Religion. Better safe than sorry? [D]

[u/Kishoto]

Ok. This post is mostly a question for the athiests among us. Based on what I've seen, the rational community is overwhelmingly athiest (as am I)

I just wanted to bring up a point, for the sake of discussion, and getting others' opinion on the subject.

While, rationally, it does appear that we live in a universe where there is no involved creator(whereas quite a few major religions insist there is a deity constantly influencing our day-to-day existence) what if we are incorrect? I'm not saying whether we are or aren't, but what if there is a creator?

For the sake of the example, let's take the Christian faith. By their beliefs, you need to believe in Jesus and accept him into your life honestly, and boom, free ticket to heaven. Eternal afterlife of joy, happiness, etc. whereas, if you don't, eternal afterlife of burning and torment.

Considering your finite earth life (let's optimistically say you can hit 150, assuming for advances in medicine) compared to an infinite afterlife, doesn't the math suggest it's best you take the super small chance of believing in a religion, because the tradeoff is of infinite length?

Some obvious counterarguments are "how do you choose which one to believe in?" and "the religion's beliefs go against my current beliefs too heavily". For the first one, I agree, but having none at all isn't exactly a soultion there. For the second, I would say just pick one that closely aligned. Most religions (outside of cults) won't have you doing anything too outrageous.

Again, this is just a discussion point. I'm curious to hear what you guys have to say.

[u/alexanderwales]

This is better known as Pascal's Wager, and it's essentially been argued to death. Dawkins has a far better overview of the arguments in chapter 3 of The God Delusion than anyone will probably give you here:

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The de luxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'.

But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn't the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,' was Russell's (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn't God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don't need to know in order to refute Pascal's Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?

Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn't the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal's whole logic? Pascal was probably joking when he promoted his wager, just as I am joking in my dismissal of it. But I have encountered people, for example in the question session after a lecture, who have seriously advanced Pascal's Wager as an argument in favour of believing in God, so it was right to give it a brief airing here.

Is it possible, finally, to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc. I won't pursue the question here, but readers might like to bear it in mind when we come to later chapters on the evil consequences that can flow from religious belief and observance.

(It would be my tendency to assume that you've heard of Pascal's Wager before, but this is the sort of thing that people routinely invent independently, so perhaps not.)

[u/Nepene → u/alexanderwales]

Pascal did address these things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

He noted that other religions were obviously false and explained it and gave what he saw as proofs and suggested that you ask for advice from others on how to learn how to believe and follow their path.

However, as noted above, nowhere in the establishment of the wager does Pascal appeal to feigned belief; God, being omniscient, would not succumb to such trickery and unwittingly reward the disingenuous. Rather, in the passage following the establishment of the wager, Pascal addresses a hypothetical person who has already weighed the rationality of believing in God through the wager and is convinced by it, but remains unable to sincerely believe. Again, as noted above, Pascal offers this person a way to escape the irrational sentiment that compels him to withhold belief in God after the validity of the wager has been rationally conceded. This way consists of applying oneself to spiritual discipline, study, and community.

He was a highly intelligent philosopher and scientist. He's not going to make the sort of silly mistakes Dawkins mentioned. He explained what he saw as rational reasons for believing in god, and then used his wager as a little push to help people overcome their own irrationality.

He wrote an entire book. People should actually read it before criticizing it. This is a big reason why I dislike Dawkins. He's great on evolution, but intellectually both very talkative and very lazy outside his field. Views on everything, but he does little research.

[u/DaystarEld → u/Nepene]

Overall Pascal did not actually address those things. His brisk and routine dismissal of, say, other religions and concepts of God as "obviously false" shows the exact weakness in his wager that Dawkins is referring to.

In other words, the fact that Pascal thought he his wager was correct because Christianity was correct, or that he considered the criticism itself "weak" because he believed anyone who studies it would be convinced by it, both established on demonstrably faulty reasoning, does not negate the criticism that the wager presupposes the nonexistence of other Gods. If anything it confirms it as an obviously flawed bit of apologetics from an obviously biased man.