Thread 41008639

Pascal’s wager might be the most unfairly maligned argument in all of history. https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/pascal-s-tier/ It’s commonly brushed off in just a few sentences. I remember years ago watching an atheist tier-list declare Pascal’s wager F-tier, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpC8WtufJbo before claiming that it commits “the black and white fallacy.” Another declared Pascal’s wager defective because it, in his words, “doesn’t even attempt to argue that God exists,” which is a bit like declaring a car defective because it isn’t edible—that’s simply not what it’s designed to do.

I think Pascal’s wager is remarkably compelling. It may very well be that even if you think some religion is probably wrong, you should wager on it still.

The short version of Pascal’s wager is that getting the right religion has potentially infinite value. Heaven is an infinitely nice place, and in it you get to spend eternity with the source of limitless perfection himself. A second of heaven contains more joys than all of the naturalistic pleasures that have existed so far in history. Alexander Pruss has a nice analogy https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2022/03/an-analogy-for-divine-infinity.html for the goodness of God:

God’s value is related to other infinities like (except with a reversal of order) zero is related other infinitesimals. Just as zero is infinitely many times smaller than any other infinitesimal (technically, zero is an infinitesimal—an infinitesimal being a quantity x such that |x|<1/n for every natural number n), and in an important sense is radically different from them, so too the infinity of God’s value is infinitely many times greater than any other infinity, and in an important sense is radically different from them.

>>41008639 (OP)
Hell, in contrast, sucks. Traditional views hold that it’s an eternity of misery. Think about how bad it would be to be tortured for a thousand years. Hell is infinity times worse than that. Even if hell is temporary, every moment out of heaven results in infinite lost well-being. It would be rational to endure 1,000 years of torture for an extra millisecond in heaven.

Accepting the right religion might improve your time in heaven for at least two reasons. First, spending a lifetime as part of the religion that most venerates God may deeper your connection with God, thus making heaven better. Second, various theological views hold that believing the right thing—trusting in Jesus, for instance—is required to get into heaven. Even if those who don’t believe in this life are eventually brought into heaven, it’s best not to risk it, and believing in this life can fast-track your route into heaven. If Christianity is true, for instance, it is rather clear that hell is a real place and that going there isn’t good. Even if the goats are eventually reunited with the sheep, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025%3A46&version=NIV it’s best to be a sheep from the beginning.

Let’s say your credence in Christianity is one in thirty-thousand. This seems pretty absurdly low—you should generally have a non-trivial credence in any view believed by a sizeable share of the smartest people who ever lived. Suppose that conditional on Christianity, you think the odds are 10% that believing it will increase your eternal reward. This still means that being a Christian has infinite expected value. It increases the odds of eternal reward by one in 300,000.

Presumably it would be worth performing some action if it gave you a 1/300,000 chance of infinite reward. If by working on reducing nuclear risks, you could lower the odds of the end of the world by one in 300,000, then that would seem like a valuable career, even if atheism is true.

>>41008644
By conservative estimates, wagering on the right religion is better.

That’s the basic argument for accepting Pascal’s wager. There are a lot of responses, but I think most of the popular ones are very weak, for reasons I’ll explain. For more reading on this subject, I recommend this article https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/pascal-s-tier/ and this article. https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/p/is-your-atheism-inflating-your-p-doom

Black and white fallacy
A common response from new atheists who couldn’t tell metaphysics from Metamucil https://mattfradd.substack.com/p/richard-dawkins-debunked-beyond-recovery is that Pascal’s wager commits the black and white fallacy. There are more than two options: atheism and Christianity (or whichever other religion it is claimed one should wager on). Thus, merely treating it as an argument for Christianity is fallacious.

Now, this is obviously correct as far as it goes. Pascal’s wager does not automatically tell you to wager on Christianity. Rather, it tells you to wager on whichever religion you think is likeliest. Suppose, that you think there’s a 10% chance of Christianity which requires you to believe it to be spared from hell, a 1% chance of Islam which requires you to believe it to be spared from hell, and a 5% chance of Hinduism that requires you to believe it to be spared from hell.

