I am continually told that I should not engage in philosophy without professional credentials in that area, even though I am now co-author with a Credentialed Philosopher™, Maarten Boudry, on a peer-reviewed philosophy paper. But this credential mongering loses force when I see real professors of philosophy engaged in lucubrations that are so transparently dreadful that even a biologist can recognize them as tripe. Even worse—these lucubrations often appear in places like the New York Times.
I refer in particular to “The Stone” column, which for reasons unaccountable continues to publish the philosophical musings of Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a frequent subject of criticism on this site. Besides teaching introductory philosophy at Notre Dome, Gutting is even rumored to get paid for his NYt contributions. It is a crime against philosophy then, that he has earned not only column space but money for his latest “advance” in the philosophy of religion, “Pascal’s Wager 2.0.”
I needn’t refresh readers here on Pascal’s Wager or the many reasons why it’s bogus (go here for a comprehensive introduction). Among its problems are the diverse array of gods on which one must wager, forcing you to choose one (if you guess wrong, you could fry); the notion that any reasonably smart god could see that your belief is based purely on expediency and self-interest; and the indubitable fact that it’s nearly impossible to force yourself to believe in something you find improbable.
Gutting apparently realizes all this, and proffers his own version of Pascal’s Wager. But in the end it’s no better than the original version. Pascal’s Wager 2.0 differs by taking God out of the picture completely, asking nonbelievers simply to accept something Bigger than Themselves instead of just being atheists who rejects anything supernatural.
The trouble with the piece involves what Gutting considers “Bigger than Oneself”. Throughout the essay, it wavers between simply accepting a philosophical or ethical worldview, which many atheists have done anyway, to belief in an unspecified Beneficent Power (clearly supernatural), to accepting religion itself. Gutting can’t even keep his argument straight. In the end, though, Gutting seems to settle on Pascal’s Wager as asking atheists to accept the possibility of the supernatural, even though he touts no heavenly reward for such belief. Instead, the reward is simply more satisfaction with one’s life on Earth.
But before we get to Gutting’s New Clothes Wager, I present the only good bit of the article: the author’s tacit admission that doubt about religious truths is growing:
I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument.
Yes, it avoid the standard objections to the usual interpretations of Pascal’s Wager, many of which turn on the assumption of an afterlife. But it replaces them with other objections: namely, that Gutting can’t decide what we’re supposed to wager on.
First, he says that we doubters should embrace a “doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference.” In other words, he challenges atheists to believe something that we want to believe, which in Gutting’s case is a Beneficent Power:
I propose to reformulate Pascal’s wager as urging those who doubt God’s existence to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference. This means, first, that they should hope — and therefore desire — that they might find a higher meaning and value to their existence by making contact with a beneficent power beyond the natural world. There’s no need to further specify the nature of this power in terms, say, of the teachings of a particular religion.
Well, this may not be the teachings of a particular religion, but it’s certain belief in something supernatural, and that’s clear. This Power is not only a “power”, but a “good power”, and is “beyond the natural world.” In other words, it’s supernatural. That makes it religious. And the benefit is more happiness in this world (granted, a goal to be desired):
The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power.
But wait—maybe the power isn’t supernatural or religious after all!:
Unlike the traditional versions, this wager does not require believing that there is a God. So the standard drawbacks of self-deception or insincerity don’t arise. The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually.
Well, if it doesn’t require believing in a God, what is this Beneficent Supernatural Power? It sounds suspiciously like a God to me. But Gutting says that other stuff can also be Beneficent Powers. It is here that he goes off the rails by touting philosophy, meditation, and ethics as manifestations of that supernatural Power. Note the waffling here (my emphasis below), in which “religion” suddenly expands to encompass philosophy, ethics, and meditation. These, despite Gutting’s claim, are not “things beyond the natural world”, though some are not “knowable” (I presume he means “derivable”) via science:
The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually. The commitment is, rather, to what I have called religious agnosticism: serious involvement with religious teachings and practices, in hope for a truth that I do not have and may never attain. Further, religious agnosticism does not mean that I renounce all claims to other knowledge. I may well have strong commitments to scientific, philosophical and ethical truths that place significant constraints on the religious approaches I find appropriate. Religious agnosticism demands only that I reject atheism, which excludes the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science. [JAC: atheism doesn’t totally exclude the acceptance of something beyond the natural world knowable by science; it claims merely that we lack evidence for that.]
. . . But we can decide for ourselves how much worldly satisfaction is worth giving up for the sake of possible greater spiritual happiness. And, it may well turn out that religious activities such as meditation and charitable works have their own significant measure of worldly satisfaction. Given all this, what basis is there for refusing the wager?
In what world must we suddenly construe meditation, charitable works, ethics, and philosophy as “religious activities”, or accept some Power to practice them? I accept Gutting’s proposition that one may find greater happiness by establishing a connection with something greater than oneself, even if that thing be the physical universe in all its splendor. Indeed, that is Sam Harris’s message in his book Waking Up. But that is not the same thing as establishing a connection with a supernatural Beneficent Power.
One interpretation of Gutting’s garbled message is that he thinks that even if we nonbelievers establish connection with nonreligious stuff like philosophy and ethics, we will be rewarded by the Big Power for making that connection, and that’s why we should believe in the Big Power. Alternatively, he may feel that we can’t achieve spiritual satisfaction without believing in the supernatural. But these interpretations are belied by Gutting’s own words (my emphasis below):
I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument. It does not require belief and isn’t an attempt to trick God into sending us to heaven. It merely calls us to follow a path that has some chance of leading us to an immensely important truth.
