Blaise Pascal's famous wager was that even if the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a rational person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
What logical flaws and/or fallacies, if any, are committed in the making of this argument?
He assumed that if God exists then
1a. humans are immortal (as a necessary condition for 1b)
1b. God decides whether they are tortured eternally or happy eternally (one of them is enough to profit infinitely, though)
1c. God bases his decision on whether they believe in him (if this is not the case, the wager does not work, because believing in God or believing in God because of the wager might cause infinite torture)
1d. God bases his decision on whether they follow religious law (again, the wager does not work if God does not like people following religious law)
1e. God is the Christian God and you have to believe in exactly the right doctrinal points and those are the points that Pascal was raised with (again, the wager does not work if God does not like people to follow a particular religious law)
It is not true that you have nothing to lose if there is no afterlife and you have spent all your life following the instruction of the religion even though you would have preferred to do something else.
He also assumed that he can rationally decide to believe.
Summary: The wager assumes that there is a positive probability for God rewarding a particular behaviour with eternal bliss and a zero probability for God punishing this very behaviour with denial of eternal bliss. There is no reason for this assumption.
If the probability for a reward is in fact zero, it does matter if you sacrifice all the life you have for a non-existing reward.
If the probability for God disliking the behavious is not zero, then you have to weigh more than one infinite expectance values.
Even if everything works fine, you would have to be able to believe or disbelieve just because you want to. (Like, say, an atheist who reads a study that believers have a better healing chance for a particular cancer and decides to become a believer as a therapy.)
It's logically fine if someone believes all the assumptions and then says that it is a good idea to believe. But this person believes in the first place, they do not believe because of the assumptions, they are just happy with their belief because of what they believe.
There are a great many logical fallacies in how the Wager is applied. Often the Wager is suggested as some sort of proof or last-ditch argument for God. But since it was embedded in the Pensées, which was Pascal's life project to defend Christian thought, it seems unlikely he intended for the Wager to stand alone. Whether anyone would be convinced by such an argument seems not to be the main thrust of Pascal's formulation of the Wager.
The very introductory statement to his argument shows that Pascal concedes that God cannot be proven in the Aquinian sense:
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him.
Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in expounding it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their word; it is in lacking proofs, that they are not lacking in sense.
It makes more sense to view Pascal's Wager as a precursor to Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. In contradiction to Cartesian skepticism, we are free (even compelled) to act on beliefs that we cannot prove from first principles. Any reasonable reading of Pensées would conclude that Pascal is not trying to take the risk out of choosing the Christian faith. Rather, he was defending the faith from the charge that it is irrational.
The Wager takes on added weight when you consider that Pascal himself made a bet and took up an ascetic lifestyle near the end of his life. It was this time that the Wager was formulated and it was not published in his lifetime. It's difficult to ignore the possibility that Pascal took the Wager quite seriously. He summarized the argument by making this precise point:
The end of this discourse.—Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.
"Ah! This discourse transports me, charms me," etc.
If this discourse pleases you and seems impressive, know that it is made by a man who has knelt, both before and after it, in prayer to that Being, infinite and without parts, before whom he lays all he has, for you also to lay before Him all you have for your own good and for His glory, that so strength may be given to lowliness.—Pensée 233
And I suppose that is the primary fallacy of Pascal's Wager: it can mean little to nothing to people who have not thrown themselves into the pattern of thought that Pascal himself followed. It is unpersuasive since it builds on uncommonly held premises.
On a personal note, I find the Wager touching, even though or perhaps because, it is flawed. I love T. S. Eliot description of Pascal: "a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world." A normal Christian considering the sacrifice he made would be content to contemplate the words of Jesus in Mark 8:34-38 (ESV):
And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
But not Blaise Pascal, mathematician. Instead, he converted Jesus' idea into an example of the relatively new field of probability. And while the problem was setup in a way that it is easily rejected as an apologetic of Christianity, it is still valid and useful as a mathematical puzzle.
Here's my problem with it:
Choose a group of self-described Christians and call them Group A.
Group A believes that Jesus was the son of God, he died on the cross for our sins, and only through him can we go to heaven.