In this case, following the wager, you should believe Christianity because doing so minimizes the risks of you going to hell and maximizes the risk of entering heaven. There might be more complicated considerations—e.g. it might be that a single moment in Christian heaven is better than eternity in Muslim heaven—but barring that, you should just go with whichever one is most probable. You should take actions which make it likelier that you’ll spend forever in paradise.

>>41008649
The core logic of the wager doesn’t change just because there are more options. You should still pick the one with the best prospects.

You can’t choose what to believe
Another common response to Pascal’s wager is to say “you can’t choose what to believe.” Thus, it doesn’t even make sense to wager on religion because you can’t choose to believe a religion. I think this is pretty clearly wrong:

The kind of attitude that the religions want you to have isn’t quite belief. It’s something more like commitment—acting like the religion is true, hoping that it is true even if you’re not totally certain that it is, and promoting it. Jesus helps a man who requests his help but says “I believe; help my unbelief.” Clearly this man doesn’t have extreme confidence that Jesus is God, but he still has the requisite kind of attitude for religious faith—trust. Christians will be in almost universal agreement that a person who gives his life for Christ despite thinking Christianity has only a 30% chance of being true has faith of the right kind.

Even though you can’t choose to believe, you can do things that make it a lot more likely that you’ll believe. For example, you can read the smartest advocates of some religion. You can pray and ask God to help you believe. You can attend religious services and make friends of the same religion. You can talk to my friend [redacted] https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-smartest-people-ive-ever-met who has about a 30% chance of convincing you that Christianity is correct.

Even if you never manage to convince yourself, you can convince other people of a religion. Once you’re convinced of the basic logic of Pascal’s wager, this is a deeply beneficent act—it provides infinite expected benefit for others! So this is a reason to live the lifestyle of the religion that you have the highest credence in, even if you’re not ultimately convinced that it’s true.

>>41008656
It’s a reason to raise your children religious and try to convince others to adopt the religion.

Isn’t this self-serving?
Another response: isn’t Pascal’s wager self-serving? You’re picking a religion so that you can get infinite reward and be spared from infinite punishment. Isn’t this kind of selfish? However:

It isn’t actually wrong to do things for self-interested reasons unless those things harm others. For example, no one thinks that you act wrongly by abstaining from eating poison, on grounds that doing so is selfish. But picking a religion doesn’t harm others, so it’s alright to do it for self-interested reasons. It’s not wrong to do things that spare yourself from infinite expected suffering.

Going to heaven isn’t just good for you—it’s good overall! It is better to spend time in communion with the source of all goodness than working against him. If Christianity is true, for instance, serving Christ is morally righteous.

By being religious, you increase the odds that the people around you will be religious. This means that your action produces infinite benefits for other people, making it the exact opposite of being self-centered. In fact, I think there is something particularly noble about performing an action based on it having good expected consequences, even if you don’t find it emotionally enticing. Abstract pursuit of the good, even when it doesn’t resonate with you emotionally, is noble. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-virtue-ethics-case-for-shrimp?utm_source=publication-search

What if you’re making the real God madder and madder?
Leading scholar on Pascal’s wager Homer Simpson argues https://diagorasofmelos.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/homer-simpson-answers-pascals-wager/ “Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder!”

>>41008660
Now, I can imagine a person buying this objection if they’re totally in the dark about which God/gods are most likely to run the world and think it’s decently likely that jealous and vengeful gods who hate people of the wrong religion run the world. But I don’t think you should buy this:

The idea that there is a roving band of Zeus-like characters is very implausible. Surely some of their actions would be notable enough for us to have heard about them. But if there is an all powerful, all good being, he wouldn’t be jealous and get mad. If anything, he’d be likely to reward those who sincerely seek religions, make sacrifices for the sake of what they believe to be following him, and try to seek him.