We can argue (but I won’t here) whether particular philosophical and ethical paths, or charitable work, constitute “truths”. It may be true in the scientific sense that such connections make us happier, and that charity will make its recipients happier, But the nature of Gutting’s “immensely important truth” remains elusive. Nevertheless, in the paragraph above Gutting clearly says that his argument does’t require “belief”. This is in strong contrast to his earlier claim that to get these spiritual benefits we must make contact with a supernatural beneficent power. In other words, we must make a James-ian leap of faith. But it takes no leap of faith to, say, try meditating or working in a soup kitchen as a way of establishing a greater connection with something.
In the end, Gutting founders on his own belief in God, unable to fully replace it with the kind of secular humanism that he also construes as “religious.” His equivocation leads him to produce a muddled and confusing essay. And he got PAID for something that would probably get the grade of C in an introductory philosophy course.
I’ll close with something that Maarten Boudry, my Belgian philosopher co-author on our paper, said about Gutting’s essay:
I wonder if Gary Gutting, rather than signing a contract with the NYT, would accept the remote possibility of receiving a handsome monetary reward, to paid by an invisible Editor whom he has never met and never heard of, and who may or may not exist.
sub
subroutine
Here’s what I posted to the NY Times:
Let’s do Pascal’s Wager 2.0 on anything else, say for example, believing in the efficacy of a supernatural agency when faced with a threat, like an appendicitis. Gutting’s wager would look like this; you can believe in the ability of (whatever) to cure you, and risk your temporal life in favor of your eternal one, or you can doubt the efficacy of a supernatural agency and go to the hospital, saving your temporal life and only slightly risking your eternal one. Two issues reveal themselves: first, there is no benefit to belief, as the efficacy of the supernatural is historically shown to be capricious. Second, doubt sustains the socially and culturally acceptable space for true believers to kill themselves and their children (or others) in the name of faith. Thus, there is actual harm in belief. Pascal’s wager 1.0 or 2.0 is still a bad bet.
–The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power.–
If such a Beneficent Power exists out there, and is approachable, well, I’d rather make inappropriate contact with Her.
If you want to be delusionally happy, you can always just take drugs.
I too flagged this “note that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power” remark. It slips in the rather extraordinary assumptions regarding the structure of the payoffs in a similar way that Pascal 1.0 did.
Later, the author notes that relevant “religious” activities include contemplating whatever it is that such a power is until one assumes contact is made. However, it is at least as likely that many years of religious study will transpire with no contact made. This would be followed by a feeling that one has wasted a worthwhile intellectual lifetime. So just like Pascal 1.0, the payoff matrix is probably misspecified.
you’re an easy marker if that gets a “C” grade. he changed nothing, merely said ” it’s not blue, it’s blue” (I don’t know how else to put it)
you are indeed a gentleman, I think he needs a larger reprimand.
A bit like our recent change of Prime Minister here in Aus. The new one looks prettier and claims to be different, but is in fact exactly the same.
What a relief to read this!
I hack up large hairballs when people call meditation and ethics spiritual or religious.
And I hate higher power language.
The only higher power is Nature. It is all around us and shakes us up now and then when we get too big for our britches, then humanity forgets it tomorrow. Tidal wave, deluge, drought, earthquake, volcano, caldera explosion, meteor strike etc are all higher powers than us. Even so we have done quite a bit of damage to that thin layer where our ecosphere and live support are. Clearing forests, clearing the oceans of life on top of poisoning it and heating it.
When people ask me about a higher power I point them to the 210 v electric socket and ask them to unscrew a bulb, French kiss it and turn on the switch. Most don’t continue with the questioning.
Who uses 210 volts?
Pascal’s Wager has never been about convincing people to believe. It has always been about justifying a belief that has no justification, but feels really good to believe. It should be called “Pascal’s Crutch”.
If one had never heard of gods, there would be no need for Pascal’s Wager…it would make no sense. But when one grows up hearing of, believing in, and dedicating enormous amounts of time and money worshipping them, one needs to cling to some form of logical justification when all other forms of logic deny them.
The new Wager is the same as the old. It is a desperate grasp for a logical (or at least practical) basis for a comforting belief in a non-existent higher being.
” It should be called “Pascal’s Crutch”.”
Ha, good one. I think your point is correct. Emotions come first, then the rationalization.
That’s why religion but not science has the discipline of “apologetics”!
I have come to see all religion as a form of virus. Logic is the vaccine and critical thinking is the immunizer. The Christianity virus has evolved to develop its own defenses against logic and reason, namely things like Pascal’s Wager, ID/Creationism, and the Kalam cosmological argument. These “apologetics” are no way developed to bring people back to the faith, they are developed to allow people to ignore reality and hang on to their delusions…and let the virus spread.
“Logic is the vaccine and critical thinking is the immunizer.”
Hmmm, sometimes. But, again, emotion comes first, rationalization later. Reason is most often the servant, not the master.
I agree. Logic and critical thinking have been employed by theologians and apologists, often quite well, for centuries. Those tools can be used just as well with make believe premises as they can with premises for which there are actually good reasons to think are accurate.
