Blaise Pascal's wager | Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J.

Blaise Pascal's wager | Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. | Editorial for Homiletic & Pastoral Review | November 2008

The case for atheism seems to be riding high these days, with the books of several authors on the New York Times’ bestsellers list. Virtually all atheists now are evolutionists, since Darwin’s theory gives atheists a way to explain the obvious order of the universe with no “Orderer” or God. They have found the watch and have convinced themselves that there is no watchmaker. One of their members even admitted that evolution is “the engine of atheism.” Sir Julian Huxley is quoted as saying that he could not have been an atheist before 1859 (the year of the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species).

Three hundred and fifty years ago there lived in France a brilliant young man by the name of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). He was a mathematician, scientist, apologist for Catholicism and a powerful writer in the French language. His most famous work is his Pensées, which has been reprinted many times and translated into all the modern languages.

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Comments

[Vincent Toups]

Pascal's Wager is a bad argument - I will not say that there are no good arguments for God's Existence, but I will take a moment to explain why Pascal's Wager is a bad one. I believe the world would be a much better place if we could all agree to stop wasting time on bad arguments and get to the business of truth finding without distraction.

It is easy to demonstrate the the problems with Pascal's Wager - suppose Christianity offers some gain to us for our belief in it. Pascal's Wager claims that I cannot risk losing the infinite on the basis of any chance, especially since the alternative presents me with no loss.

Imagine then that I approach you with the following claim - not only is Christianity False, so that the reward it offers you is not infinite, but I offer a reward which is in all ways identical to the one proposed by Christianity but ten percent better! All you have to do is believe that the number of angels which can dance on the head of needle is unbounded but must always be prime. This is an even better deal than the one offered by Christianity - I offer a larger reward (by ten percent) AND my Doctrine is considerably less burdensome on your day to day life.

I would hope you would not apostate yourself to join my religion. Why? Because I may make an offer but my offer is simply NOT CREDIBLE. The atheist is not neglecting Christianity because he does not want an infinite reward, he is discounting it because he perceives the likelihood of it being true as nearly zero.

Modern probability theory sheds light on the problems with the wager - in Bayesian analysis a person makes decisions not just based on the rewards and punishments of successes and failures but on the relative probabilities of a correct guess or an incorrect one. In this case the infinite reward of being a christian is multiplied by the probability of Christianity being True (effectively zero, an atheist believes, correctly or not) and the decision to neglect Christianity is made.

In other words, in light of modern thinking what this comes down to, ultimately, is who makes a credible offer, not what the rewards are. If a person believes an offer is sufficiently incredible, then it is logical to reject it.

There is one wrinkle here - the notion that the reward is infinite. If the reward is infinite then we cannot reason about it - at least without more mathematical machinery than the Church provides us with for quantifying the reward. In any case, I would argue that no reward can be infinite for a human because we are finite creatures, and so can only perceive a finite amount of reward.

[Jackson]

Vincent, as for this line:

"The atheist is not neglecting Christianity because he does not want an infinite reward, he is discounting it because he perceives the likelihood of it being true as nearly zero."

This is a rather idealized portrait of the atheist, i.e., atheist as champion of pure reason. From what I've seen, it seems that, really, atheism primarily flows from emotion, morality, and will - not intellect. Fulton Sheen's words ring true:

"No one is born an atheist, as no one is born a skeptic; these attitudes are made, and they are made less by the way one thinks than by the way one lives."

As for Pascal's Wager, is it really an argument for God's existence? Doesn't it actually presuppose that God's existence can't be deduced via pure reason?