie-breakers. Note that this principle is not found in the Wager itself, although it might be regarded as a friendly addition.

Are there reasons, then, for assigning higher probability to some Gods than others? They begin by noting the familiar problem in science of underdetermination of theory by evidence.

Faced with a multiplicity of theories that all fit the observed data equally well, we favor the simplest such theory. Conceptions of rival Gods, by contrast, leave open various questions about their nature, the answering of which would detract from their simplicity, and thus their probability. This relies on a sophisticated handling of infinite utilities in terms of utility ratios given in his ; see below. He argues that a given probability assignment is choiceworthy only if it is an equilibrium of this deliberational dynamics.

He shows that certain assignments are choiceworthy by this criterion, thus providing a kind of vindication of Pascal against the many Gods objection. There are four sorts of problem for this premise. The first two are straightforward; the second two are more technical, and can be found by following the link to footnote 9. However, perhaps you could rationally fail to assign it a probability—your probability that God exists could remain undefined.

We cannot enter here into the thorny issues concerning the attribution of probabilities to agents. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. Or perhaps rationality does not require it, but at least permits it. Either way, the Wager would not even get off the ground.

Strict atheists may insist on the rationality of a probability assignment of 0, as Oppy among others points out. For example, they may contend that reason alone can settle that God does not exist, perhaps by arguing that the very notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being is contradictory.

Or a Bayesian might hold that rationality places no constraint on probabilistic judgments beyond coherence or conformity to the probability calculus. Indeed, this inequality is questionable, as even Pascal seems to allow. Now perhaps this is an analytic truth, in which case we could grant it to Pascal without further discussion—perhaps it is constitutive of rationality to maximize expectation, as some might say.

But this premise has met serious objections. The Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, for example, are said to show that maximizing expectation can lead one to perform intuitively sub-optimal actions.

So too the St. Petersburg paradox, in which it is supposedly absurd that one should be prepared to pay any finite amount to play a game with infinite expectation.

That paradox is particularly apposite here. Various refinements of expected utility theory have been suggested as a result of such problems. Or we might consider suitably defined utility ratios , and prefer one option to another if and only if the utility ratio of the former relative to the latter is greater than 1—see Bartha If we either admit refinements of traditional expected utility theory, or are pluralistic about our decision rules, then premise 3 is apparently false as it stands. Indeed, Bartha argues that his ratio-based reformulation answers some of the most pressing objections to the Wager that turn on its invocation of infinite utility.

Finally, one might distinguish between practical rationality and theoretical rationality. One could then concede that practical rationality requires you to maximize expected utility, while insisting that theoretical rationality might require something else of you—say, proportioning belief to the amount of evidence available. But when these two sides of rationality pull in opposite directions, as they apparently can here, it is not obvious that practical rationality should take precedence.

For a discussion of pragmatic, as opposed to theoretical, reasons for belief, see Foley A number of authors who have been otherwise critical of the Wager have explicitly conceded that the Wager is valid—e. Mackie , Rescher , Mougin and Sober , and most emphatically, Hacking Their point is that there are strategies besides wagering for God that also have infinite expectation—namely, mixed strategies, whereby you do not wager for or against God outright, but rather choose which of these actions to perform on the basis of the outcome of some chance device.

The expectation of the entire strategy is:. It can be argued that the problem is still worse than this, though, for there is a sense in which anything that you do might be regarded as a mixed strategy between wagering for God, and wagering against God, with suitable probability weights given to each. Suppose that you choose to ignore the Wager, and to go and have a hamburger instead. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your winding up wagering for God nonetheless; and this probability multiplied by infinity again gives infinity.

So ignoring the Wager and having a hamburger has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. Even worse, suppose that you focus all your energy into avoiding belief in God.

Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your efforts failing, with the result that you wager for God nonetheless. In that case again, your expectation is infinite again. Rather, there is a many-way tie for first place, as it were.