But, it does seem likely that if the average person were to become reasonably skilled in the use of logic and critical thinking that religion would have less of a hold on society.
Probably, but religious reasoning is generally so bad that I think the average person would instantly see the problem if the reasoning were applied to something they didn’t have a precommitment to.
If I were king, I would probably send them for training in cognitive biases, rather than logic.
There is no need for Pascal’s Wager (crutch) if you are an atheist. At least teapots floating in space might is something I can picture. So far, any God ever posited by humans has less value than deep space kitchenware.
I don’t know about orbital teapots, but I’m pretty sure there’s an espresso machine aboard the ISS.
b&
At least as used popularly.
Pascal’s own use is not obvious, since the text of the Pensees is not the one Pascal had in mind. (Modern scholarly editions point this out.) If I recall, it was assembled literally out of pieces and scraps.
“Pascal’s Crutch” is very appropriate, but still only necessary where not everyone believes in gods and at least a few remain to be convinced. Apparently it has never been the case that god beliefs were totally universal.
Pascal’s Wager is predicated on the potential downside of not adhering to the Church: eternal damnation. It the negative is that bad, isn’t belief less dangerous? But what is the negative outcome of not believing in Pascal 2.0? In attempting to remove the negatives, Gutting has also removed the motivation.
The Wager works just as well with a value of 0 in the “don’t believe, it turns out to be true” box. Belief is the rational game-theoretic choice so long as there’s a positive value for belief/true OR a negative value for non-belief/true, but you don’t need both. Just either one.
So he hasn’t removed the motivation. But he hasn’t qualitatively changed the Wager either; he’s just switched the row labels from Belief and Disbelief to Agnostic and Disbelief.
That may be true logically, but it’s not how Pascal framed the problem.
The potential downside of being a nonbeliever no longer seems to be damnation. It’s become the downside of NOT being a believer, which is a happier, nicer, better thing to be. Pascal’s Wager is driven by a deep disappointment with the natural world. No improvement will ever be good enough.
If you don’t think so, then you’re wrong. You’re too easily contented.
I think this is basically just another push for atheists to stop being happy. We’re making God look irrelevant.
I think we need to start telling believers that true happiness only comes from the maturity of embracing reality as it is, rather than trying to escape into a childish fantasy.
While Christians are busy sitting in church being promised a better-than-real concert by the Heavenly Choir…an atheist can really be really thrilled by sitting in a real concert hall listening to (or performing with!) a real choir in the real here-and-now. The true happiness is ours; theirs is just the shadow of disappointment cast upon Plato’s cave’s walls.
Indeed, when it comes right down to it, it’s the difference between a romantic evening with the love of your life…and a copy of Playboy on the nightstand. Sure, all the warts have been airbrushed out of the photos in the magazine…but does that really make it somehow preferable?
Cheers,
b&
Or, to carry your analogy further, it’s the difference between a romantic evening with the love of your life … and a romantic evening with the love of your life whom you believe and/or hope will someday look exactly like an air-brushed Playboy model. That way you’re happier than if there was no hope.
It’s like they’re selling ‘shallow.’
Except, with Christianity, you don’t even get the evening with your non-model love of your life — mortification of the flesh and the Puritanical ethic and so on. You’re supposed to be very dour and straight-laced and stiff and formal in this life…and the next life is supposed to be even more of the same, save it somehow becomes pleasurable.
How many people actually enjoy the religious components of Church services? Yes, many enjoy the music and the artwork on the walls. But, if Jesus held a press conference and said that he’s cool with people going to the ballgame on Sunday rather than going to church, you can damned well bet the churches would be empty. The only thing keeping the asses in the pews is people imagining how wonderful it’ll be when they finally get to Heaven — or, of course, fear of how miserable they’ll be in Hell if they don’t go.
b&
Pascal’s Wager was prejudiced for Christianity, whatever version Blaise Pascal believed when he created this wager. To expand it to encompass all religions so that in this but you leave no one unturned.That includes all past religions, some lost in time, and new ones to come till humanity is extinct one day.
Just to be safe which is the logic of PW.
On a more ironic note notice the last sentence from the first paragraph on Pascal in Wikipeadia.
Blaise Pascal (/pæˈskæl, pɑːˈskɑːl/;[1] French: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal’s earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
Sorry, I didn’t plan on all of that being bold.
If he really believes what he is saying then lets ask him to start an organization with this believe. He should probably come up with another name without the 2.0 and see how many followers he gets. I would guess not many and the plate would be pretty dry.
I suspect he just has this thing about atheist as many of the religious seem to retain.
“we have good reason to expect much greater happiness if there is a beneficent power we could contact,”
No, actually we have no good reasons at all for such expectations. Most people can enjoy good music without such “contact.” If you try, you can also enjoy giving to others, beholding the wonders of nature, and being a wonderful good person, all without such “contact.”
In fact, dispensing with the ilusion of a “beneficent power” is quite empowering, and opens up a world of potential great joy. Mr. Gutting needs to get out more.
+1
Some people don’t understand the bigness and indifference of the cosmos, or the radical contingency of their own existence.
I remember overhearing a conversation between my mother and grandmother when I was six and learned that my mom had been engaged to another man and had started seeing my dad, a childhood friend, while engaged to that man. My first thought was “Wow, I could have had a different dad!”. My second thought was, “Could I really have a different dad?” My third thought was “So many things had to be exactly as they were for me to come into being, and those more numerous worlds where I do not exist are as valid as the small range of worlds where I do exist.” Full modal logic by age seven.