Choose another group of self-described Christians and call them Group B.
Group B believes that Jesus was the son of God, he died on the cross for our sins, and only through him can we go to heaven.
Given: for every Group A, there is a Group B that firmly believes that Group A is going to hell.
As a result, the statement "a rational person should wager as though God exists" is meaningless, unless you first define to which group you're referring.
The logical flaw is that he ignored a third possibility. Essentially he assumed that either there is no God, or there is a God who will do something good for you if you do some set of positive actions or, at worst, will do nothing. The third possibility is that God is evil or just backwards, and does good only for those who disrepect him or don't believe in him or spend their lives convincing people to hate him, etc., and punishes everyone else. "Bad God" is just as probable as "Good God" without any other assumptions, so it makes no sense to believe that one or the other exists.
Any religious tradition promising infinite good or infinite bad to the individual would be desirable according to the wager - not just Chrisianity. At this point, a reasonable person needs to examine the religious traditions that meet this definition to determine which infinite reward is most plausible, and they may reach different conclusions than Pascal.
There is also the issue of this being a very weak, fake faith. Would God accept it? The reasonable response would be that a person recognizing both the value of Christian faith, and their inability to believe such a ludicrous idea, would pray fervently for Christian faith. A merciful God would grant faith to anyone who seeks it, and the once-disbeliever would receive the infinite reward for finite effort anyways. A lack of a merciful God would mean the unbeliever might (a) convince himself falsely to believe - finite loss, finite reward or loss depending on if you believe that believing is its own reward; or (b) waste a bunch of time praying and never come to believe, finite loss, finite loss or reward depending on if you believe that believing is its own punishment.
You can modify Pascal's wager to suggest a course of action for people coming from a different understanding of religion (e.g., non-Christian) than his: A rational person would act according to whichever set of different religious traditions that promise infinite consequences and do not conflict with each other, weighted by which set he thinks is most likely to contain a religion that will actually deliver the hoped-for reward (which religions are most plausible), and also weighted by how attainable those rewards are for someone who takes this approach (e.g., can a person starting from unbelief end by attaining the rewards?). I think it's a little more complicated than this, since you also have to weigh in punishments, but hopefully you get the idea. Obviously, defining this set of religions would take a lot of thought, research, and reasoning. It is also likely that reasonable people could come to very different conclusions about the "best" religion using a generalized form of the wager like this.
He assumes that God would accept the sort of cold, calculating faith able to make such a wager seriously.
To me this would seem to be a significant problem. I'm definitely not an expert on Pascal, so you may wish to take this with a grain of salt.
I think his premise has at least one fault: living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose I personally think that are lots of things to lose, like the freedom to think beyond the dogma and many others. However if we assume all the sentences correct, the conclusion is correct, no pure logic flaws I think.
If this life is all you have and will ever have it is unique and therefore has infinite value. The choice, assuming you accept the imaginary celestial side of the argument, is balanced: one infinity versus another. Moreover, there is no doubt that your current life does actually exist, and no evidnce whatever for the "infinity" of heaven. Pascal's actual wager would, then, have a person restrict the actions and pleasures of your one real, infinitely valuable life for the sake of a contradictory delusion, life after non-life.
Suppose someone tells you that it has been revealed to him that there's an omnipotent being who is very secretive and wants to be completely ignored, and that if you live your life as if there's no God you'll be given an infinite reward after you die, but if you outwardly show any religiosity, you'll be eternally punished? This equally unprovable assertion is subject to Pascal's own argument, and thus cancels it.
The logical flaw is the premis itself, starting with a false promise reaching any conclusion is logically crrect.it has two parts
1)A god exists AND
2)God that exists has set of rules to award points for some types of behavious and deduct points otherwise.
The way he viewed god is the same as the sheep would view a shpered. They would do as they were told to meet the end just as the same as the non-behaving sheep, yet they all end up tasting same to the sheperd.
Avoiding purpose-built problems, there is one basic error of context.
As a Christian, he buys into the monotheistic tradition. The wager ignores the potential disapproval of all the other gods for believing in the wrong one.
