Pascal's Wager... Revisited, Revised, and Updated
Offline Pascal's Wager fails miserably against today's arguments. Unfortunately for our good friend Blaise, there are more than two beliefs out there. The big three are Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim. Within these there are Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, and Orthodox Jews. Muslims have the Sunni and Shiite denominations. Christians? There are Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Baptists, Lutherans, Mormons, Christian Scientists, etc.
Unfortunately, this is just the big three. There are other plenty of other faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Baha'i, Confucianism, Jainism, Shinto, Rastafarianism, Scientology, and more. So this leaves us even more confused as to how Pascal's Wager would work in this situation, if at all.
But Pascal's Wager can still be applied to today's mess of religions – we just need to modify it. So how do we do this? First we need to realize that one ticket in the God lottery is certainly better than none. If you were given a ticket in a drawing for living in eternal paradise, would you throw it away? Certainly not! You would keep it, no matter how small your chances of getting picked, because there is still that chance. But it gets better than just randomly picking a ticket out of the pot. We can pick the religion that makes the most sense, the religion that has the most evidence for it. Well, which religions hold at least a little water to them? I think we can safely assume that most smaller religions like Scientology, Rastafarianism, Baha'i, Confucianism, and such are most likely cults, not the true followers of an omnipotent being. So let's look at the big three: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Let's take a look at the evidence for the big three. We'll start with Islam. Islam is founded on the Koran, written by Mohamed around 700 A.D. I don't know what kind of stuff we would need to prove Islam, since it's pretty recent and it doesn't make too many extreme claims or prophecies. There are several good videos on the major problems with the Koran here (Ignore the fact that he's a Christian, he does a good job pointing out the big flaws in the Koran). Let's take Judaism next. There are still Jews around even though their nation had been gone for hundreds of years, so we have some evidence for them. Unfortunately, they have a major flaw. They're still waiting for their messiah, but it is prophesied in the Bible that the Messiah would come before the destruction of the temple, which occurred in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed it. So I see a flaw in their belief too. Lastly, we have everyone's favorite (wink wink), Christianity. Do we have any proof for Christianity? Let's look at Jesus. Now, yes, I know, everyone here is going to say, “Oh, but Jesus didn't exist!!” I think we can prove him through his disciples. What motivated them to die such horrible deaths? Certainly not a myth they had made up in their minds. Now, yes, we have other people dying for their religion, but these people saw the real thing. They didn't have to read something and suppose that it happened. They were there when it happened. They had no advantage to preaching the gospel if Jesus was a myth. There was no political or monetary power to be gained by it. They were imprisoned, tortured, and died terrible deaths. What for? I think they died for Jesus, the Jesus who rose from the dead. Now, yes, it looks like I'm “promoting Christianity” here, but I want to try this out and see what everyone else has to say about this post. Maybe I'm dead wrong, if so I'll shut up, but I figure it'll be fun to challenge myself and everyone else with this.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
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No it is not, because you still have an equal chance of losing out for an obvious reason, that there exist an infinite number of possible propositions p relating to an entity which demans worship and controls your postmortem existence. So, in the case of the atheist, we have 0/inf, which is absurd (divide over zero), in the case of the theist, we have 1/inf, which is asymptotic (div by infinity). You can't win either way. There is still an equally infinite chance of losing. It is not an argument of any form, consider that an infinite number of propositions can be created implying seperate dieties which demand worship and will punish you otherwise. It does not matter whether you pick one or do not, your chance of striking right is still none, since the fraction derives an inherent absurdity. Even if this were not the case, I would challenge the idea that a single ticket is better than no ticket, since one would have to have an extreme amount of faith and foolish trust in a matter so critical to think they had actually picked the right ticket. Consider the purpose of the wager, it is meant to induce fear such that even the slightest chance of Chrsistianity being right forces one to adopt it because it is win-win or lose-lose. In this situation, you are creating an opposite scenario, that being that you know there is only a slighest chance of you being right and there is a much larger chance of you being wrong AND you still lose if you are wrong, so you have broken the wager. So one ticket or not, the wager would be mathematically unsound, you would, in effect, be playing Russian roulette with a revolver that held infinity loaded chambers.
Furthermore, why examine only this one scope of the debate, as opposed to simply pointing out that wagering ones bets in favour of any proposition relating to an entity that demands worship simply because of the possibility of losing is a hollow faith indeed. The whole purpose of faith is actual belief. Belief is belief regardless of volition. Unless I have some extraordinary psychological wedding to an emotional belief, I cannot sweep away the cognitive dissonance by engaging in self-deception and convincing myself that I actually believe when in fact I do not believe in it.