Even if God gets marginally disappointed, this is very likely outweighed by the increased probability of entering heaven. Christians, Muslims, and Jews agree that a randomly selected theist is in better shape than a randomly selected atheist. Christians will even generally think that a Muslim who attempts to serve God is in better shape than an atheist! And, of course, if you get the right religion, then this has very good prospects—both for you and others! Thus, if anything, this response backfires; your prospects are likely better from wagering on the wrong religion than no religion at all.

At the very least it seems one convinced of this position should try to serve God even if they’re unsure as to his nature. Maybe they shouldn’t wager on a specific religion, but they should pray sincerely an attempt to live a life devoted to God.

If there is a true religion, it’s very unlikely that the religion would have a tiny number of adherents. If God is going to enact his will on Earth, he’d do so in a major way. So then the only religions one must choose between are the major religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and so on. I think Islam is pretty implausible, so the odds of you picking the right religion, conditional on there being one, are non-negligible.

>>41008664
Discount low risks?
Another reply to Pascal’s wager: perhaps we should discount risks that are very low! If a risk is, say, below one in a billion, maybe we should just ignore it, no matter what the consequences are. In addition, it might be that utility is bounded, so that as the amount of time spend in heaven approaches infinity, the goodness of that approaches a finite integer. However:

Even if you discount low risks, it’s not clear why the risk is so low that religious commitment has infinite utility. As I explained at the start of the article, even if infernalism is false—even if all are saved—it still is plausible that our actions have infinite expected utility by speeding up our entry into heaven and strengthening our relationship with God. Surely one’s credence in this shouldn’t be less than one in a billion. If the risks are one in 300,000—well, a 1/300,000 chance of an infinitely good outcome is clearly worth taking. 300,000 is not anywhere near the point at which it’s permissible to discount.

You shouldn’t have a credence of zero in eternal hell. There are lots of very smart Christians and Muslims who believe in an eternal hell. If lots of people smarter than you believe some proposition, you should rarely think the odds of the proposition are very near zero. But if you take this into account, then it makes sense to wager.

>>41008669
I don’t think discounting low risks or accepting bounded utility makes any sense. I’ve made this case at great length here, https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-a-fanatic so I’d encourage you to read that if you want to hear more. But one brief argument is that if you’re offered 100 years in paradise, surely that is less good than a 99.999% chance of 100,000 years in paradise, which is less good than a 99.99% chance of 10,000 years in paradise. So long as lowering the odds of payment by .000000000000001% while increasing the quantity of payouts by a factor of a trillion always makes the deal better, then there’s no risk threshold beneath which you discount risks. In addition, if you discount low risks, for complicated reasons explained in the post, you’ll need to think that whether you should take an action will sometimes depend on causally-unrelated things happening galaxies away, which is pretty insane.

You are biased
I think we’re mostly pretty biased against Pascal’s wager. When I consider the argument, I notice in myself an extreme psychological aversion to it—a desire to disprove it. This is because: https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-a-fanatic

Humans instinctively round low risks down to zero. Whether a risk is 1/100,000,000 or one in a billion, we simply register it as functionally equivalent to zero.

We don’t have reliable intuitions about big numbers. People will pay the same amount to save 2,000 birds as 20,000 birds or 200,000 birds. Even though eternity is infinitely longer than a mere 10 quadrillion years, they register as the same in our minds. Thus, it’s not remotely surprising that we’re biased against Pascal’s wager, where the wager is something our intuitions demonstrably underestimate.

>>41008672
We’re particularly biased by partisanship. Humans are motivated to believe whatever facts are most convenient to their own side. Thus, when an argument comes along for why we should wager on a belief that we think is probably wrong, it’s no surprise we’re biased against it. It’s for the same reason that political partisans would be biased against arguments for why the candidate that they don’t like raises the odds of infinite utility being brought about.

