Now you want to get into heaven – it’s not some crummy heaven that you won’t enjoy. St Peter offers you one of two options: you can walk through door A and go into heaven, or you can walk through door B and have a 1 in 1,000,000,000 of getting into a heaven and a 999,999,999 in 1,000,000,000 chance of being annihilated. So the wager doesn’t give you any more reason to believe in God X over any of the alternative gods.Īnswer: Suppose you find yourself standing at the gates of heaven. If there’s a non-zero chance of getting infinite utility if you wager for a different God, then wagering for any of these gods has infinite expected utility (EU). The basic idea: there are n-many gods that reward belief. There are many gods you could wager for, not just one! I’ve also put next to the objections currently mentioned on the Iron Chariots blog entry on Pascal’s wager, since it’s a source a few people have mentioned to me when discussing the problem.ġ. Sometimes it’s easier to understand the reply to one objection if you already know the reply to another, so I’ve tried to put them in an order that takes that into account. I’m happy to go into further details or discuss objections that I haven’t included here in the comments if anyone wants me to. BUT so that this post doesn’t take me forever, I’m restricting myself to 100 words (that’s right, 100 words!) per response. Here I’m going to respond to the common objections to the wager (some more sophisticated, some less). (3) Conclusion: you shouldn’t wager against God. (2) The expected utility of wagering for God is greater than the expected utility of wagering against God. So to lay out the argument behind Pascal’s wager explicitly: (1) You shouldn’t perform actions with lower expected utility over those with greater expected utility. It should be obvious that the only way to ‘win’ in such a scenario is to believe in God even if you think it’s very unlikely (but not impossible) that God exists. What should you do? Well, there are four possible outcomes that will occur when you die, so let’s list them and note down the utility of each: B&G: heaven (infinite utility) B&~G: annihilation (0 utility) ~B&G: either hell (infinite suffering) or annihilation (0 utility) ~B&~G: annihilation (0 utility) Treating ~B&G as if it produces 0 utility lets us avoid some nasty features of infinities for now, so I’ll assume it and then mention those below. Now there are two actions available to you: (B) Believe in God, and (~B) Don’t Believe in God. There are two possible states of the world: (G) God exists, and (~G) God doesn’t exist. Okay, so let’s start things off by giving a simple formulation of Pascal’s wager. So in this post I’m going to quickly run through each of the most common objections to the wager that I’ve been presented with thus far, and explain why (in under 100 words!) I think that none of them are successful. But people are nonetheless often very confident that the argument is not a good one. In fact, I think that many of the methods used to get around the wager are worse than simply accepting that the argument is, perhaps surprisingly, valid and sound. I think that Pascal’s wager is in fact a very interesting and difficult problem to which there is currently no completely satisfactory solution. PASCALS WAGER SERIESAnd when I do there are a series of common objections that I get to Pascal’s wager in particular. In fact, sometimes I’m even foolish enough to mention these topics over dinner. I am interested in Pascal’s wager, fanaticism problems, and infinite decision theory. In this post I respond to some of the common objections to Pascal’s wager, keeping each response to under 100 words! Published: AugSummary: In this post I respond to some of the common objections to Pascal’s wager, keeping each response to under 100 words!
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