And when I learned the world was too big for Santa Clause, and began to have a grip on the largness of space and the depth of time. The theism I had been exposed to just wasn’t gonna take ever.
All the gods we have imagined are too human and too small for the cosmos we live in.
I really think some of the opposition to abortion comes from the belief that somehow persons pre-exist before their birth. We don’t just have a life after we die, but that we also had a life before we live. NO. If my mom had married that gay boy who charmed her and never cheated on him with my dad, I would not exist. And BTW, I do not mean to disparage this man. Charming gay men from wealthy families had a lot of pressure to wow a college girl from a small town and marry her. It was 1961 after all.
Fascinating story. It’s great that you were able to think your way through all that when so young. It must have cleared the way for a life engaged with reality. Others, as we know, are not so lucky.
Has anyone done an analysis of just how improbable a super intelligent manipulating force existing pre-formation of our universe? I would like to throw the number at them.
I don’t think so, I suppose you’re going to need Bayes’ Theorem to do that one.
Seems to me that if one believed in a “beneficent power,” then looked around at all the crap in the world, one would only get more depressed; certainly not joyful.
I think it would be more honest of Gutting called his ‘hopeful doubt’ ‘wishful thinking’.
He wants us to wish for a god, and he moreover wants us to wish for a god that is beneficent, despite the well-documented evils suffered by the innocent.
Another +1
Pascal’s Wager is not an argument against atheism (aimed at atheists), it is an argument for theism (aimed at theists). It is an inoculation against the incredibly persuasive arguments for atheism. It is a response to the belief threatening logic of those who do not believe. Its purpose is to keep belief alive, not destroy the belief of others.
There once was a man who believed in a god names Sknib Raj-Raj. He met another man who had never heard of, much less believed in, Sknib Raj-Raj. The man with no belief quickly brushed aside, with sold logic and impeccable reason, the claim that Sknib Raj-Raj existed. The man who believed could do nothing to convince the non-believer, so instead he told himself that even if there was no Sknib Raj-Raj, it was safer to believe…while the non-believer walked away shaking his head.
Of course the Sknib Raj-Raj-worshipper is crazy. That’s because the evidence clearly points to Nnij nog-iuq as the one true deity.
Let me get this straight.
We’re talking about some super-powerful oogity boogity, and it “needs” my help in furthering its goals? And the best means it has at its disposal to enlist me in the cause is to send incoherent rambling pundits like Boudry to blow smoke up my ass?
Get real.
b&
Urp! Mea culpa! I did a copypasta of the worng name!
Gutting Gutting Gutting Gutting Gutting Gutting Gutting
b&
You’re gutting close.
The smoke is not from particularly high grade tobacco either.
All atheists believe in something bigger than themselves. We call it the universe. We also believe in life, which is bigger than ourselves. We also believe in the totality of humanity and human history and science. All of these things are much bigger than ourselves.
What’s going on here with Gutting is some very unsophisticated sophisticated theology. People will buy it though. Lo how they will buy it.
bigger things atheists “believe in”, in ascending order:
family, friends, acquaintances, neighborhood, city, county, state, region, country, continent, humanity, earthlings, planet, sun, solar system, star cluster, galaxy, galaxy cluster, universe, multiverse (pending)
I LOVE both comment #13 and this reply!
I guess that, for Gutting, all of these “bigger things” don’t count because they are not “beyond the natural world knowable by science.” The irony, of course, is that the only way to learn about all of these “bigger things” is THROUGH science. It is belief/faith that is myopic and limiting. Science will continue to astound us and enlarge our understanding.
Excellent restating!
Nope. You still have an argument that provides equal support for an infinite number of beliefs in different contradictory things. Thus the Wager 2.0 is still self-contradictory, and still useless for decision-making. Exactly like the original. His philosophical agnosticism may be one of those things, but its presence doesn’t remove all the other theisms from the Wager.
If salvation is predicated on his preferred agnosticism, then it requires that agnosticism. If salvation is not predicated on his preferred agnosticism, then Wager 2.0 provides no argument to be agnostic. IMO he has not avoided the standard problem at all.
Indeed.
Gutting’s is one of the most pointless articles I’ve seen.
Exactly right.
One also can construct a deity whose rules would lead to the conclusion that non-belief is safer (more rational) than belief. To wit: the deity will damn to eternal torment anyone who puts some other deity first. Otherwise the deity doesn’t care a fig for your beliefs.
This results in two groups attaining paradise: believers in the right deity and atheists. Everyone else goes to hell.
Sub
You have more patience than I, 2.0 sounds like word salad.
Well of course Pascal’s Wager is very old-fashioned.
Nowadays everyone uses C++’s Wager, or Python’s Wager.
Alas, these day’s it’s JavaScript’s Mobile Cloud Wager….
b&
I’ve recently moved from Backbone’s Wager to Angular’s Wager…quite happy about it too.
or Gutting-off-the-Rails Wager
Nice one! 🙂
Wanes Gutting….sounds Monty Python.
I saw Guttings piece a couple of days ago. C-
His infatuation with God is ceaseless and what is also without bounds is his bottomless wish to make God real. The mysterious, unknowing God.