For these reasons, I think we often apply way too much scrutiny to Pascal’s wager and are willing to accept bad arguments against the wager. Beware! I think people would be a lot more sympathetic to Pascal’s wager if they could more firmly grasp how good heaven is—if they really, intuitively could grok that the experience they’re gambling for infinitely surpasses all joys they’ve experienced before, both quantitatively and qualitatively. That a single moment of heaven is worth a trillion years of excruciating torture.

Conclusion
There’s obviously a lot more to be said about the wager. As a personal note, I haven’t taken it though I think a lot of that has to do with my own psychological defects. But hopefully, I’ve explained why most of the common responses that people give don’t work. You shouldn’t just shrug off the wager—it merits serious thought, whatever you end up ultimately concluding about it. And you probably shouldn’t wager on atheism!

https://benthams.substack.com/p/pascals-wager-is-a-good-argument

>>41008672
>Even though eternity is infinitely longer than a mere 10 quadrillion years, they register as the same in our minds.

Not when I'm on psychedelics. I felt so much existential dread, fear of death and fear of no afterlife I can't even begin to put it into words and now I think I have PTSD.

>>41008639 (OP)
Say you follow the wager and recognize Christianity as the most rational option in confronting death. At what point do you find the faith needed to actually go to heaven? This rational exercise is rooted in fear and detracts from faith for that reason. To choose Christ because you're fearful and want to minimize risk is to be a hypocrite and a betrayer of His spirit.

I guess that makes Buddhism the winner?

>>41008697
The good thief was allowed to "pretend" to believe and still go to heaven

>>41008702
Indeed, the pretenses we perform for others are not an indicator of salvation. Faith is not just belief though, and what the good thief had was faith. As long as you bling to the rational for salvation faith is beyond you. Yet, according to Christ, it's all you need.

>>41008712
>bling
cling, lol

>>41008718
>>41008712

>>41008639 (OP)
It is baffling to me. Can anyone with a genuine conscience look into a mirror and declare “I was not created!”, without feeling any doubt? We have mothers, yet assume the universe has none. Insanity. You would be laughed out of the room if you considered yourself an atheist 500 years ago. Blame the Enlightenment for this material subjugation.

>>41008921
I think this thing can look in the mirror and say it was not created by an all knowing all powerful and all loving God

>>41008958
To be able to have such a thought even in such an unfortunate condition speak volumes about human capacity. The bible made it clear we were left to our own devices and failings. That child's creator is his parents. Do you think he'll look in the mirror and curse them for not loving him and knowing better? The fact that we can't be certain shows that this life God gave us is truly beautiful.

>>41008958
Understandable sentiment. I never said the God of this world was benevolent. I believe he is Satan.

>>41008639 (OP)
The faith must be sincere therefore wager is null and void.

>>41008639 (OP)
My problem with Pascal's wager is that it shouldn't be possible to choose to believe something like that. We ought to be compelled to believe in that which we consider truth, regardless of whether we like it or not.
Who even are these people who are capable of convincing themselves of lies that, by their own admission, they are telling the.selves in hopes it pays off for them? I do not understand hpw it is,done, firstly, and secondly, it is a Jewish-tier deceit.

>>41009108
>>41009051
Try reading the entire thread and all of the links

Pascals Nigger: Only my religion can be real.

>>41009163
You're trying to feign faith in attempt to deceive God and attain heaven.
Anon, it doesn't work like that, Pascal's wager is nonsensical, doomed from the conception.

>>41008639 (OP)
ever hear of Roko's Basilisk?
Pascal's wager has just as much merit as that, which is to say, none

>>41008639 (OP)
>getting the right religion has potentially infinite value
I had a dream that alchemy was the true religion multiple times
this was backed by other dreams describing the value of sovereignty and how it lets you sign shit into existence

as above, so below

whats it like to be a lost soul

It seems like every other day BB is defending another questionable idea involving God. My reasoning against Pascal's wager is simple: The sort of god who would dole out infinite rewards and punishments primarily on the basis of whether or not someone is convinced of something over a brief period is morally abhorrent and so should be resisted on principle, and intuitively that sort of god seems far more likely to be a human invention for manipulating people (as in, whether or not such a god existed, I would expect some humans to have come up with it eventually as a tool of manipulation), so in the interest of not being manipulated it should be again be rejected on principle.

