Living in a generally liberal society such as the UK, it is fairly common for people to come to be religious through culture rather than belief. Because of this, many people have either not questioned their religious upbringing or have rationalised their beliefs with trivial logic.
With Christmas fast approaching, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to scrutinise one of the most common justifications I have come across by using it to justify belief in Santa.
Blaise Pascal was a 17th century mathematician, physicist, philosopher and theologian. In 1670 he published his work “Pensées”, literally translated to “thoughts” in which his famous proposition was first set out. This came to be known as Pascal’s Wager.
The Premise of Pascal’s Wager
The premise is simple; either God exists or he does not.
In order to decide which to believe he lays out some steps:
- With no way to know the truth you cannot reasonably defend either position therefore, we should treat this as a coin flip
- You have to make a choice
- We need to weigh the risk vs reward. If you believe he exists and you are correct, you win infinitely; if you believe and he does not, you lose nothing. The antithesis to this is that if you don’t believe and you are correct, you don’t gain anything but if you are wrong, you lose infinitely.
- Based on this, the logical conclusion would be to believe as you have nothing to lose
- Finally he suggests that some people cannot believe but these people should try to convince themselves as the wager has infinitely good odds
To summarise these steps in simple terms, we can say that if you believe and you’re correct, you get to spend an eternity in heaven whereas if you are wrong, you die and nothing happens. Similarly if you don’t believe and you are correct, you die and nothing happens however if you are wrong, you will be rejected from heaven (or spend an eternity in hell depending on your denomination).
Before I jump into the common objections to this proposition, I want to show why many of these arguments cannot get you to one God without also getting you to every other God that has been conceived.
Does Santa Exist?
Let’s apply this same logic to the existence of Santa.
The premise is simple; either Santa exists or he does not.
Once you have run through all five steps, you can summarise the conclusion in a similar form.
We can say that if you believe and you’re correct, you will receive presents whereas if you are wrong, you get no presents. Similarly if you don’t believe and you are correct, you get no presents however if you are wrong, you will also get no presents where you otherwise would have.
We can therefore conclude that the rational thing to do is to believe in Santa as you have nothing to lose and presents to gain.
Now I’ve used Santa as a seasonal example but the truth is that you could use this wager to justify belief in any proposition where you are rewarded for your belief but being wrong is inconsequential.
Criticisms
One big problem is that being wrong in the proposition set out by Pascal is not inconsequential at all. If you truly submit to belief in God then your life will be shaped by this.
When “God did it” can answer any fundamental ontological question we have, we tend to stop looking for answers that progress our societies and understandings. If Charles Darwin had believed that animals as we see them today were created by God, he may never have discovered evolution by natural selection as he would have had no reason to try and find an answer to a question that he already had the answer to.
People also say things like, “my religious beliefs don’t impact other people”. This is almost always false. Belief that a holy text holds the instructions for morality will impact how you view the world.
As an example, imagine that you are religious but are generally liberal in your views. Your religion is strongly opposed to homosexuality but you happened to know and interact with many homosexual people who you think of as genuinely nice people. When the topic of gay marriage is on the political agenda you have two candidates to vote for; one who is opposed to gay marriage and one who is for it. Your religion may compel you to vote for the candidate opposed to gay marriage despite it’s impact on the people in your own life who you see on a daily basis.
Every action we take is based on a set of beliefs about the situation we are in and therefore any belief can (and usually does) have an impact on the world and people around us.
Another common criticism is based the notion that we cannot choose our beliefs. We are either convinced that something is the case or likely the case or we are not. If we “pretend” that we believe, surely an omniscient God would know that we are lying and may even look upon us less favourably for being deceitful.
We also need to remember that our level of conviction in a belief has no bearing on it’s truth. In other words, it doesn’t matter how strongly we think something is true, the actual truth of the proposition does not change. This is the same with how many people believe something to be true – it is always true independent of how many people believe it to be the case.
“the interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists”
Voltaire
Probably the most powerful of all the objections to Pascal’s wager is the idea that there have been thousands of gods posited throughout history and many of them have their own benefits to believing in them. How many gods would you be justified in believing in based on this wager?
“How many times have I stated that I don’t believe in any God? There are possibly 3,000 so-called deities. If we’re talking about monotheistic gods, I believe in one less god than you. When they say, ‘Why don’t you believe in God?’, I often say, ‘Which one?'”
Ricky Gervais