Q&A: Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s Wager
Question
I was thinking about Pascal’s much-maligned wager, and maybe with a slight renovation it actually isn’t so bad.
We didn’t randomly choose some god from our imagination and build the wager on that. It can be arranged like this:
Given a (specific) God with a 10% probability — serving Him would be the right thing to do, and if not, it would be so bad that we wouldn’t take the risk… Even Dawkins would agree that there is a significant probability of some kind of God existing (actually, specifically Dawkins the idiot wouldn’t agree, but you get my point).
In my opinion, one could defend Pascal and say that this is surely what he meant by the wager.
What do you think?
Answer
I didn’t understand a thing.
Discussion on Answer
Sorry.
If we serve Him and He doesn’t exist, then yes, we do lose. The effort. And again, you can’t really calculate this formally. But in my opinion it’s easy to add a third assumption: that the effort involved in serving God is smaller than the need to serve Him if He exists (it’s not something you can really calculate because they’re not on the same plane, but still intuitively it works. Like a steak tastes better than an orange). And again the expected value is positive.
In short, my idea was to add values to the wager.
I don’t see any difference here from the original formulation, except for the assumption that the probability is 10% rather than something tiny. In that case my objection may perhaps not apply, but the other objections still do (there are other religious options with a similar probability. There is no value in service that does not come from faith, and so on.)
Sorry. It came out unclear.
I mean that you can add information and formulate Pascal’s wager like this:
Suppose I investigated and reached the conclusion that there is a 10% probability that God exists. Now I can construct Pascal’s wager without the usual criticisms of it (I’m omitting from the wager the playing around with infinity). It’s hard to formulate the wager formally this way, because you can’t calculate things like gratitude, hell, etc., but you can state it loosely: a 10% probability that God exists is enough to make me serve Him.
Assumption A: there is a specific God with a probability of 10%
Assumption B: if there is a God, one should serve Him
If there is no God — and we serve Him — we will neither lose nor gain.
If there is no God — and we do not serve Him — we will neither lose nor gain.
If there is a God — and we serve Him — we will gain.
If there is a God — and we do not serve Him — we will lose.
The expected value of serving God is positive.
If you assume those premises before making the wager, doesn’t that fix Pascal’s wager?