Pascal’s Wager is an argument proposed by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in his posthumously published work Pensées (1670).
Pascal proposed the wager as a method of helping a person torn between belief and unbelief in God when they don’t feel able to settle the question based on evidence.
As such, the wager is not an evidential or “cognitive” argument for belief in God. It is an example of practical or “non-cognitive” reasoning.
In essence, Pascal seeks to show that—whether or not God exists—it is in the interests of a person who is unable to decide between these options to go ahead and believe.
It thus offers practical reasons to believe rather than new evidence to believe.
I won’t go into the details of Pascal’s Wager, because I’ve written about it elsewhere (for example, here).
However, the wager relies on insights that can be useful in other situations, and I’d like to explore some of those here.
Context
First, we need to understand the context in which the wager was proposed and what its limitations are.
We’ve already mentioned that it is not designed to give new evidence. That’s the point of the wager. It’s meant to help someone who has reviewed the evidence and still feels unable to decide.
As a result, the wager turns to look at matters besides evidence—that is, what is in the person’s interest.
There is nothing wrong with interest-based, practical reason. Humans constantly make prudential judgments about what to do based on their interests: Is it in my interest to take this job or that? To marry this person or that? To watch this movie or that?
Making decisions that maximize our interests is a fundamental part of the human experience. Such reasoning is built into us.
An Objection: Proportion to Evidence
Some question whether it is legitimate to apply practical reason to matters of belief.
Some have claimed that we have a moral duty to proportion our beliefs strictly to the evidence we have supporting them.
It is difficult to know what advocates of this claim are envisioning, because this is not how humans work. We do not constantly review our beliefs and assign numerical probabilities to them.
Much less do we proportion the beliefs themselves, so that we would say, “I 75% believe this, but I 25% disbelieve it.”
Beliefs are binary. In the typical human experience, we either believe something or we don’t.
We may have different degrees of confidence about our belief, but the belief itself is either there or it isn’t.
How Things Work in Science
It is readily admitted by scientists that the results of science are always provisional.
No matter how much evidence has been accumulated for a scientific theory, it’s always possible that new evidence will emerge that indicates the theory must be modified or rejected in favor of a better one.
But that doesn’t stop scientists from believing particular scientific claims.
Based on the evidence so far accumulated, they accept—let’s say—the existence of electrons. They believe in them, and then they proceed about their business on the premise that electrons exist, without doubting this.
If someone asks them how sure they are that electrons exist, they may stop and mentally review the evidence and say something like, “Well, the results of science are always provisional, so I can’t say with infallible certainty that they do. But the evidence is so strong that I can’t imagine a scenario where sufficient evidence would emerge to overturn their existence. So, I believe that electrons do exist, and I don’t worry about the tiny chance that they don’t.”
In saying something like this, a scientist would be acknowledging that:
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- There is always a gap between the evidence at hand and total certainty, and
- That this gap is sufficiently small that the scientist doesn’t worry about it.
In other words, the scientist has made a leap of faith to overcome the evidential gap. He then adopts the belief that electrons exist, and he doesn’t deem it worthwhile to worry about the possibility that he is wrong unless something happens to cause him to reflect on the question.
Everyday Life
Such leaps of scientific faith are omnipresent in the sciences, but the same applies in all areas of human life.
For example, most people believe that their spouses are not secretly trying to kill them. The evidence for this proposition is significantly less than the evidence for the existence of electrons.
In fact—among a population of billions—any number of people do try to kill their spouses. But—absent evidence that this is the case in a particular instance—the odds are so low that it is not worth worrying about.
People thus accumulate a certain amount of evidence—e.g., that someone loves them and will not kill them—they adopt the belief, “I am safe with this person,” they marry them, and then they don’t worry about it until significant evidence emerges to the contrary.
This is simply how human belief works.
And so, the idea that we should proportion our belief to the evidence does not describe the human experience.
Instead, we see enough evidence that we deem it rational to adopt a belief, we adopt it, and then we don’t worry about the chance we are wrong until something happens that causes us to question the belief.
In other words, we make a leap of faith to overcome the gap between the evidence we have and the position of belief (i.e., acceptance of a proposition without worrying about it) that we need to achieve in order to move on with life.