All hell breaks loose: anything you might do is maximally good by expected utility lights! He argues that an atheist or agnostic has more than one opportunity to follow a mixed strategy. Returning to the first example of one, suppose that the fair coin lands tails. You are back to where you started. But since it was rational for you to follow the mixed strategy the first time, it is rational for you to follow it again now—that is, to toss the coin again.

And if it lands tails again, it is rational for you to toss the coin again … With probability 1, the coin will land heads eventually, and from that point on you will wager for God. Similar reasoning applies to wagering for God just in case an n-sided die lands 1 say : with probability 1 the die will eventually land 1, so if you repeatedly base your mixed strategy on the die, with probability 1 you will wind up wagering for God after a finite number of rolls.

Robertson replies that not all such mixed strategies are probabilistically guaranteed to lead to your wagering for God in the long run: not ones in which the probability of wagering for God decreases sufficiently fast on successive trials.

However, Easwaran and Monton counter-reply that with a continuum of times at which the dice can be rolled, the sequence of rolls that Robertson proposes can be completed in an arbitrarily short period of time. In that case, what should you do next? Easwaran and Monton prove that if there are uncountably many times at which one implements a mixed strategy with non-zero probability of wagering for God, then with probability 1, one ends up wagering for God at one of these times.

And they assume, as is standard, that once one wagers for God there is no going back. They concede that imagining uncountably rolls of a die, say, involves an idealization that is surely not physically realizable. But they maintain that you should act in the way that an idealized version of yourself would eventually act, one who can realize the rolls as described—that is, wager for God outright.

There is a further twist on the mixed strategies objection. But we have seen numerous reasons not to grant all his premises. But if it is, according to the mixed strategies objection, all hell breaks loose.

Hence, it seems that each action that gets infinite expected utility according to Pascal similarly gets infinite expected utility according to you ; but by the previous reasoning, that is anything you might do. The full force of the objection that hit Pascal now hits you too. But that is just another way for all hell to break loose for you: in that case, you cannot evaluate the choiceworthiness of your possible actions at all.

Either way, you face decision-theoretic paralysis. It still does not obviously follow that you should wager for God. All that we have granted is that one norm—the norm of rationality—prescribes wagering for God. For all that has been said, some other norm might prescribe wagering against God. And unless we can show that the rationality norm trumps the others, we have not settled what you should do, all things considered. There are several arguments to the effect that morality requires you to wager against God.

Pascal himself appears to be aware of one such argument. One way of putting the argument is that wagering for God may require you to corrupt yourself, thus violating a Kantian duty to yourself. Penelhum contends that the putative divine plan is itself immoral, condemning as it does honest non-believers to loss of eternal happiness, when such unbelief is in no way culpable; and that to adopt the relevant belief is to be complicit to this immoral plan.

See Quinn for replies to these arguments. For example, against Penelhum he argues that as long as God treats non-believers justly, there is nothing immoral about him bestowing special favor on believers, more perhaps than they deserve. Finally, Voltaire protests that there is something unseemly about the whole Wager. Let us now grant Pascal that, all things considered rationality and morality included , you should wager for God.

What exactly does this involve? A number of authors read Pascal as arguing that you should believe in God—see e. Quinn , and Jordan a. But perhaps one cannot simply believe in God at will; and rationality cannot require the impossible.

What, then, would you have me do? However, he contends that one can take steps to cultivate such belief:. But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.

We find two main pieces of advice to the non-believer here: act like a believer, and suppress those passions that are obstacles to becoming a believer. And these are actions that one can perform at will.

If he is real than I want to be the guy who dose Jesus less harm as a stranger than the people he called children, it sounds at least like a win-win.

If this is all just a pointless parade than It does not matter at all except 1. I helped my species advance, and I get to do the things that I am temporarily here to be part of while getting all the little chemicals that make me feel happy while showing empathy towards others. I do it because it just gave me personal satisfaction and I think that is all that religion is, its personal satisfaction. As of now, there is no external force that we can prove that dictates our species interpersonal cultural interactions.

