From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Oct 12 2002 - 17:03:47 MDT
After I sent my earlier post on tomorrow's meeting, I
took a further look at the AU site and noticed an
article by George Smith on Pascal's Wager. The
article was tagged as "new."
<http://www.atheistsunited.org/html/pamphlets/smith/smith.html>
Some of you may recall more recently my forwarding of
some material on memetics that I had posted to one of
the news groups focusing on the ongoing Pacifica
Network controversies. One of the arguments I
included in that post had to do with the seductiveness
of Pascal's Wager from an analysis based on decision
theory. As far as I knew, this particular explicit
line of argument was original with me, although
various other takes on the issue included it
implicitly, and of course there are many separate and
valid arguments against Pascal's Wager.
At the monthly breakfast meeting of Atheists United
shortly thereafter, I brought up my version of this
argument to several of the attendees to get their
feedback. None of them had ever heard my particular
take, and one of them, the husband of some official at
AU, suggested that I submit it for consideration in
the newsletter.
I haven't seen the newsletter, as I'm not a member of
the organization due to my objections to their
"Progressive" political positions, so maybe they
actually published my article, but apparently they
must have contacted George Smith about my article, as,
instead of my new original contribution to the set of
arguments against the Wager, they published George's
article, which incorporates my line of argument, as
you will see if you read his article, without quite
ever quoting it.
If you've read Goerge's rather good "Atheism, the Case
Against God," then you may have noted that none of his
arguments are new there either. He provides a
well-written, reasonably concise summary of a lot of
fairly sophisticated thought on the isssue, but when
he doesn't himself understand some complex line of
argument, he suddenly gets very verbose. Sadly, I
don't know of any original work by George since his
original libertarian writings in "Invictus."
Some things never change.
Here is what I sent Atheists United:
Harvey Tippit and I had a brief converstaion at the OC
AU breakfast meeting a couple months back and he
suggested that I send this on for possible inclusion
in the newsletter. Unfortunately I can't get to a
copy of the original piece which was submitted to one
of the Pacifica/KPFK news groups which does not
maintain an archive, as well as to the Extropy.org
email list, which does, but which hasn't yet gotten
around to compiling the 2nd or 3rd Qtr archives of the
list - so I'm stuck with re-creating it on the fly in
15 minutes here at the library...
Ok, the typical form of Pascal's Wager goes like this:
The upside of believing in the particular formulation
of God being proposed by some person at some
particular moment is that if it is in fact the case
that that particular God is for real, then you're home
free - if that particular God pays off that way. The
downside - of believing - is allegedly negligable,
while the alleged downside of non-believing may be
very high indeed. So, why not be safe and just
BELIEVE(!)?
Well, decision theory tells us to multiply the
probability of some outcome by its evaluative weight
in comparing it to other possible courses of action.
Running across a lonely country road without looking
may have a low probability of automotive encounters
but a very high evaluative weight for having one. So
we decide to look first.
Getting struck by a meteor is probably about as bad on
average as getting hit by a car, but we only have one
such event on record for all of known human history
(not counting the people who died from the blast
effects of the Tunguska event) and that lady survived.
So, we don't watch for meteors when we step outside -
at least not for safety reasons.
Now what about Pascal's Wager? Here the problem is
that the Christians got really clever. Pascal's
wager, as used by the typical Christian, attaches an
INFINITE weight to the outcome. Infinity multiplied
by any positive quantity is still infinite.
We are told by the typical Christian that if we only
believe then we will be rewarded with paradise
FOREVER! And, depending upon the particular doctrine
being sold, if we don't believe, then we risk
infinitely horrible torture - again FOREVER. Wow!
That's heavy, brother.
So, applying straitforward decision theory, the very
MOST important thing that we need to do RIGHT THIS
MOMENT is BELIEVE... right? I mean, what could
outweigh INFINITY? What possible trivial finite
earthly reward could justify taking an infinite risk?
Hopefully none of you has collapsed onto his or her
knees at this point, desperately enjoining the cosmic
dictator to forgive you for your infinitely terrible
mistake. Because... there are also, on brief
inspection, an infinite number of possible Gods that
might conceivably exist:
Rational Gods who reward non-belief and punish
believers. Silly Gods who made this whole thing up as
a joke. Juvenile Gods who cooked up our whole
universe on their gaming machine and are getting bored
anyway. Talk-show Gods who tweak our universe to
create interesting stories. Sadistic Gods who ain't
goin to let you win nohow. Inconsistent Gods who are
struggling to reconcile omniscience with free will.
Neurotic Gods who need your reassurance that they're
"OK." Please feel free to extend this list.
So, the two infinities cancel out - or, transposing a
couple of terms in the formula, the probability of any
particular unsupported fantasy being real goes to zero
as you multiply the number of terms under
consideration. Belief, non-belief, animal sacrifice,
human sacrifice, self-sacrifice, prayer, holy rolling,
snake handling.... What possible criteria could be
used to determine which of the infinite number of
possible conflicting claims upon our lives should be
chosen? Fantasies can be multiplied forever. I don't
CARE that your "God" will torture me forever.
Infinity times zero is ZERO!
It is only when someone, typically a child or anyone
who is philosophically ignorant, is posed with
Pascal's Wager in the form that poses only ONE
unsupported fantasy that we get anomalous result from
our normal decision process. Unlike scientific
hypotheses, which have to satisfy criteria such as
internal consistency, consistency with known evidence,
explanation of known results, predictive capacity and
parsimony, fantasies such as "God" have no limits on
their variety and thus should be assigned no weight in
our decision-making process.
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