PHILOSOPHY - Religion: Pascal's Wager

[Music] hi I'm Susanna reinard a philosophy professor at Harvard and today I want to talk about Pascal's wager an argument for belief in God there have been many different Arguments for theism throughout the history of philosophy but blae Pascal a 17th century French thinker employed a particularly unusual strategy he did not try to prove that God exists he didn't even try to argue that God's existence is more likely than not instead he lifted an approach from the Gambling Hall and argued that given the odds and the potential payoffs belief in God is a really good deal even if the chance that God actually exists is low rationality he claimed compels us to wager for God first consider a different decision problem whether or not to buy a lottery ticket holding fixed the price of the ticket the sensible approach is to focus on two considerations first what are the chances of winning and second what is the size of the payoff holding fixed the payoff the higher the chance of winning the better the deal but equally holding fixed the chance of winning the larger the payoff the better the deal most actual lottery tickets are not a good deal at all but we can easily imagine a hypothetical Lottery that's a really good deal even if the chance of winning is still very low for example even if the chance of winning is only one out of 100 if the payoff is a billion dollars and the cost of the ticket is say only a dollar it makes sense to buy a ticket Pascal claims that belief in God Is by similar reasoning an infinitely better deal than this he reasons as follows either God exists or God does not exist if God exists and you believe the payoff is an eternity of Happiness an outcome of infinite value if God exists and you don't believe things will go much worse for you so if God exists you're better off believing now if God doesn't exist then regardless of what will happen to you if you believe and what will happen to you if you don't believe regardless of whether the value of each of those outcomes is positive or negative and regardless of whether the first is larger than the second or vice versa this much seems clear the value of each outcome will at least be finite now here is where the mathematics of infinity Works its magic since Infinity time any nonzero probability is still infinity and infinity plus any positive or negative finite value is still Infinity the expected value of believing in God is infinity which is definitely greater than the expected value of not believing now something about this reasoning might strike you as a little bit fishy indeed philosophers have provided many objections to this version of Pascal's wager one objection starts from the observation that the world World contains many different religions which postulate different gods some of which would if they exist punish Believers of other religions another objection claims that even if Pascal's reasoning is good as far as it goes it has no practical importance since someone who doesn't already believe can't just decide to truly believe a third objection holds that even if you could decide to believe someone who believed in God because they thought it was a good gamble wouldn't be given the infinite reward today to though I want to focus on a different objection this objection is that Pascal's wager proves too much first notice that there's some chance that if you attend just one church service you will be converted and become a staunch believer no matter how low this chance is as long as it's nonzero given the infinite payoff if God exists the same form of argument given before would allow us to conclude that the expected value of attending just one church service is infinite perhaps this doesn't seem so crazy yet but notice that there's also some nonzero chance that if you go to the beach tomorrow morning right at dawn you'll have a religious experience and be converted the same is true of going to the mountains at dawn tomorrow or for that matter of riding a ferris wheel or playing the guitar or brushing your teeth or well anything at all for every possible action you might perform there's some chance that doing so will give you a religious experience and make you a Believer and so by the same pattern of argument given before every possible action has infinite expected value this can't be right for one thing it has the consequence that every possible action has the same expected value as every other possible action and so there's never any reason to do one thing rather than another given the absurdity of this conclusion it seems this line of reasoning must go wrong somewhere but I'll leave it to you to think through exactly where it does go wrong to conclude I'll describe a different version of Pascal's wager which may avoid some of the objections mentioned so far there's some evidence that this version is closer to the argument as Pascal himself actually intended it we start off with the same first premise if God exists you're better off as a Believer than as a non-believer but the second premise of this argument is different it claims that even if God doesn't exist you're still better off as a Believer than as a non-believer if so then you're better off as a Believer whether or not God exists and so you should believe in God this argument relies on a very plausible General principle which says that if no matter what the world is like the outcome of choosing option A will be better than the outcome of choosing option b then you should choose option A it's hard to argue with that the crucial question for this version of Pascal's wager though is whether the second premise is right is it true that even if God doesn't exist you're better off as a Believer than as a non-believer there are some preliminary results in Psychology that suggest that Believers may be happier than non-believers on average in certain respects but the data are still inconclusive and there may be important differences between different people different cultures and different religions a final verdict on this version of Pascal's wager will have to wait another day

Channel: Wireless Philosophy

Views: 281,949

Keywords: Khan Academy, Philosophy, Wireless Philosophy, Wiphi, video, lecture, course, Susanna Rinard, Harvard University, Pascal's Wager, Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion, God, Christianity, Reason, Belief, Pragmatic

Id: 2F_LUFIeUk0

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2017