An Aurelian wager


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.

Comments

  1. says

    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.”

  2. StevoR says

    What happened to Pascal’s brain?

    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

  3. whheydt says

    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.

  4. whheydt says

    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.

  5. raven says

    Epicurus had something a lot more intelligent than Pascal to say as well.

    Epicurus:

    Would God be willing to prevent evil but unable?Therefore he is not omnipotent.
    Would he be capable, but without desire? So he is malevolent.
    Would he be both capable and willing? So why is there evil?
    Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

    The universe we live in looks like a universe would look if the gods didn’t exist.

  6. beholder says

    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.

  7. Rob Grigjanis says

    whheydt @4:

    The real problem I see with Pascal’s Wager is that it assumes it is a binary choice.

    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.

  8. says

    “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).

  9. beholder says

    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.

  10. birgerjohansson says

    Aurelius forgot an option: The gods might be incompetent, like Aqua in Konosuba.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    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.

  12. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them.

    Wikipedia – Book of Job

    In chapter 1, the prologue on Earth introduces Job as a righteous man, blessed with wealth, sons, and daughters […] God gives Satan permission to strip Job of his wealth and kill his children and servants
    […]
    Job contrasts his previous fortune with his present plight as an outcast, mocked and in pain. He protests his innocence, lists the principles he has lived by, and demands that God answer him.
    […]
    From chapter 38, God speaks from a whirlwind. God’s speeches do not explain Job’s suffering, defend divine justice, enter into the courtroom of confrontation that Job has demanded, or respond to his oath of innocence of which the narrative prologue shows God is well aware.

    Instead, God changes the subject to human frailty and contrasts Job’s weakness with divine wisdom and omnipotence: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Job responds briefly, but God’s monologue resumes, never addressing Job directly.

    [God brags at length about making the formidable behemoth and leviathan and how nobody’s gonna stop him from doing whatever he wants to Job. “41:10-11 None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me? Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? Whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine.]

    [In 42, Job retracts his complaints and grovels. God gives him twice as many animals as he started with. Friends and family give him gold and money, and “comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him”. Job had as many children as before, plus 3.]

    * SAB Job ToC
    * Skeptic’s Annotate Bible note

    it says nothing about his wife (who in 2:9 said he should curse God and die). Was she still around? Or did God replace her with a newer, prettier wife? And, lastly, were Job’s new children made in the usual way? And if so, who was their mom? Job’s three new daughters were even prettier that his original ones! The new ones even had names

  13. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Job 2:9: “Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.”

  14. JM says

    What happened to Pascal’s brain? He must have read some deeper philosophy than the tripe he wrote.

    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.

  15. John Morales says

    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:

    Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on projective geometry; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of conic sections at the age of 16. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. In 1642, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines (called Pascal’s calculators and later Pascalines), establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.[6][7]

    Like his contemporary René Descartes, Pascal was also a pioneer in the natural and applied sciences. Pascal wrote in defense of the scientific method and produced several controversial results. He made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli. The SI unit for pressure is named for Pascal. Following Torricelli and Galileo Galilei, in 1647 he rebutted the likes of Aristotle and Descartes who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum.

    He is also credited as the inventor of modern public transportation, having established the carrosses à cinq sols, the first modern public transport service, shortly before his death in 1662.[8]

  16. wsierichs says

    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.

  17. stevewatson says

    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).

  18. says

    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.

  19. says

    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:

    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.

    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.

  20. Owlmirror says

    Looking at this assembled compilation being operationally coded, I give up. I’m just not that good at machining language.

  21. DanDare says

    My biggest gripe with Pascal’s Wager is that it assumes there is no cost for choosing the belief. I beg to differ.

  22. Owlmirror says

    Is there a kilopascal’s wager?

    Religious people do like to overpressure everyone with their beliefs…

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