Paranoia and Self-Interest
We even have a word for people who fail to do this and who continue to worry about the possibility they are wrong: We call them paranoid.
If—despite the evidence a person has that they are safe with their spouse—they continue to worry about the idea that their spouse is going to kill them, that person is paranoid, and we tell them so.
“Look,” we may say, “it is hypothetically possible that your spouse is plotting your murder. But the evidence for that is so small that you shouldn’t be worrying about it. You are only hurting yourself by doing so—and you may be dooming your marriage to failure.”
By making an argument like this, we are appealing to the person’s interests.
They are currently hurting themselves with unnecessary worry—which is contrary to their interests.
And they may in the future hurt the interests of both themselves and their spouse by dooming a marriage that can otherwise benefit both.
In appealing to them to stop worrying, we urge them to use practical reason to overcome the evidential gap between what they’ve seen and the subjective certitude they need to move on with their life on the belief that they are safe with their spouse.
In other words, we are counseling them to make a leap of faith in their own self-interest.
Back to Science
This is the same thing every scientist does when they make a leap of scientific faith between the evidence that electrons exist and the belief that they do—or any other scientific belief they may entertain.
At some point, it would become scientific paranoia to continue to have doubts or anxiety about the existence of electrons (or whatever).
We would thus counsel a paranoid scientist to set aside his doubts and move on—given that he lacks compelling evidence to the contrary.
Is it rational—in terms of self-interest—for the scientist to worry about the reality of electrons, or is it better to believe that they do and move on—being willing to reconsider this if contrary evidence emerges in the future?
If the scientist continues to devote time and energy to the non-existence of electrons—in spite of the current evidence—he is hurting himself and his career.
He is harming his quest for greater scientific understanding by wasting time on an exceedingly unlikely hypothesis, and also hurting society at large by denying others the discoveries he could otherwise make.
We thus counsel him to set aside his worries and make the scientific leap of faith needed to overcome the evidential gap between what experiments have shown and belief (acceptance without worry) that electrons exist.
Preliminary Lessons
From the preceding, I take it that there is simply a difference between the degree of confidence that the evidence alone would warrant and the belief that corresponds to this.
It is rational to make leaps of faith between the two—and it is rational to do so on practical (prudential) grounds.
At some point, the evidential chance of being wrong is low enough that it simply is not worth worrying about the idea one is wrong.
Instead, it is in one’s interest—and the interests of others—to set aside doubts and proceed on the basis of belief.
At some point, we judge it impractical to continue to worry above the evidential gap and choose to embrace a belief on practical grounds. That’s just how humans work.
I thus take it as established—at least from this point forward—that there is a difference between:
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- Whether we believe a proposition (which is binary; we either believe a proposition or we don’t), and
- What degree of confidence we feel regarding the proposition when we review the evidence for it.
I further take it as established that:
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- It can be rational to believe a proposition even if the confidence level we feel based on the evidence is less than what would be required for infallible certainty,
- We all do this constantly; we all wager, all the time, and
- There is nothing wrong with this; it is how human cognition works.
This puts us in a position to consider interesting aspects of the reasoning involved in Pascal’s Wager.
A Limit of Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s Wager was formulated to help a person in a specific situation—being torn between belief in the Christian God and a western form of skepticism that would involve agnosticism or materialistic atheism. As a result, it does not deal with other religious options.
Many have pointed out that there are other options, and the wager doesn’t address them. This is true, but it does not deprive the wager of its utility for those who are in this situation.
In his 1896 lecture “The Will to Believe” (later published as an essay), William James provided helpful discussion of this subject, noting that—for various people—some hypotheses are “live” while others are “dead.”
James defined a live hypothesis as “one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed,” whereas a dead hypothesis is one that does not strike the hearer as a real possibility.
James referred to the decision between two hypotheses as an “option” and stated:
A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones.
If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.
Pascal’s Wager, then, is designed to help a person for whom both Christianity and western skepticism are live hypotheses.
Other Wagers
However, wager-style reasoning can be applied to other situations. To cite a simple example that I’ve discussed before, one can construct a kind of “reincarnation wager.”