But if believing in god helps you act socially benevolent than super! If you can act kind without the threats of eternal pain, awesome. But either way act kind. And that does not mean you can force your unproven assumptions on others. As humans we know we are right, within ourselves, every single one of us…. And the weird thing is we are!

With a world that we can live on for a long, long time. So get busy and make this place better for the long run. For the species sake.. People always think of evolution as something thru history past. But its happening now, all the races around the world , cultures, groups, our genetic diversity is what makes us so great, as great as one group may think it is, a single microbe could wipe them all out, we need back up plans, we need diversity to survive.

You need to go away; we need different peoples doing different things to insure our future. We need to move forward as a team. But please just leave others alone. Its not their fault that your god has chosen not to speak to them. I mean I know you feel you are special and you do love your life but waiting to die sounds just awful.

And if god made you and you are part of this universe than you are just a part in a larger wheel but a part that is here so it is a part that is supposed to be here. Go out and explore and learn, just because your small does not mean you are not important, be the butter fly that creates a tornado.

Or, are we not going to be allowed to grow and be forced to kill ourselves off. We just assume our senses are the right and best.

So the choices I have laid out for myself in this particular universe on this particular world with these particular customs that I inhabit are as follows 1. I can live a morally, ethically and righteous life that is in the goldilock zone of positive continuation of the species while doing things that give my brain the chemicals that make me feel good by caring for others without the threats of Santa will put coal in your stocking hell-fire.

Side note about Santa, I always found it interesting that even the bad kids were loved by Santa to the point that he wanted to at least keep them warm; even if they were not good enough to get toys he cares enough to give them fuel to stay warm with.

I would rather be the kindest of strangers to Jesus than one of the multitude of hate filled children of his. If god exists than he understand that because if he made me he knows my mind, but if he does not understand that than he should have made me differently! I will do what is right because it is culturally right and it helps the species advance. Give your god a break, take some personal responsibility, show him that you can stand up straight on the two feet he has loaned you and maybe he will remove the blinders from your eyes and maybe you will get a small glance at the majesty of the ALL.

The creation is the creator. So I guess the last and most important question I have is? Is this some good weed or what? And smart people need to start having babies or the generations to follow will not get the best of what our brains are capable of. Are we locusts or are we focused. If the concept of life after death appeals to you AWESOME, but that does not give you the right to take the lives of others who would rather stay a while longer.

If you want to go, go! But pack lightly. We can get farther without you dragging us all down. Is my computer desk little more than an altar to the newly born computer god? I find myself in deep meditation at the altar asking the son google to ask the father the internet to show me the answers to the questions I want to know. Is the internet learning about us as we commune with it? As we answer questions about our likes and dislikes?

About our perceived wants and needs? Are we the new believers in a power that is greater than ourselves? Are computers gateways for growth or do we use it to waist what little precious time we have? Will it care about what happens to us or will it choose to explore the larger universe and leave us behind? Are you kidding? Your logic would be that it is a valid position since being selfless is as likely to bring poor consequences as being selfish.

So everyone should choose to do what is evil? The set of lives that lead to heaven is some subset of the set of all possible lives, this is all we know. Maybe it is the empty set, maybe it is the set of all possible lives itself, maybe it is the set containing only the life that I am living right now heaven would be a lonely place then. It is most likely that it is the empty set since the bacteria that we evolved from had no ability to appreciate a concept of heaven or travel to such a place and there is no reason natural selection would select creatures that perceived heaven when they died.

In any case if the set of lives that lead to heaven is not empty then every life has an equal chance of being in the set until proven otherwise. That is true, but not ALL religions are exclusive in that sense. For example, Jews are quite happy believing that ALL good people go to heaven irrespective of their religion. But Judaism is not unique in this. There are other religions eg.

Sikhism which also have no problem with the worship of a God of a different religion believing that they are all the same God. But your argument, that living a good life is sufficient is of course supported by the above. So it really then comes down to whether one wishes to believe. You are commenting using your WordPress.

You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content An argument often used by religious people is that they have nothing to lose by believing in God and that Atheists are risking eternity in Hell for no gain.