>>41009699
cool image

I really like Benjamins bulldog though.
There's not many theists who were previously outspoken atheists who are vegan and effective altruists

>>41009276
/thread
OP tongues my anus

>>41009276
>strawman

Bump

>>41008639 (OP)
What if god punishes you for believing in him then?

>>41012825
God is a swear word. God worshippers go hell

>>41008639 (OP)
>you should generally have a non-trivial credence in any view believed by a sizeable share of the smartest people who ever lived.
I don't take advice from mortals. Also tl;dr, Jesus Christ.

>>41008639 (OP)
1) "Hell" is an egregore, but in form of a place. It exists, but it is man-made.
2) God is not male. She is female. Why? The fuck do I know.
3) All religions are carefully designed control systems. The only guidance that conforms with reality is the gospel of mary of magdala, IF you have to stick to ancient scripture for some wicked reason. But then again, that one completely contradicts judaism and abrahamism in general so you'll probably not be able to make that leap.
4) This realm is under total control of beings that use you as cattle, as a resource. Cope all you want, it is what it is.

One more advice.
You can't understand reality with your brain. Your intellect only gets you so far. Control systems that appeal to logic and intellect, such as hermeticism / hegel / kant bullshit, are just as effective as emotion-based ones.
You need to find the true path on your own. don't forget you have a heart too. Use it.

>>41008639 (OP)
Pascal's Wager is really "LARP it till you make it", or in better terms, "Faith leads to works, faith without works is a dead faith." Even if you don't believe fully in a faith you started getting into, you'll eventually find yourself doing works for it and having trust in it, which that is faith.
But how "Pascal's Wager" is framed and worded as a dishonest wager, I get why people argue against it. It's saying it in such a way that implies we shouldn't build up faith, but between words it's essentially saying to trust and get into a faith that you know will give such a good benefit as it is the love of God and heaven.
But really, any sort of faith, be it in relationships or religion, starts with dishonesty, because we are creatures of fear and uncertainty. They key is building up trust and eventually not being dishonest anymore

How willing would you be to bet your life on a belief you've always doubted? In our world, it's hard to know what's true or false, but what if we bet on finding out what happens in the afterlife?

Now we will see about Pascal's wager, If I were in a plane on fire and asked God for forgiveness for my sins, would I be forgiven? We'll find out tonight in Night Springs.

>>41013986
I don't think people can bet on beliefs at all, beliefs are something you build up through a process
and atheists don't believe in what they believe because "we don't know which religion is correct", they are atheists because either they don't want to believe in God but are still spiritual (Buddhists for example), or simply because they don't want heaven and the afterlife but non-existence, etc, etc, so they won't go around throwing bets with what is correct because they simply don't believe theism is correct
a better way of doing this exercise would be to convince heaven and God's love (the Other, separation meets love in unity) are better than annihilationism or still oneness, but that would be theology and not a cheap "wager" to convince people

>>41014069
>atheists don't believe in what they believe because "we don't know which religion is correct"
It's a pretty good reason. Belief got complicated and more dubious after terrestrial entities started making up faiths for political purposes. Like Christianity.

I don't rate Pascal's Wager as strategically sound. People lie constantly and variously claim different religions are true. You have no personal evidence supporting any. So there are essentially infinite possibilities, including one where worshiping one god would make another, jealous one send you to hell forever. You also have to trade the only existence you KNOW exists, life, in case one of those possibilites is true. Retarded.

The reality is that devoting your life to the desert donkey is variably offensive to real gods, depending on whether you should know better, and won't do you any favors. That religion tells you to ignore them if you encounter them, as false idols. Shame it all went so badly, but that's evil for you.

>>41014318
How should we live?
Should we be utilitarians trying to maximize the amount of wellbeing others feel and minimize suffering?

