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Pascal's Wager

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The Odds Are Against You

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I'm one of the many people--I'm sure there are thousands, if not millions--who have independantly come up with Pascal's Wager.

Pascal's Wager goes like this: If there is no god, no deities, or anything like that, it doesn't matter one way or another what you believe, but if there is one, you're in big trouble if you don't believe in it. Sounds simple enough, right?

Pascal's Wager is a sort of dislexic dog race. The way you usually hear it, either God exists or he doesn't. It's as if there's only one dog that will get you any money, and if that dog wins and you bet on it, you win, but if you didn't bet at all, you have to fork over you're money. It's a very common and popular thing to tell atheists when you've run out of other arguments. However, like many others who ended up where I ended up belief-wise, I couldn't let the argument rest. I wanted to be sure I had the odds down before forking over the money, and that I didn't immediately give in to the extortion of loosing all my money whether I bet or not. I encountered some problems.

• How many dogs?

  I first realized that I really have to consider the consequences of believing or not believing in all the religions. I basically have to compare the odds on all the dogs. There are a lot of dogs in this race--a lot of religions are out there. And these religions often have different consequences when you die for not believing. The Christian God gets mad if you don't believe in Jesus, Allah doesn't mind too much if you believe in Jesus or if you're Jewish, but gets really mad if you're a polytheist, and so on. There are so many religions around, and new ones often pop up, and old ones occasionally die out. I can't be entirely sure that what happens to be the predominant religion in my area of the world, say, Christianity (ignoring the variations), is The One True Religion. What if it's one of the other major world religions, like Islam or Hindu, is? Or, you might say, little differences in culture and practice don't matter. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all more or less equally valid, similarly all varieties of Buddhism and Hindu and Jainism are more or less the same. But, even so, which god do I believe in? What about Greco-Roman religion? Just because it's no longer around doesn't necessarily make it invalid. Afterall, the Roman Empire fell apart when people stopped believing in Jupiter and Mars and Venus and all of them. Or, maybe I'm supposed to believe in one of those native, shaman religions? But, what if the One True Religion hasn't come up yet? There was a time before most of the major religions that consider themselves the only path to salvation. How do I know that I'm in trouble because I was born too soon? I could go on forever...

• How do I know what is wanted, anyway?

  So far, I've been assuming that all I need to do is just accept one of the major world religions, past, present, or future, and I'll be fine. But, as Christianity, Buddhism, and almost any major religion you want to name demonstrates, it's not so simple. For many varieties of religion, simple belief in the existance of a deity or deities is not sufficent. How do I know that, even if I've picked the right dog to bet on, that I'll follow the proper procedure to collect my winnings?

• What about empirical evidence?

  Before putting my money on a dog race, I'd want to make sure that the race is indeed taking place. I'm not a big betting person, but if I do bet, I make sure I bet on a real event. If someone told me to bet on the result of a coin toss in Mexico, I'd want to see a video or some kind of evidence that the person wasn't just telling me something to get my money. Now, I realize that the whole idea behind gambling is that you don't know the outcome beforehand. This is fine. But when I'm asked to bet on an event that doesn't sound even physically possible, and I'm not allowed to see the event take place, and... I think you get the idea.

• What if there is something coresponding to some deity, but he/she/it/they doesn't care?

  Why is there the assumption that a god cares whether we believe in its existance? One of my favorite ideas on the origin of the universe is that there were some higher-dimensional kids fooling around with some stuff, and accidentally created the universe. Even if our universe was created by someone, that doesn't mean whoever created it cares one way or another about us. Or, what if whoever created it specifically dislikes blind followers and tortures them for worshiping him?

After a little bit of this, I gave up on the whole religion idea all together. Ethics and morality, often given as examples of the benefits of religion, do not require the supernatural to exist. I'm not going to waste my time worrying about the odds of an afterlife. For me, the sure bet is that I'm here now. I'm going to enjoy it.

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