Comment by FLeXMurphy
16 hours ago
> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.
The house always wins.
I've always thought that surely an all-knowing god would consider Pascal's Wager to be rather mercenary and insincere, and it wouldn't count.
A god who didn't like rules lawyering would ruin a lot of people's plans https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
People always leave off the second half of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is not simply that you can map out the odds vs risk and decide being a theist is more practical. But rather that if you take the odds, decide to be a theist, then start acting like one (participating in rituals, living like one, practicing what is preached, etc) then you may find God through those actions.
Or maybe he'd even penalize you for it.
It's important to recall that an all-knowing God isn't necessarily very compassionate, or even rational. Some of the people I've known who knew the most have been the biggest assholes. Or insane.
What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.
But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.
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Judaism has, outside some mystical currents, less of an emphasis on "well, do you really believe?" than in Christianity, and more of an emphasis on rule-following (and studying how to navigate those rules) as the basic bargain between God and man.
EDIT: My bad, I missed that Neumann asked to be baptised, so he wasn't going back to the Judaism of his ancestors through his Pascal's Wager-esque step.
True, but I believe Pascal was specifically talking about the Christian god, was he not? Ironically, Jesus clearly claims that what truly matters to god is your intentions, as in the goodness of your heart. I would argue that Paul came along later and dumbed that idea down to "do you really believe?", which is what Pascal based his wager on.
I never really understood Pascal's Wager.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.
Pascal's Wager if you read the entire book is more intricate than choosing to believe. He also argues that by practicing as if you believed, you may feel as if the choice is true and find God that way.
I see it as more of a rationalization. When you already believe something, you look for intellectual reasons to justify that belief. Pascal's Wager feel like that to me. Its main power is hardening an existing belief rather than swaying an undecided mind.
Except that 'pisteuō' means more nearly "to be faithful to" or, one could even say, to enter a type of contract (thus the Greek construct 'dia pistis', two parties relating "through faithfulness").
Anglo evangelicalism constrained its meaning to something like "intellectual assent", for its own purposes (in my opinion, it made for better sales models) some time in the nineteenth century. And as you essentially point out, intellectual assent is fairly meaningless.
Yeah, this is one of the more subtle issues with Pascal's wager.
That and it only really works in a system where one decision involves an infinity. Once you add a second infinity that is not aligned or is incompatible with the first it falls apart.
If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -
Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.
Pascal's own religious beliefs changed several times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Religious_conver...
The Wager was published after Pascal's death, in an edited collection of his notes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es
In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".
In the immortal words of Achewood's Cornelius T. Bear: