Pascal's Wager

In some of my previous posts, I have briefly considered a couple of the more common religious arguments. I have focused on the argument from design, which is countered by the theory of evolution and I have also considered the argument from morality, which is juxtaposed with the problem of evil. We have also seen that morality can be explained without reference to the supernatural.

Evolution and the problem of evil are what I consider to be the strongest objections to all of the brands of religion that I have encountered. These are the two most powerful motivations for my atheism and the latter accounts for some of the passion you may perceive in the exposition of my arguments challenging religion. It is fair to say that I would have less argument with the deist, but at best I consider his god superfluous.

There are other arguments that we can consider. One that you may or may not be familiar with is known as 'Pascal's Wager'. I will briefly outline it.

Blaise Pascal was a mathematician who created the following wager- if you believe in god, that which you stand to gain if you are correct is enormous in relation to that which you have to lose if you are wrong, which is nothing. Pascal argued that if you live your life as an unbeliever and are correct, then death is final and after it you will cease to exist in any form, therefore you will have lost nothing. However if you are incorrect, you will be risking entry to heaven and an eternal life, things available only to the pious. Worse still, you may even be headed for somewhere such as purgatory or hell. Whereas, if you live your life as a believer and are incorrect you will die and your death will be final, you will know nothing and you will have lost nothing, just as the un-believer. However, and this is the lynch-pin of the proposition, if you live your life as a believer and are correct, you stand to gain far greater than you lose, for you may go to heaven and live eternally.

I suspect that Pascal’s wager wasn’t put forward as a serious proposition for being religious, but I do not know. I do know that it is cited as a common argument for belief in god.

The proposition does have a mathematical feel about it. It is an argument based on probability and the benefit to loss ratio involved in living your life as a believer and it does, for a moment, draw you to feel that the wager represents perfect logic. However after a little consideration, you will discover some problems with the wager.

Firstly, despite the delights available to the believer upon death, I find it hard to believe that one could grasp religious faith by the horns solely on this basis. Could one truly believe only in an effort to acquire the benefits of being a believer? You may start going to church, singing hymns and you may even start praying, however this does not mean that you will acquire a sincere belief in god. The wager itself does not provide any further evidence in favour of god existing, but merely proposes that the gain associated with being a believer far outweighs the loss. Could you believe on this basis only, especially if you already had doubts about the existence of god previous to ‘hedging your bets’ as suggested in the wager? I think that the best that may be mustered is a kind of lip-service belief offered only in an effort to secure a life after death.

Now, surely any god who has the properties as those that are suggested in many a holy book, such as omniscience, would be able to see the moral treachery committed by the ‘believer’. Surely god would tell instantly that the individual did not truly believe, but had acted only in a sycophantic kind of hedge betting so as to secure their own gain.

Also, the proposition does require that a believer also wagers heavily on the premise that any god who may exist places a high value on the belief of his flock. It assumes that the gates of heaven will be open to individuals who have managed to live their lives as believers. If a god did exist, he, she or it may place higher value on qualities such as sound reasoning, intellectual honesty and respect of evidence. Surely this god would praise the atheist for using the grey matter with which they had endowed them and reward their effort to make sense of the world around them to the best of their ability. Maybe it is people with these qualities who would be allowed entry into heaven, not those equipped with devout faith or those paying lip service in the form of worship to a god in whom they don’t really believe.

I do not find the wager very persuasive and recognise that many believers do not base their faith on this kind of cost / benefit premise, although I am sure that there are some who do. This argument is simply a proposition and an attempt to make belief a logical position. It adds nothing in terms of evidence and it soon becomes clear to us that human thoughts and feelings, and indeed belief, cannot be dealt with exactly as you would numbers in a sum or calculation.