Suppose a person’s live option is whether to believe in reincarnation or whether to believe that this life is the only one we have.
How we spend our time has consequences—whether it is achieving goals with respect to this life or with respect to the afterlife.
Consequently, if a person feels unable to decide the issue of reincarnation based on evidence, it will be in his interest to believe the latter so as to make the most of the time he has. If it turns out he is wrong and he reincarnates, he will simply get more time to pursue his goals and “get it right.”
There also can be a similar “afterlife wager” for those who have a live option between believing that there is no afterlife and the possibility that there is an afterlife in which we experience positive or negative consequences based on what we do in this one.
If one is unable to decide this question based on evidence, it will be prudent to assume that there is such an afterlife so as to take reasonable steps to ensure a good afterlife.
If it turned out that the person were wrong and there was no afterlife, the person would not experience a negative one and would only have wasted reasonable efforts in pursuit of a good one.
Wagering, Materialism, and Morals
In light of the applicability of wager-style arguments to other situations, I’d like to address one involving materialism and morals.
Despite the fact we all constantly wager and adopt beliefs based partly on practical rather than evidential reasons, one of the concerns limiting the use of wager-like reasoning is a nagging anxiety people have about whether they are doing something “wrong” by adopting beliefs on these grounds.
I concede that people have a moral intuition that there needs to be some kind of relationship between belief and evidence.
For example, we have the intuition that we would be violating what philosophers call our “epistemic duties” if we chose to believe something that had a massive amount of evidence against it and no evidence for it.
This is true. However, it is not applicable to the situation that Pascal’s Wager is designed to address.
The wager is specifically intended to address a situation in which a person has considered the evidence and still feels unable to make an evidence-based decision.
Further, as William James points out, we may be forced to make a choice, for to refuse to adopt belief in a proposition is to adopt the alternative of non-belief in it. James discusses this in terms of a decision between adopting a religious view or not doing so:
[W]e see, first that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our nonbelief, a certain vital good.
Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.
It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else?
Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
One thus does not escape the trap of making a choice in this situation. It is simply a choice between belief and non-belief.
And—in the absence of evidence that decides the matter—it is made on non-evidential grounds no matter which choice is made.
Religion vs. Scientific Materialism
The above illustrates the difficulties with the idea that it is somehow immoral—a violation of epistemic duties—to adopt a belief based partly on pragmatic rather than evidential concerns.
However, there is more that can be said about this when a particular situation is considered—that is, one like Pascal’s original situation of a person torn between Christianity and skepticism.
Today in the West, skepticism typically entails a form of materialism in which science is given a primary place (i.e., scientific materialism).
Conventional science is driven by empirical phenomena—things that can be observed and measured using the conventional senses (sight, hearing, etc.) and their technological extensions (microscopes, telescopes, spectrometers, gas chromatographs, etc.).
Science is held to be incapable of investigating non-empirical phenomena (souls, spirits, God), and so these are deemed outside the realm of science.
Indeed, for scientific materialism, it is the non-empirical quality of these entities that drives rejection of their existence in the first place.
However, it isn’t only souls, spirits, and God that are not subject to empirical investigation. It is also morality.
Moral properties like good and evil, right and wrong, cannot be detected with the senses or their technological extensions. As a result, it is difficult to see how morality could be real if scientific materialism were true.
Another Wager
This leads us to another wager—this time between a religious worldview and scientific materialism:
1) Suppose a person adopts a religious worldview, and it turned out that scientific materialism were right and that there are no non-empirical things.
In that case, the person would not be violating their epistemic duties because morality would be a fiction, and the person had done nothing wrong by being religious.
2) On the other hand, suppose that a person adopts a worldview of scientific materialism, and it turns out the religious worldview is correct.
On the religious worldview, morality is real, and one should be a moral person. The person then has a choice:
a) In keeping with their scientific materialism, they could reject the real existence on the grounds that it is non-empirical. In this case, they would be doing something wrong because the religious worldview is true and morality is real.
b) Or, despite their scientific materialism, they could continue to accept the real existence of morality. In this case they also would be doing something wrong, because they are violating their own principles, and violating your own principles is morally wrong.
