I was just served Pascal’s Wager in my email. Anyone who deploys that ill-formed nonsense is a fool in my book — including Pascal himself, who invented it after a weird Jansenist epiphany. My reply is always the same, after Marcus Aurelius, who seems to have avoided the “revelation” of religion:
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
That’s good enough for me.
What happened to Pascal’s brain? He must have read some deeper philosophy than the tripe he wrote.
That’s a lovely sentiment, and definitely one that I’m stealing to add to my own little scrapbook of personal philosophies – my favourite of which at the moment comes from Doctor Who”
“The universe shows its true face when it asks for help; we show ours by how we respond.”
Overheated due to blaising up too much? Turned to jelly* under pressure?
A bit unfair on an important physicist and mathematician ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal ) but still
The big thing for me about the whole Pascal’s wager thing is how insultingly stupid it makes any God that accepts it. Also how unprincipled. I don’t think Pascal can have done much work on ethics somehow? ( Goes to check own wikilink..)
.* Pascals is a lolly – sugar treats &, I think, licorice (spelling – pronouncd “lick or ish”) – company here – think its international too. 123
If my late wife’s religious beliefs were correct, I will tear the afterlife apart seeking her. If my beliefs are correct, all that is left of her are the words she wrote and the memories of the living.
The real problem I see with Pascal’s Wager is that it assumes it is a binary choice. People have–and do–believe in a variety of gods, and even when disparate groups claim to believe in the same one, they attribute different characteristics and attitudes to that god. So the Wager comes to, not to believe or not, but if you choose to believe, which god/set of attributes do you pick–where picking wrong supposedly has dire consequences.
Epicurus had something a lot more intelligent than Pascal to say as well.
The universe we live in looks like a universe would look if the gods didn’t exist.
PZ’s teasing us with a dumb ☪oe✡is✝ e-mail, but we don’t get to read it. Oh well.
I am personally a fan of Pascal’s Triangle Wager, where there is a monotheist at the top and where each person must syncretize and believe in the gods of the (at most) two people immediately above them. It’s never communicated perfectly between levels, so each imparted god belief essentially counts as a new god for the purposes of later concatenation.
Is there a kilopascal’s wager?
whheydt @4:
It is binary. But it’s not “god(s) or no god(s)”. It’s “Pascal’s god or not Pascal’s god”. The latter covers atheism and every other kind of theism.
That’s my reading, anyway.
“What happened to Pascal’s brain?” I’m gonna be merciful and suggest he merely caved to pressure from peers and a society who had far less room for atheism or agnosticism than we have today, or than Marcus Aurelius (or whoever actually wrote that quote of his) had in his time. Sort of like all those other past philosophers who came up with really smart and useful ideas, but then had to mollify the establishment by using their smart new ideas to “prove the existence of God” (yet again).
Correcting @6 to “Pascal’s Wager Triangle”, after I was informed that “Pascal’s Triangle Wager” claims that there’s a god out there who wants you to write down Pascal’s Triangle, so you should, just in case.
Aurelius forgot an option: The gods might be incompetent, like Aqua in Konosuba.
Raven @5
Epicurus was a clever one.
If you ask Herr Doktor Johannes Cabal, necromancer, he will say that both god and the devil are avatars of Nyarlahotep, playing good cop/ bad cop.
Words to live by!
Wikipedia – Book of Job
* SAB Job ToC
* Skeptic’s Annotate Bible note
Job 2:9: “Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.”
Pascal likely wrote the wager specifically to appeal to some friends that gambled constantly. Pascal himself did foundational work on probability theory for a friend that asked him about calculating winnings in gambling. In that context the format and argument make more sense even if they don’t ultimately work. Historically there is no record that he actually used the argument with anybody, it was found in some of his notes after his death. Some of his writing and notes were assembled in a book after his death and the argument became famous through the book.
There was of course nothing wrong with Pascal’s brain; he was a damn good mathy dude.
Also, the Wager takes as one of its premises that God’s existence cannot be determined by reason, which basically vitiates most apologetics.
From Wikipedia:
In fairness to Pascal, he probably did not invent it as it was used by a third-century CE Christian writer, also by Thomas More. The Wager is in a collection of notes Pascal wrote, a sort of diary of his thoughts, so he likely was repeating it because he liked it. The thoughts were published as a collection after his death, so it’s possible he never intended the dairy to be released. Additionally, at least one pagan Roman wrote something that strikes me as a variation of the same argument. Even if my speculation is wrong, the argument (which is nonsense) is likely pretty old.
@Robert Westwood #7
I prefer FORTRAN’s wager…
Ada might beg to differ, phillipbrown.
(It’s all very BASIC)
I C what you did there…
More Pythonesque, I’d say.
With a few PERLs of wisdom here and there…
I don’t know about Pascal specifically, but from what I’ve read about other Great Minds of the Past, it’s often difficult or impossible to separate the “good” rational stuff that we agree with from the “bad” religious stuff that we don’t, as seen from the POV of the individual under consideration. They themselves would have seen their thinking as a unified endeavour, and for us to insist on seeing it as internally contradictory is Whig history — the imposition of our own prejudices on an historical figure. For example: I’ve just finished James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers, and he describes the ways in which Kepler’s religious and mystical ideas influenced his astronomical work — the laws of planetary motion were not in tension with his religious ideas, but (to Kepler) were a outcome of them.
(I dimly recall that Stephen Jay Gould’s essays contain similar examples, but it’s been a very long time since I read any of them).
Sky Captain: Yeah, the book of Job has always seemed one of the most utterly ridiculous parts of the Bible — which is saying a lot. I don’t remember anyone ever quoting it to support any sort of useful message or advice. How any Christian can mention it without embarrassment is beyond me.
Guess I’ll dust this off. Aside from previous points made, I find it’s a vehicle for mercenary faith. It replaces “is this true?” and “is God good?” with “What’s in it for me?”
If I were the god in charge, I’d be insulted by such faith motivated by self-interest, rather than logic, evidence, and empathy for other beings. But then again, I’d be quite a different deity than the one Pascal posits. I’m certainly insulted when someone uses the argument on me, assuming that hedonistic self-interest is my overriding motivation.
JM @ 17:
I can buy that. Still comes across as a cynical half-measure, rather than a sincere effort, though. The fact that it’s gotten popular just makes it more annoying.
possibly all part of a Satanic COBOL…
Looking at this assembled compilation being operationally coded, I give up. I’m just not that good at machining language.
My biggest gripe with Pascal’s Wager is that it assumes there is no cost for choosing the belief. I beg to differ.
Religious people do like to overpressure everyone with their beliefs…