Elliott’s Wager
If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.
Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.
| There is a God | There is no God | |
|---|---|---|
| I believe in God | Go to Heaven (ultimate reward) | Believe in a lie for my entire life, but I can’t feel shame in death (no real punishment, no reward) |
| I don’t believe in God | Go to Hell (ultimate punishment) | Believe the truth throughout life, but take no consolation because there’s nothing after death (no punishment, no reward) |
Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.
Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.
But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.
Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).
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So where’s your money?
Tags: Elliott's Wager, God, Pascal's Wager, Religion
January 12th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
IAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA CTHULUUUUUU!!!!! I love this chart btw.
January 12th, 2010 at 10:09 pm
I think Pascal’s wager is really unconvincing as an argument for belief in God. In order for it to get off the ground, you need to assume that if God exists, God would want you to believe in God. Pascal’s wager doesn’t give you any way of figuring that out though. Even if you somehow knew that God existed, you still wouldn’t know whether or not that was a good belief to have given the potential consequences: God might not want you to believe in God and could punish you for knowing about God.
I think there are hidden assumptions like that in a lot of arguments for the existence of God. Take the example of the teleological argument: things are designed so there is some kind of designer. That doesn’t even show that the designer is still alive.
January 14th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Actually, Chris, I think there’s a much simpler reason that Pascal’s Wager is unconvincing. Namely, that one cannot simply CHOOSE to believe in something. He either believes, or he does not.
The best one can do when following Pascal’s advice is to PRETEND to believe (going through the motions of ritual and admission); and if an omniscient god existed, it would see right through that farce.
January 17th, 2010 at 1:08 am
Round 2, I guess? At least we’re coming to the same conclusion this time. Anyways, I think that’s a good response to the argument too. I don’t know if it’s as successful as the line of thought that I was trying to push or that Elliott was trying to push though.
Pascal originally thought of conversion through the wager argument as having two parts. In the first part, he convinced you that there was a good reason to believe that God existed, or that Christianity was good to believe. His argument had nothing to do with trying to show that Christianity corresponded with reality, but just that it was a good bet. This is odd, because normally when someone convinces you that there is good reason to believe a proposition it is because someone convinces you that the proposition, in some sense, corresponds to reality or best explains some data (or something like that). And if someone convinces you that some proposition corresponds to reality, then you really can’t help but believe it. However, since Pascal didn’t try to prove that belief in God was a rational belief by showing that belief in God corresponded to reality, he had a problem: he showed that there was good reason to believe something but gave no way of showing how to actually come to believe it.
The next step of the argument (which is really brief in the original essay) suggests that you start going to church and that through some miracle the sacraments will help you believe in God. One reading of this is that you can, in a sense, force yourself to believe in something by associating with the right people and behaving in the right way. That’s a strong empirical claim, but I have never seen definitive proof that it’s false.
So, in an important sense, Pascal’s wager is really a bet. The person accepting the argument sees the belief as rational and then places his bet by jumping “off the deep end” and going to church and becoming immersed in Christian culture with the goal of brainwashing himself. There’s really something to bet in Pascal’s wager: your life (or your sanity). The person accepting Pascal’s wager never chooses to believe in Christianity, but chooses to immerse himself in Christian culture with the goal of forcing himself to believe. The first step in Pascal’s argument isn’t just to get you to pretend to believe; it’s supposed to get you into church.
The text of Pascal’s wager supports that reading of the argument. Whether you can really force yourself to believe in God by “jumping off the deep end” (and into church) in that way is an empirical issue, I guess. So, in the end I prefer to respond to the argument at the first step instead of the second. Pascal never shows a good reason to believe in Christianity, so there is no need to get into a discussion of whether you should try to believe in Christianity (or whether you should start going to church).