Never mind that mystery, Gutting has a job to sift and sift through unquantifiable claims about the unknowable. Without evidence, Gutting can transcend to his heart’s content.
I am confident Gutting actually has no idea what God is and if God actually existed he would have no idea such a thing would be.
I’ve rebutted him on-line several times. He’s a ‘true believer’ who refuses to acknowledge a leap of faith. And he gets paid to dump his poop on students and the public ( by the NYT)
The species is largely incapable of logical thinking, so I’m slowly tiring of speaking to rocks. The Column name includes Stone, and many fit that.
I have to think the NYT knows it has readers wearing the same god-tinted glasses as this Gutting guy, and are aiming to placate. Otherwise – move along now, nothing to see here…
Although it is heartening that most of the top rated comments about this article are largely against it.
Since we’re on religious insanity today, anyone else notice that PBS is airing a “build Noah’s Ark” [seemingly a very large straw coracle] on NOVA next week?
If they have to air these lame build-a-pyramid, etc., shows, I wish they wouldn’t cross-contaminate the NOVA label..
The show is based on the part of the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, where Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim, a proto-Noah who survived a giant flood, with animals, in a large round craft. Written circa 2100 BC, it’s considered one of the first works of literature in the world. Widely assumed to the source for the biblical story of Noah and the flood. As with reading a novel, you need not believe it happened in order to find it interesting.
Actually it may be the same documentary that’s been aired a couple of times in the UK. Don’t knock it, it’s quite interesting, and absolutely not buying in to the whole legend, but rather seeing if boats of that type were actually feasible.
Hint: They take a LOT of effort to construct!
I think these sorts of endeavors are a good thing. Ham’s floundering attempts to build an ark, even with 21st century tech and millions of mugs’ dollars shows that it could not have been done. Building Utnapishtim’s coracle will show people that Noah wasn’t the first guy to have to save the planet from god’s ire.
“possibility of receiving a handsome monetary reward”
I would add “posthumously” to that.
Gah!
Ethical and philosophical “truths” do not belong on the same epistemological shelf as scientific fact.
Gary Gutting is not Isac Newton and Pascal’s Wager 2.0 is not a law of thermodynamics. Yet, the vast majority of people, even NYT readers I fear, will fail to make a meaningful distinction between an objective fact and poorly thought out philosophical construct.
Whoops, I misspelled Isaac.
One of my kids is an Isaac. Which gets misspelled as Issac more often than not. I regret giving him that name.
One benefit of teaching introductory philosophy to undergraduates is that it lets you talk about philosophy with eager and intelligent people who do not come with predispositions formed by years of technical study. This semester, preparing for a philosophy seminar with first-year honors students at Notre Dame, I reread with fresh eyes one of philosophy’s best-known arguments for belief in winning the lottery — Pascal’s wager.
The argument, made by the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, holds that believing that you have won the lottery is a good bet at any odds, since the possible payoff — enormous happiness — far outweighs any costs of believing — even of believing that you have won the lottery when you have not.
Most discussions of Pascal’s wager take it as a peculiar if not perverse calculation of self-interest. As Pascal puts it: “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing.” Taken this way, the argument seems morally suspect; William James noted that those who engaged in such egotistic reasoning might be among the first to lose the lottery. In considering it again, I found what I think may be a more fruitful way of developing the wager argument.
The wager requires a choice between believing and not believing. But there are two ways of not believing. I can either deny that I have won the lottery or doubt that I have won the lottery. Discussions of the wager usually follow Pascal and lump these two together in the single option of not believing that you have won the lottery. They don’t distinguish denying from doubting because both are ways of not believing. The argument then is about whether believing is a better option than not believing. My formulation of the argument will focus instead on the choice between denying and doubting that you have won the lottery.
Denial that I have won the lottery means that I simply close the door on the hope that I will some day have millions of dollars; doubt may keep that door open. I say “may” because doubt can express indifference to what is doubted. I don’t know and I don’t care whether there is an even number of stars or whether there are planets made of purple rock. Indifferent doubt is the practical equivalent of denial, since both refuse to take a given belief as a viable possibility — neither sees it as what William James called a “live option.” But doubt may also be open to and even desirous of what it doubts. I may doubt that I will ever understand and appreciate Pierre Boulez’s music, but still hope that I someday will.
I propose to reformulate Pascal’s wager as urging those who doubt their lottery winnings to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference. This means, first, that they should hope — and therefore desire — that they might hit the jackpot by purchasing a ticket or scratch card. There’s no need to further specify the nature of this power in terms, say, of a particular state lottery system.
The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by winning the lottery. The next question is whether there are paths we can take that have some prospect of achieving this win. Many people, including some of the most upright, intelligent and informed, have claimed that there are such paths. These include not just rituals and good deeds but also private spiritual exercises of prayer, meditation and even philosophical speculation. A person’s specific choices would depend on individual inclinations and capacities.
So far, then, we have good reason to expect much greater happiness if there is a $100 million jackpot we could win, and we know of paths that might lead to that win. The only remaining question is whether there are negative effects of seeking a lottery win that would offset the possible (but perhaps very improbable) value of a win.