Thirdly, the argument still contains no substance because it is ad baculum
Fourth, the idea of life after death can be undercut anyway. onsciousness and mental process are extrinsic properties. They are not properties of the brain per se, but rather emergent abstractions which arise from the interaction between the brain and the empirical world. It is nonsense to speak of "thoughts" and such as originating from a confusing Cartesian realm, since a thought, by definition necessitates a recombination of sensation and memory. While the relationship between the conscious process and thoughts is not reciprocal (a being cannot be described as conscious without thought, yet thought can exist in an unconscious organism). So, with the organic death of the biological structures which process sensory data, and the death of the neural networks which make up memory...we cannot truly speak of the continuation of "you" as an entity, simply because "you" depend on both of these. If I selectively destroy the neurons associated with your memories, then do you still exist? In what sense is the being which is perceiving the world through your eyes "you" if "your" memories are destroyed? The bottom line is that mental processes are extrinsic, not intrinsic, so they depend on the empirical world. It is hence inherently absurd to claim that they originate anywhere except by processes of the brain, which is in and interacts with this empirical world which is necessary for the existence of you as an entity and your thoughts. Indeed, how can a mysterious Cartesian "you" survive death in this regard? In what sense is this mysterious non-physical think "you"? It would not have your memory, since those depend on neural networks which die when the brain dies. It would not be conscious since an aware being requires sensory input, yet that implies a physical mechanism. In short, how is it possibly coherent in any fashion to speak of a mysterious Cartesian realm or a supernatural origin for human mental process, and consciousness in particular? These are extrinsic between the brain and the world. Two cloned brains will not have the same empirical experiences and hence not be expressed as beings which are identical, hence they will have different memory and experience and hence different thoughts and be different people. All because of interaction between the brain and the world. The continuation of the conscious process necessitates physical process in the brain within the domain of the empirical world since these processes are extrinsic, not intrinsic, and certainly not intrinsic to some mysterious Cartesian essence. “You” as a self-aware entity require an extremely fine and balanced arrangement of matter that generates the property of “you” being a self-aware conscious organism, of neurons, neural clusters, brain tissue, synapses and such. This precise arrangement does not survive death, it is destroyed.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
To sum up a couple of the above points
1.We could come up with An infinite number of religions or belief systems that suppose a God and therefore there will always be a 1 in infinity chance you have the right one. Those odds are so big that it is impoosible therefore to be right.
2.the standard Pascal reponse, God requires you to believe without doubt (a stupid thing for anyone to do) but by using pascals wager to justify belief you are at best saying "i'll put my faith in something i know might be wrong just so i wont face the concequences if i'm wrong in my disbelief"
deludedgod has handled the basic parts of Pascal's Wager pretty well but no one's touched the nonsense about how Christianity is true because the disciples died for it.
What horrible deaths? The horrible deaths of the disciples as martyrs for Christ are nothing more than Church tradition, probably started long after they died, however they died. There is no real evidence that the disciples were martyrs, or that, if they were martyrs, that they were martyred for the same beliefs contained in the Gospels. (Outside the Gospels, there's not even any evidence for the disciples themselves, other than Peter, Paul, and James, who are mentioned in the epistles.)
Even if the first Christians really did die horrible deaths for their beliefs, which is totally unsupported, we would still have no idea what those beliefs actually were. There is no surviving record of what the early Christians believed that can be truly trusted to not have been edited later by the church.
You're attempting to argue that, since the disciples were willing to die for the belief in a Christ who died and rose, there really was a Christ who died and rose, and therefore Christianity is true. Yet your argument is circular. Your argument is that the disciples really did believe in a Christ who died and rose because they saw these events for themselves. But the only record that exists of what happened with the disciples is the Gospel. Assuming that they saw these events for themselves requires assuming that the Christian interpretation of the Gospels is true -- the very conclusion you're trying to argue for.
Saying "The Disciples would never have died for Christ if they hadn't met him and if he wasn't God!" assumes the very depiction of the disciples' beliefs that you want to prove. If the disciples had believed in a totally spiritual Gnostic Christ, as the Mythicists claim, or simply followed the teachings of a decidedly non-divine but real Jesus, as Non-Mythicists claim, then the beliefs that the disciples were willing to die for could very well have been a form of Christianity totally unlike modern Christianity or the picture of Christianity depicted in the Gospels. And these beliefs of the disciples are unrecorded. Could Andrew have been martyred for not renouncing his belief in a totally spiritual Christ who never visited Earth? Possibly, but we'll never know, since any later Church could easily have erased the heresies from their traditions.