>>41015311
>Should we be utilitarians trying to maximize the amount of wellbeing others feel and minimize suffering?
This approach leads to an emphasis on mitigating loss as much as possible. Doing so leads to fear based reasoning by which many positive opportunities can never be seen. Ultimately the implementation leads to a cold cruelty, if not enacted by individuals then by the systems they implement.

>>41015368
Compassion is both the easy and the hard answer, because ultimately choices we make are not about how we should live. They're about why we should live.

>>41015388
What about justice?

>>41015596
Whom's justice?
If it exists as something separate from us we've yet to find it. Always justice enacted by humans is biased by our circumstances which leads to drastic injustice. That's not to say we're better off not trying, only that to speak of justice with confidence is often the first step to failing its discovery.

>>41008639 (OP)
Well it's not that the faith doesn't obtain it's object. It's that it's an outright evil cricket Demiurge. Pascal didn't conceive of this when he made the stakes

>>41015311
>How should we live?
I don't think that's my specialty, but excelling at what you do is good, unless it's a bad thing. Follow your heart, until you hear better advice.
>Should we be utilitarians trying to maximize the amount of wellbeing others feel and minimize suffering?
In a word, no. In more words, a policy that everyone should be utilitarianist tends to invoke authoritarianism and egalitarianism (Yes that can be bad). Philanthropy isn't inherently bad.

>>41015621
For example Jesus says he will wipe away every tear from your eye in the new world. Scholars read this as no more sorrow. Actually, you will simply be deceived into not being sorrowful at the new world created by the hack

Jesus creates a new world using word salad. It's like a failsafe for the species, that if things get really bad and you have schizos, they can create a new word like a "grain of mustard seed." But Caesar wasn't that bad.

I currently think Jesus' Word is entirely separate (a new thing) from the Buddha-Dharma

>>41008639 (OP)
You know besides human knowledge we have revelation. The true faith is known by all, it is Catholicism. It is also the only faith that proclaimed it was and is the true one. Jesus Christ Himself founded it. There is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church. Pascal's Wager is rocksolid reasoning. No will regret dying a good man. You will regret living in Hell in saecula saeculorem. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen

>>41015740
>Scholars read this as no more sorrow
The idiots do at least. Most people I know though realize Jesus can't wipe away your tears if there is no more crying. The prize is consolation.

>>41015740
That's why when you first read the Gospels it sounds like schizophrenia. Because that's what it is. But if you let it grow like a "mustard seed" (schizo) inside of you, it's powerful enough to create a new existence led by a new Demiurge. I don't doubt that. But Arete (skill) is a Grecco-Aryan feat. Can Jesus be creative? Then he will make SOMETHING. How will it be? I contend it will not be "good" as in the Form of the good, but will be called good by those with "faith and love," just like the louse who runs this lousy world. Then he will wipe away every tear from your eye. That's Pascal's wager

>>41015765
If a spiritual encounter takes you away from the experience of living your life then we call it schizophrenic. If it brings you more fully into your life then we call it a genuine spiritual experience.

>>41015793
Well Christians forsake the world and call it "Life."

>>41015841
So do people who treat spiritual groups like monoliths when passing judgement - clearly we've all got our struggles.

>>41008639 (OP)
>>41008644
>>41008649
>>41008656
>>41008660
>>41008664
>>41008669
>>41008672
>>41008678
This is inorganic thread, nobody writes this much shit about something they don't actually care about

>>41016395
So you think most threads have topics the OP doesn't really care about? Asking for a friend.

>>41016703
shill threads are like that

>>41008639 (OP)
The problem with pascal's wager is it consideres god a bureaucratic entity, and thus nullifying the whole thing.

The concept of religion is based on actual belief in that entity, not taking it or taking it as a plan B

It's as retarded as those kikes who think they can pass sins to chicken that the torture and kill after

>>41017381
>The concept of religion is based
you had me at based, you need not say any more