Unlike the traditional versions, this wager does not require believing that you have won the lottery. So the standard drawbacks of self-deception or insincerity don’t arise. The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually. The commitment is, rather, to what I have called financial agnosticism: serious involvement with economic teachings and practices, in hope for a truth that I do not have and may never attain. Further, financial agnosticism does not mean that I renounce all claims to other knowledge. I may well have strong commitments to scientific, philosophical and ethical truths that place significant constraints on the financial approaches I find appropriate. Financial agnosticism demands only that I reject alotteryism, which excludes the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by conventional, Western economics.
Financial agnosticism may accept the ethical value of a lottery-based way of living and even endorse alternative economic ideas as a viable basis for understanding various aspects of human existence. But the ethical value is a matter of my own judgment, independent of economic authority. And the understanding may be only a partial illumination that does not establish the ultimate truth of the ideas that provide it, as, for example, both Dante and Proust help us understand the human condition, despite their conflicting intellectual frameworks. None of this will interfere with a commitment to intellectual honesty.
But perhaps a “serious involvement” with the lottery will require giving up other humanly fulfilling activities to make room for financially-motivated thought and action. Given a low likelihood of attaining a “higher form of happiness,” it may make more sense to seek only the “worldly” satisfactions that are more certain, even if less profound. But we can decide for ourselves how much worldly satisfaction is worth giving up for the sake of possible greater financial happiness. And, it may well turn out that activities such as rubbing off scratch cards and watching the lottery announcement on TV have their own significant measure of worldly satisfaction. Given all this, what basis is there for refusing the wager?
I don’t see this new wager as merely a way of nudging non-lottery players and indifferent agnostics onto a financially benecificial path. It’s also important for those who are committed to a lottery-playing community to realize that such commitment doesn’t require believing the teachings of that community. It’s enough to see those teachings — and the practices connected with them — as a good starting point for an inquiry into their truth. We should also realize that the real truth of a finance-based worldview may be quite different from its official “self-understanding” of this truth. A living lottery system should have room both for believers at rest with its official teachings and for nonbelievers (financial agnostics) who see these teachings as a promising beginning in their search for the truth.
I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on lottery winning. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument. It does not require belief and isn’t an attempt to trick the state into awarding us the lottery prize. It merely calls us to follow a path that has some chance of leading us to an immensely important truth.
“I reread with fresh eyes one of philosophy’s best-known arguments for belief in winning the lottery — Pascal’s wager.”
The comparison falls short in a couple of ways.
The lottery exists. No one denies that.
Someone wins the lottery. This is verifiable.
As for the other part of the analogy – that God exists – this is unknown, and apparently cannot be verified.
The fact that even if the lottery is legit, your chance of winning is negligible, weighed against a high probability that the lottery itself is a simply a scam to bilk out of the cost of a ticket, and a somewhat lower probability that it’s a front for an identity-theft ring that will leave you homeless and destitute.
If I believe I won the lottery when I have not, I will make really bad decisions. I will spend money I do not have. I won’t bother to seek a good career or save for the future. These decisions are likely to impair my happiness far more than believing in a non existent lottery would increase happiness.
For me, I would gladly make different decisions than those I made when blinded by religion.
Reality is amazing. Why do some assume only the make believe can bring joy?
Using the lottery analogy, one problem is that believers start spending their lottery winnings before payout… if that makes sense, which I doubt!
“spiritual happiness”? I have literally no idea what that could possibly mean.
It seems to me that Gutting is just looking for an excuse not to call himself an atheist. I wonder what he hates so much about the word.
It means the check’s in the mail. It means the boss is offering you a new fancy title instead of a raise.
Silly boss. Offer a pay rise before someone asks and you get away with a much lower one
Yes indeed. What is the alleged difference between happiness and “spiritual happiness?” They never seem to be able to clearly explain such things. Of course, one purpose of such word games is to facilitate the characterization of people who are not impressed with grandiose terms like “spiritual happiness” as people that just don’t get it because they lack something, so sorry, the poor dears.
Not a thing, is the correct answer to what the difference is. Such word games are merely a carny scam, a con. The intent is to get people to feel like they want, need, whatever the extra special level of happiness that is “spiritual happiness” is.
And there’s only one place you just might be able to get it from. But you’ll have to take what they’re offering for the rest of your life. And it will cost you. Money, integrity, intellectual honesty and cognitive impairment are some of the favored coins.
I agree. Gutting’s argument is a mess and he probably doesn’t even know what he thinks. Gutting implies that religious activities cause more happiness than “humanly fulfilling activities.” The latter should make room for “religious thought and action”. Religious activities include charitable works and meditation. But then Gutting goes on to say that those activities also “have their own significant measure of worldly satisfaction.” First he makes a distinction between worldly and religious activities, then he mixes those two together.
It’s easy to see through Gutting’s BS when you don’t treat mind and matter as separate entities. There is no such thing as “spiritual happiness.”
Time for more NMRI work on brains of believers versus not. See what is triggered in the brain and see if they really have a different experience from doing secular things. Drug and sex and music use included. Some of it has already been done and found the same areas of the brain are activated in religious ecstasy and drug use and sex. It is all brain drugs man, just different stimulus to elicit the same effects. Or so they told me….
“Spiritual happiness” is what you have when you’re broke, lonely, and miserable, but you believe it will all be okay after you die.
I certainly believe in something larger than myself. For instance, Milwaukee. I have never been there, but it seems there is sufficient evidence for the proposition.
