27 Pascal's Wager (God is a safe bet) (Atheism FAQ)
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This article is from the Atheism FAQ, by mathew meta@pobox.com with numerous contributions by others.
27 Pascal's Wager (God is a safe bet) (Atheism FAQ)
"If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost
nothing -- but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be
incorrect, you will go to hell. Therefore it is foolish to be an
atheist."
This argument is known as Pascal's Wager. It has several flaws.
Firstly, it does not indicate which religion to follow. Indeed, there
are many mutually exclusive and contradictory religions out there.
This is often described as the "avoiding the wrong hell" problem. If a
person is a follower of one religion, he may end up in another
religion's version of hell.
Even if we assume that there's a God, that doesn't imply that there's
one unique God. Which should we believe in? If we believe in all of
them, how will we decide which commandments to follow?
Secondly, the statement that "If you believe in God and turn out to be
incorrect, you have lost nothing" is not true. Suppose you're
believing in the wrong God -- the true God might punish you for your
foolishness. Consider also the deaths that have resulted from people
rejecting medicine in favour of prayer.
Another flaw in the argument is that it is based on the assumption
that the two possibilities are equally likely -- or at least, that
they are of comparable likelihood. If, in fact, the possibility of
there being a God is close to zero, the argument becomes much less
persuasive. So sadly the argument is only likely to convince those who
believe already.
Also, many feel that for intellectually honest people, belief is based
on evidence, with some amount of intuition. It is not a matter of will
or cost-benefit analysis.
Formally speaking, the argument consists of four statements:
1. One does not know whether God exists.
2. Not believing in God is bad for one's eternal soul if God does
exist.
3. Believing in God is of no consequence if God does not exist.
4. Therefore it is in one's interest to believe in God.
There are two approaches to the argument. The first is to view
Statement 1 as an assumption, and Statement 2 as a consequence of it.
One problem with this approach, in the abstract, is that it creates
information from no information. This is considered invalid in
information theory. Statement 1 indicates one has no information about
God -- but Statement 2 indicates that beneficial information can be
gained from the absolute lack of information about God. This violates
information entropy -- information has been extracted from no
information, at no "cost".
The alternative approach is to claim that Statements 1 and 2 are both
assumptions. The problem with this is that Statement 2 is then
basically an assumption which states the Christian position, and only
a Christian will agree with that assumption. The argument thus
collapses to "If you are a Christian, it is in your interests to
believe in God" -- a rather vacuous tautology, and not the way Pascal
intended the argument to be viewed.
The biggest reason why Pascal's wager is a failure is that if God is
omniscient he will certainly know who really believes and who believes
as a wager. He will spurn the latter... assuming he actually cares at
all whether people believe in him. In addition, he may require more
than simple belief; almost all Christians believe that the Christian
God requires an element of trust and obedience from his followers, and
that destroys the assertion that if you believe but are wrong, you
lose nothing.
Finally, if this God is a fair and just God, he will judge people on
their actions in life, not on whether they happen to believe in him. A
God who sends good and kind people to hell is not one most atheists
would be prepared to consider worshipping.
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