Pascal's Wager

First, a note about football (since I'm watching MNF at the moment):  I LOVE defense!  Sacks, interceptions, forced fumbles, mega-hits, goal-line stands...  That's unrelated to the rest of this post, but I needed to share it.

Moving on, today we discuss a philosophical notion called Pascal's Wager, named after French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.  You may recognize this name from 8th grade algebra (his eponymous triangle is instrumental in polynomial expansion), and we engineers of course love Pascal the unit (a fairly small measure of stress or pressure; the yield strength of structural steel is 250,000,000 Pa; atmospheric pressure is roughly 100,000 Pa).  Pascal's Wager, interestingly enough, was not publicized until after his death, when many of his surviving notes were compiled into the Pensées, a collection of thoughts arranged in somewhat random order.

A disclaimer before I continue:  I'm not trying to convince you of anything or sway you from your beliefs.  I'm simply inviting you to glimpse my own spiritual struggle.

His wager, from note 233, is as follows:

1. God is, or He is not.  (this is a postulate! math rules!)
2. A game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
3. According to reason, you can defend neither proposition.
4. You must wager.  It is not optional.
5. Let us weigh the gain and loss in wagering that God is.  If you win, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6. Wager then, without hesitation, that He is.

Essentially, his argument boils down to this:  If you assume God exists and live your life so as to please Him, then you are either right, and will be rewarded by heaven, or wrong, and you just die (and perhaps wasted a finite number of hours of your life worshiping a non-entity).  I arrived at this conclusion back in elementary or middle school and at the time it satisfied me.  The problem, for me, arose out of a couple things.  First, the religion in which I was brought up professes that one must have faith in God in order to be granted admittance to His Kingdom.  Sounds easy enough, except that one can't convince oneself to have faith.  That's part of the definition of faith (here's the definition my pastor supplied: "belief that is not based on proof").  So, with Pascal's Wager in mind (I didn't realize this concept even had a name until only a couple years ago), I felt like I had a gun to my head and no right answer.  It's not faith if I'm doing it out of coercion, and I can't convince myself rationally that God exists.

I'm going to interject a note here to keep you believers reading.  I'm talking about myself here.  I pass no judgment on your faith or religion so long as you don't go around trying to make people believe the same way you do.

So I have been thinking recently that since I can't force myself to be a believer, my options are either damnation until the End of Days or simply absolute and final death, which are both horrifying.  (I'm not going to touch how complicated this gets when we introduce multiple religions, but you can see it gets quite convoluted)  I read more on the subject, and found counter-opinions of Pascal's philosophy.  Richard Dawkins, a British scientist, argues that living for God and a religion will make one tend to live a less fulfilling and good life (he cites holy wars, forced conversions, bigotry based on religious tenets, etc.).  I'm not going to go that far, but I am reassured by this passage by Richard Carrier, which I ripped off of Wikipedia:


"Suppose there is a god who is watching us and choosing which souls of the deceased to bring to heaven, and this god really does want only the morally good to populate heaven. He will probably select from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. For all others are untrustworthy, being cognitively or morally inferior, or both. They will also be less likely ever to discover and commit to true beliefs about right and wrong. That is, if they have a significant and trustworthy concern for doing right and avoiding wrong, it follows necessarily that they must have a significant and trustworthy concern for knowing right and wrong. Since this knowledge requires knowledge about many fundamental facts of the universe (such as whether there is a god), it follows necessarily that such people must have a significant and trustworthy concern for always seeking out, testing, and confirming that their beliefs about such things are probably correct. Therefore, only such people can be sufficiently moral and trustworthy to deserve a place in heaven — unless god wishes to fill heaven with the morally lazy, irresponsible, or untrustworthy."


Though the preceding passage was rather irreverently worded (Carrier is an evangelical Atheist), I tend to believe it.  I think it's hard to deny that there are religious fanatics who, either out of blind faith, or a cold desire to subjugate others to their will, commit acts of evil.  On the flip side, there are unwashed heathens who, though not living in accordance with any particular religious philosophy, sincerely wish to do good.


Let us simply always be ever willing to challenge our own beliefs regularly in order to ensure that they make sense and cause us to do good instead of evil.


In the future, I think I might discuss what differentiates good from evil (philosophers like me call this ethics) but right now I'm spent.


On another Pascal-related note, I've had some people ask me what a fractal is lately (generally after I explain to them that the blown-up-specimen-slide-looking pictures hanging in my living room are fractals).  Fractals are repetitions of a pattern, as on a snowflake, or in this case, appropriately enough, Pascal's Triangle.

Pascal's Triangle is also cool in that it looks like a bunch of Triforces.  Yes, that was a Zelda reference.