Admittedly, Milwaukee does seem improbable, but I’ve been surprised before. I keep an open mind.
As a native Milwaukee resident, I could attest to it’s existence. But you would need to accept that I exist, too. And you should keep an open mind about such things. 😉
As a fellow Milwaukeean, I think the position one should take on this thread is to hope for its non-existence. 😉
Oh, good, we are done.
Gutting is a philosopher and doesn’t know how to find out facts, which he demonstrates by empirical irrationality. Whatever he decides his wager is about in the next v 2.x, it isn’t about nature and we don’t need to consider it.
As a side note, I like Gutting’s demonstration of how the “wager” and on a larger scale unwarranted apologetics v 2.0 is a cesspool running downhill. With such auspicious evolution v 3.0 will likely never be.
The religion of Pascal’s Wager 2.0 doesn’t look like any religion I know anything about; and if it became a major religion, the non-religious wouldn’t find it consequential enough to oppose.
You’re right, I don’t think the non-religious would oppose it, but non-religious intellectuals who regularly discuss philosophy and ethics would still criticize it as useless mumbo jumbo whenever the subject came up.
He’s simply replaced Pascal’s arguments with more or less those of William James in “The Will to Believe” and called it an “upgrading” of Pascal. (Although the phrase “leap TO faith” is originally from Kierkegaard.)
But the two ideas are more different than he lets on. It’s really a brand switch rather than an upgrade, even if both are sold in the same dubious storefront.
I don’t regard the God of Abraham, the Bible, or classical Christianity as particularly “beneficent”, so arguments for a generic higher power are of no moment to me.
Shame that Gutting goes off and does this sort of stuff. His NDPR is a wonderful service. But then again, a web editor doesn’t need much philosophical acumen. 😉
My inductive atheism does not “exclude the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science.” Show me some evidence beyond one’s internal feelings and I’ll revisit my conclusions.
Belief and the desire for belief are independent of one another. You can believe and want to believe, or believe and NOT want to believe (e.g. convicted murderer awaiting execution). You can NOT believe yet want to believe, or not believe and not want to believe. One emotional state does not imply the other; 20 minutes of self-contemplation ought to reveal that to most anyone.
Nicely said. You’ve hit upon the point that bothered me the most: the claim that atheism by definition “exclude[s] the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science.”
As you say, it’s precisely the other way around. It’s the lack of evidence that leads one to atheism. If new evidence arises, non-belief can be reevaluated. I guess Gutting really just wants to “exclude” anything that could meaningfully count as evidence, as what kind of evidence could be, in principle, “beyond the natural world knowable by science”?
Furthermore, I hate these smug claims that we should be worried about things “beyond the natural world knowable by science”–the reality is that science has helped us see the natural world as so much richer, so much more complex, and so much more beautiful than we could ever have known without science. Believers should spend more of their time and energy exploring things beyond the myopic world knowable by theology. No hope or faith required.
A Gutting blast from the past (2013).
Here’s his equally muddled equivocations about whether Zeus exists.
His motivation was to provide believers a way to respond to the growing number of atheists accusing the religious of being atheists in regard to all other gods.
Another major fail that doesn’t reflect well on Notre Dame’s philosophy department.
The comments rip the argument apart and are more enlightening than the article.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/did-zeus-exist/?_r=0
Aaaaand … here I will make the first objection. The premise can and should be challenged. What if we live happier, more authentic lives by focusing on finding meaning and value in this world, as opposed to ever hoping for something “higher” out there?
In other words, I propose that being indifferent to the existence of God ennobles a person, whereas cultivating an unquenchable discontent and sense that the natural universe is ultimately insufficient demeans, deflects, and diminishes our best characteristics. We find a higher meaning and value by looking in our own backyard — a “backyard” which encompasses everything wonderful, loving, beautiful, and uplifting that we have ever experienced. It ought to be enough. We do ourselves no favor at all believing otherwise.
By way of analogy, Gutting is no doubt familiar with people who sabotage their own happiness and sense of contentment by an unchecked ambition, forever dreaming or hoping for something better than what they have no matter what they have, or no matter how much scope there may be for improvement. Nothing can ever be good enough, nothing is ever appreciated on its own merits. Instead of dealing with or accepting a less than perfect spouse, kids, job, or health they only alienate themselves from life by internally reassuring themselves that they deserve perfection and anything less is inadequate. It’s all less worthy of love than it ought to be. Yearn constantly then, for supernatural consolement.
That isn’t optimism, it’s pessimism with a superiority complex. For shame. What the hell makes Gutting and other theists think we want to be like them in the first place?
Pascal’s Wager 2.0 is less than wrong even before we consider its dubious epistemic foundations.
Not only that, it seems like he thinks atheists are angry and nihilistic. If we just take a more positive attitude and dip our toes in philosophy or philanthropy we might soften our hearts and somehow be open to seeing more noble “truths” and maybe turn our lives around. Kinda like the reverse of gateway drugs. It’s funny, philosophy and giving to Red Cross is a slippery slope to Christianity.
I’m with you. I’m not religious because I have morals. The Gods depicted are vile in many ways and the followers of these Gods can be both vile and dangerous in many ways. I could not bring myself to be one with them unless I was self-loathing and had no self-respect.
But I for one *am* angry. That someone with the power and privilege of a professor of philosophy at a university of such prestige can write such twaddle and get a forum to publish it more august than a butcher-paper notebook.