Furthermore, regardless of the specific beliefs that the disciples had about Jesus, there would still be other beliefs they may have been willing to die for. Again, if they were martyred, we still don't know what they were martyred for, beyond the unreliable traditions of the church. Whether or not Christ was divine or actually existed, the disciples would have believed in the Jewish God of the Old Testament, and would probably have been willing to die for him. They may also have believed that Rome would be punished for its treatment of Jews and Christians, whether they got those beliefs from a divine prophet of God, from a charismatic public preacher, or from a Gnostic interpretation of visions and scriptures, and died for that belief, which would have made them political martyrs and not religious ones. Just as some have suggested that Jesus was really executed for political reasons, the disciples might very well have been martyred for their protests of Rome.
But we'll never know, because the deaths of the disciples have been shrouded and obfuscated by the centuries of church opposition to heresy, until truth can't be separated from tradition.
You are dead wrong and it's not a challenge to anyone. This stupid "Jesus was really God because people died for him!" argument has been around as long as there have been atheists. You don't even need to be a Jesus Mythicist to get this argument thrown at you.
Götter sind für Arten, die sich selbst verraten -- in den Glauben flüchten um sich hinzurichten. Menschen brauchen Götter um sich zu verletzen, um sich zu vernichten -- das sind wir.
In England, the fundamentalists use the wager as an anti-apathy tool.
They say "Find out and accept or reject our beliefs, but don't just stand back and say 'you might be right but it doesn't matter' because it does matter. Either we are right or we're wrong and if we're right then you're in trouble so don't you want to hear what we say and be sure?"
It turns out that they'd rather be intolerant to their belief rather than tolerate it without believing!
Well, it looks like deludedgod just beat the shit out of me, congratulations on doing so. I guess it will never work, no matter what, but I wanted to reconcile that in my mind.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
As an aside, what keeps one of the options from being a deity that loves atheists as it hates being bothered by humans. Thus by being an atheist you are assuring your place in a utopian afterlife provided by the very anthropromophic deity you do not believe in. At the same time this god hates theist of all kinds as they bother him with their constant pleading and praying, and thusly casts all god believers into a place of torment for all eternity. The fact that such a deity can be even concieved of places a potential gain for the atheist position and by the criteria of Pascal's Wager makes no difference between believing and not believing in its gain/loss ratio.
The Regular Expressions of Humanistic Jones: Where one software Engineer will show the world that God is nothing more than an undefined pointer.
I didn't think of that...that would be awesome though. Nice point.
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Its been my response to Pascal's wager ever since I was turned from Deism. I was shown my only remaining argument for god was crap, and then sat down and thought about it.
I had turned to Deism in the mindset that, give the nearly infinite possible variations on religion, no one interpretation on god was acceptable without massive evidence in its favor. So I took what I thought at the time was the default, just acknowledge there is a god and don't try to define it by religion's terms. Things like first-cause arguments and the Wager still had me thinking that there MUST be a god... and honestly, I think I was still scared the idea of no afterlife.
Upon my turn away from that last shred of god, I also got my final answer to the Wager which was in almost the same form as my answer to Theism. Given an infinite number of gods, we must necessarily include even the most bizarre and down-right silly gods as well. Therefore we must account for gods that love non-believers over believers as well. By this case the gain-loss chart now registers +'s for non-believers and thus we can claim that the Non-believer position stands to gain just as much if not more if they are wrong as a Believer stands to gain if they are right.
No praises unto the non-existent Athe for he does not exist and if he did they would just bother him.
The Regular Expressions of Humanistic Jones: Where one software Engineer will show the world that God is nothing more than an undefined pointer.
It's not to defend my fellow Frenchman, but I think Pascal's wager still stands in the way he intended to. Sort of.
Basically there are still two choices.
1) You believe (in any of the zillions of registered religions, or you can even make up your own one or mix them up, it doesn't matter - you're still a believer)
2) You're an Atheist. You reject any of these until there's a proof.
These are basically the two different stances that Pascal described.
Where it falls short, though, in my opinion, is that it presupposes equiprobability of the two propositions. Sure, if we knew for sure that we have a 50% probaibility of 1) or 2), or even any measurable and known probability whatsoever (different than 0), it would stand. But that's the problem. It's not a probabilistic area.
The same logic fallacy can be easily observed in the following metaphor: if I throw a dice, then one of these proposition is true:
1) I roll a 1
2) I roll something else than a 1 (eg 2,3,4,5 or 6)
There are two propositions, therefore we have 50% probability of each one of them. Let's wager for 1.