If believing in Baal is worse than not believing in the Lord, in the Jewish world, and vice versus in the Samaritan world, and you live between them, you might be best off ignoring them both.
Even if your god's aren't jealous, they are likely to place different and opposing requirements upon you, which you don't have to reconcile if you simply avoid the concept of worship altogether.
Another flaw that hasn't been pointed out yet is that there is a 50% chance that god exists. Pascal bases this on the fact that we can never know the probability.
Consider a lotto. There are two outcomes, win or lose. If you had no idea of the odds of this particular lotto, you wouldn't assume that the odds are exactly 50-50.
The same principle can be applies to Pascal's Wager. For those who believe that there is only a remote chance that god exists, the wager does not apply.
One point that no one has mentioned but that I make use of in the following paper:
https://doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2023.133030
Pascal came before the introduction of infinite sets. This is important because one can hold that there's no ultimate proof against God's existence, and also hold that the probability that God exists is zero. To do so, however, one must embrace the existence of infinite sets. Thus Pascal thought that zero probability implied impossibility. This fact about zero probability not implying impossibility is important to the Wager. For if we hold a position with zero probability, the expected payout for belief isn't necessarily infinite. Thus we could possibly have a finite expected payout for belief, but not be tied to an absolute proof against God's existence.
Myself I hold such a position - that the probability for God's existence (at least certain types of Gods) is zero, but there's no absolute proof against these Gods existing. It is also true that Richard Dawkins made the same mistake as Pascal in his "Spectrum of Theistic Probabilities". I won't go into large detail here, as you all can follow the link if you're interested in my work.
If one doesn’t believe that God exists then one doesn’t necessarily believe/ can affirm that God will punish (or forgive) people who don’t believe in him. If he exists he may be so forgiving that all of us we’ll live blessed ever after. But if he doesn’t exist then people who believed in him may have lost opportunities along the way. In other words you have nothing to lose by not believing.
There are a few fundamental problems with Pascal's wager.
(1) Which version of God one conceives of matters. The so-called Professor's God, instead of rewarding belief for belief's sake, rewards rationality. If you think you have sufficiently strong reason to think that God exists as to justify rational belief, then rationally, you should believe that he does; if you think you don't have sufficiently strong reason to think that God exists as to justify rational belief, then rationally, you should withhold belief. And that's what the Professor's God wants from you: believe or not according to the reason you have, or don't have, to think that God exists. And as it turns out, the usual game-theoretical result of Pascal's wager--that you're better off believing than not believing--gets reversed, if you don't think you have sufficiently strong reason to think that God exists as to justify rational belief that he does. In that case, if you do believe you lose out, while you gain if you don't believe. But...what would an actual God be like? Would he want you to believe in him no matter what? Or would he want you to believe in him only if it were rational to believe in him? You don't know--so you also don't know which way Pascal's wager militates. (2) Pascal's wager is an expected-value argument. (And, I will note, it does not matter whether the probability of Pascal's God's existence is 0.5 or is 0.000000000000000000001; as long as it's nonzero, Pascal's wager goes through.) But we know that expected-value arguments involving infinitudes--game-theoretic arguments involving infinitudes--have serious problems with them, and relying on one seems highly dubious. (3) We know that the form of the argument isn't one that we would normally rely on. If I said that there were powerful aliens who would destroy the Earth in a week unless you said to yourself, and meant it, "I submit to your [the aliens'] will." But suppose I further said that they would not only spare the Earth but would give you an elixir of immortality (and eternal youth and eternal good health--let's not forget the example of Tithonos) if you simply submitted yourself to their will (and they're telepathic, so they'll know). Nobody would do that unless he had really good reason to think that those aliens really existed! And nobody should rely on Pascal's wager unless he thinks he has really good reason to think that God exists already--which rather defeats the purpose of Pascal's wager in the first place.
This question is a no-brainer. You have nothing to lose if you base a conclusion that god exists as a result of the argument of pascal's wager.
However, God wants faith to replace a logical argument or evidence to conclude that faith to be the truth.
God wants you to believe. If you based your 'belief' in god based upon the logic of pascal's wager your just hedging your bets, and it is not faith and not what you truly desire. God would know that.