Why does Gutting think he’s in a position to tell others what their personal hopes should be? I don’t want or need to hope for something “Bigger Than Myself (winkwinknudgenudge)”. I’m 110% satisfied with reality.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this is writing from someone who wants to say something (or to be recognized for saying something) but doesn’t have anything to say.
Pascal’s Wager is a lot like the Ontological Argument: it can be used for pretty much anything you can think of. This is exemplified by what’s called “Pascal’s Mugging”.
Imagine a mugger threatens you by saying that he’s actually god, and if you don’t give him $10 he’ll send you to hell for eternity. Certainly $10 isn’t worth going to hell is it?
You can substitute god in this case with any super powerful being and it still works.
“Pascal’s Mugging”… I like it, but maybe try “Pascal’s Mugger” as it sort of rhymes better!
Maarten Boudry’s one sentence summary of Gutting’s essay is precisely accurate.
I’ll go one further and claim that it accurately describes all of modern sophisticated apologetics.
I wonder if anyone has proposed the reverse of Pascal’s Wager, Lacsap’s Wager, positing the existence of a Higher Power that interprets the conscious attention of others (us) as unwanted intrusions. The Higher Power has taken great pains to eliminate all evidence of Its existence from the realm of mortals, yet many disrespect that effort through willfully applied faith, causing great irritation to the Higher Power. The Higher Power does not extract retribution for this irritation within the mortal sphere, because that would provide evidence of Its existence, but upon death, upon leaving the mortal sphere, the offending beings are punished accordingly.
Given that the Higher Power has so thoroughly hidden all evidence of Its existence, reason suggests It wants no attention, and those that honor that desire shall be rewarded.
Esialb Lacsap
Sithrak‘s gonna fuck you up when you die.
Cheers!
b&
Only a psychopathic god would judge you based on if you believed in him/her/it or not. Therefore this god of Pascal’s Wager is either a psychopath or doesn’t exist as is frequently the bottom line when it comes to gods.
…and only an infinitely evil monster would even think of infinite torture as a suitable punishment for those who fail to be suitably gullible.
I mean, really: what kind of sick asshole gets his kicks by torturing people infinitely weaker than him?
b&
Pascals Wager illustrated:
https://blinchiki.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/gamble.jpg
So this guy wants to be the gatekeeper of who gets to think and who not? Charming!
I am not going to brush up on Pascal, but, I always understood the wager to be speaking primarily to behavior.
Pascal was no fool and new that belief couldn’t be forced but behaviors could, so to give yourself the best chance, behave as though you believed.
Gutting’s mish mash of ideas is not new. It was thought of and developed by AA a long time ago and is the basis for its and other 12 step programs.
The wager 2.0 sounds to me like, “Come on atheists, at least try to believe in something.”
It’s hard to help people understand that we actually are content, without trying to believe in anything supernatural!
There is the inverse of Pascal’s Wager, based on the observation of ordinary gambling – the enormous ‘value’ of the win is so great that the ‘chance’ of the win must be very small.
Besides which many religions/sects believe gambling to be sinful.
Methinks far too many pixels are spilt on self-indulgent fantasies designed to array oneself in glorious rainment by wagging a finger at nonbelievers (in religions, hopes, and anti’s of all sorts).
If Nature is God, then it is clear that “she” doesn’t give a goddamn about any species, including “Man.”
Science is the ultimate arbiter of truth here. If science shows that every aspect of this phenomenal world, including the origin of the universe also, can be explained without invoking any kind of god, then that will definitely go against all kinds of supernatural claims, and naturalism will establish itself as the ultimate truth. However there is at least one aspect of nature that has not yet been addressed by the scientists. And it is this:
Physicists say that this universe has actually originated from nothing. If it is true, then that will mean that not only the total matter and energy, but the total space-time as well of this universe have originated from nothing. So not only its total matter and energy, but its total space-time also should always remain zero. Physicists have so far shown how the total matter and energy of our present universe always remain zero, but they have not yet shown how its total space-time also always remains zero. As the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, so the question to be addressed by the physicists will be: How does the total space-time of an ever-expanding universe always remain zero?
He is trying to persuade atheists to at least want to believe in gods. He objects to our lack of sadness at our unbelief, as so many theists do. If we’re determined to be so troublesome we could at least be contrite about it.
This is just the old “fake it till you make it”. Pretend to believe and it will come. Really it’s “pretend to believe and all of us deluded won’t have to be discomfited by your unbelief”. If all the unbelievers pretend to believe, there is no issue for the true believers. They don’t have to endlessly argue flawed apologetics, and be constantly on the back foot trying to justify the unjustifiable. It’s far more restful for them.
Well said!
This argument is like a car dealership that is just beyond desperate to sell you a car, to the point where they will just sell you a banana and call it a car.
“Oh, you don’t agree with religion? Well… what if I were to throw out all of this stuff over here, and just make it like this? Then would you join? Please?
Okay, fine – you drive a hard bargain, sir. What if I was to remove all mention of God, but replace Him with a “beneficent higher power”? Does that language work for you? What do you mean “what’s the difference”?
Okay, fine – but we’ll be losing money on this now. You’re putting me out of business with this deal! What if I were to remove all reference to a conscious being at all, and replace it with some nonsense about meditation and ethics?”
Yeesh – it just comes off as sad.