We thus see that (1) if a person incorrectly adopts a religious viewpoint, he does nothing wrong, while (2) if he incorrectly adopts scientific materialism, he inescapably does something wrong.
Given these facts, the logical thing to do is to accept the religious worldview since—whether it is correct or not—one avoids doing something wrong.
Testing the Wager
One way of testing this wager is to ask, “If the religious worldview is true, could I still be doing something wrong by adopting it? Not in the sense of being religious, because we’re assuming this view is true. But perhaps by violating my epistemic duties in some way from within a religious perspective?”
At this point, we are speaking purely from within a religious perspective. We are taking it that religion is true and asking whether one can violate one’s epistemic duties and thus do something morally wrong.
The answer, of course, is yes. From a religious perspective, people of any stripe—religious or not—need to be moral people, and that includes honoring their epistemic duties.
If a person—religious or non-religious—stifles his conscience to convince himself that murder is an okay thing to do, then he is violating his epistemic duties.
So, yes, religious people can violate their epistemic duties. But what does this have to do with the question of being religious itself?
We can infer from this that one should not violate one’s epistemic duties by adopting beliefs that one should not, so don’t join a religion that teaches them.
If you have a functioning conscience, don’t become a member of the Manson Family and participate in its murder sprees. And if you have good evidence that evolution is true, don’t join a church that insists on Young Earth Creationism.
The Religious View in General
But how would one be violating one’s religious duties merely by adopting a religious point of view?
This returns us to the question of evidence and what relationship it has with belief adoption.
If a person thought that he had conclusive evidence against religion, then he should not adopt a religious point of view.
And if a person thought he had conclusive evidence for religion, then he should adopt it.
However, neither of these situations is what wager-style arguments are designed to address (or at least the kind that we are considering). They are for people who don’t think that they can settle the matter based on their review of the evidence.
But there is still a need to settle it, and so wagers appeal to practical reason to overcome the evidential gap—just as we do in science and in everyday life.
Given the omnipresence of pragmatic leaps of faith in every field of human endeavor—indeed, in virtually every belief we adopt except as the result of a mathematical demonstration—it is hard to see how using practical reason to overcome an evidential deadlock could be seen as violating our epistemic duties.
We use practical reason to overcome evidential gaps all the time. It is built into human nature, and so we are simply acting in accord with our nature when we do so. There is nothing wrong with this.
Intellectual and Moral Coherence
Further, adopting a religious perspective provides a greater degree of intellectual and moral coherence than adopting scientific materialism.
Whether or not one is religious, we have an inbuilt moral sense that tells us that we have moral duties, including the epistemic ones that the person torn between religion and materialism is concerned about.
On a materialist view, these may have an evolutionary explanation, but they do not objectively bind, and—as non-empirical—they should not be given credence.
Nevertheless—unless they are psychopaths—materialists find themselves inescapably falling back into thinking and acting as if morality is objectively real. They are as horrified by murder, bigotry, and oppression as anyone—even though their worldview would imply that there is nothing objectively wrong with any of these.
Materialists thus have a lived experience that is inconsistent with their belief system, resulting in a lack of coherence between the two.
By contrast, on the religious view, non-empirical entities are real, and this provides an intellectual framework that allows our in-built moral sense to be what we take it to be—a reflection of reality and something that is objectively binding on us.
The religious view thus provides a form of coherence between the intellectual and the moral that scientific materialism does not.
Coherence between belief and lived experience is a desirable feature of worldviews, and the religious worldview offers this regarding moral realism, whereas materialism does not.
This is one more reason—in addition to the evidential and pragmatic reasons—to prefer the religious worldview.
There’s an old saying, “Once a Catholic; always a Catholic,” but what does this mean?
Suppose that you have a friend who was raised Catholic (or at least Christian) but is now having doubts about whether God exists. You’ve given him a number of books about evidence for the Christian faith, but they haven’t really clicked for him. On the other hand, neither have arguments against Christianity. He feels torn between belief and unbelief, unable to resolve whether to be a Christian or an agnostic.
