Welcome to the third video in our series on the common fallacies that both atheists and
libertarians run into while debating their opponents.
This week, it's a pretty insidious and persistent concept known as Pascal's Wager.
This was first posited by philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, and comes from
his book, The Pens�es.
Here's the gist of it:
Either God exists, or he doesn't.
That is a true dichotomy.
According to Pascal, there's no way to intellectually defend either proposition, but you MUST wager
on one or the other.
So he says to wager that God exists, because, quote: "[T]here is here an infinity of an
infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of
loss, and what you stake is finite...there is no time to hesitate, you must give all.
And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather
than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness."
So, if God doesn't exist, there's nothing to gain or lose either way.
But if God DOES exist, and you don't believe in him, you give up an eternity in Heaven,
and possibly even gain an eternity in Hell.
So let's go over it, point by point.
"Either God exists, or he doesn't.
You have to choose one or the other!"
There's all sorts of problems with this, starting with an Excluded Middle.
While the choice between God or no God is a true dichotomy, he's actually implying a
very different dichotomy: either no god exists, or the God that does exist values belief over
reason.
But what about the possibility of a god that values reason over belief?
That God would reward you for sincere intellectual reflection, even if you don't end up convinced
that he exists, and might actually NOT like you believing in something--even him--when
there just isn't any evidence to do so.
Let's say that such a god is equally likely.
Then believing in God over reason is just as likely to win as it is to lose, and the
benefit of the wager goes away.
Plus, one might think that the God of Reason is actually MORE likely, since he did apparently
give us brains capable of reasoning.
And what about the possibility of a God that demands true belief, not just belief because
you're playing the odds?
He might get mad that you're just pretending just so you can get a reward later on.
If we put this third possible God into our mix, then believing simply because of this
wager becomes more likely a losing prospect than a winning one.
There's also the big problem of, which God do you believe in?
Yahweh might get mad if you choose Allah and send you to Hell, but Allah might get just
as mad if you choose Yahweh!
And choosing either might earn the scorn of Quetzalcoatl if it turns out HE'S the real
God after all.
"If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing."
It's just not true that the cost of betting on God and losing is zero.
What would you have done as a result of this false belief?
How much time do you spend in church, and how much money do you give them?
Also, what happens to your desire for intellectual fullfilment when you can just answer every
question with "God did it"?
And how does it affect your relationship with other people who aren't the same religion
as you?
Do you trust them less, even though you have no reason to?
Do you lobby your politicians to ban gay marriage or working on Sunday or whatever, even though
those actions don't have any effect on your life in any way?
What about enjoying your life to the fullest?
If you really like pork, but the religion you choose says to not eat pork, you're gonna
miss out on something you enjoy.
And if your religion says not to get blood transfusions or even seek ANY medical care
when you're sick, you might be in for a REALLY bad time--and a MUCH shorter life.
Of course, the biggest problem with Pascal's Wager is that it's nothing more than fearmongering
disguised as an intellectual exercise.
Because you see, people know this intuitively: they know they give up stuff by adhering to
a religion.
So to get people to do it, you have to scare them with either giving up eternal life, or
even worse, being subjected to eternal torture after you die.
They're actually preying on the economic concept of "delayed gratification," where you invest
by giving up money or something else you've earned in exchange for a greater rate of return
down the line.
When you think about it like that, it actually sounds pretty sad that they have to promise
an INFINITE return on the investment to get you to believe!
But a bank can get some of your hard-earned money for a whole year by offering you a CD
with less than a 2% return!
Hmm, if I remember correctly, infinity is larger than 2%.
So, how does this fallacy relate to politics?
We actually see the same failed logic over and over again from statists.
One prominent example has to do with Global Warming.
No one of any rationality denies that the planet is warming, or that humans are contributing
to the effect.
But that doesn't mean we get to skip over the entire risk-benefit analysis like many
environmentalists want to do.
"But we just can't wait any longer!
We have to act to stop climate change NOW or we're all doomed!"
They've been saying that for over 20 years now.
And what action do they want us to take?
Of course, it's the same enivironmental agenda they've been pushing on us the whole time.
We have to cut emissions.
We have to make people use biofuels.
And why?
In his Nobel-prize-winning Powerpoint presentation, Al Gore showed what would happen if global
warming caused the sea level to rise 20 feet.
The problem is, no scientist is actually predicting anything like that to happen in the next thousand
years!
The IPCC's worst case scenario for the next century is 55cm.
In the 20th century, it rose 19cm.
Was it a problem?
Sure, for certain places who were able to mitigate the damages on their own.
Most of the damage from global warming can be taken care of in this way, and much more
efficiently.
"That doesn't matter!
We can't afford to wait or we'll destroy the planet!"
They said this back in 1997 when the US failed to sign on to the Kyoto protocol, even though
the best estimates showed it would make very little difference to CO2 levels over the next
century.
Now they're saying this about measures such as Cap and Trade, which oddly enough BP is
lobbying in favor of.
Exxon is lobbying in favor of biofuels.
Could it be that the oil companies are turning over a new leaf and protecting the environment?
Or are they just seeing an opportunity for cronyism allowing them to profit more than
they ever have before?
Of course, the big problem is, when you have government try something that doesn't work,
or even makes the problem worse, it's really difficult to overturn it.
Environmentalist groups went gaga over corn ethanol (and, of course, so did the corn growers),
and they passed laws for government to subsidize the production of ethanol and require a certain
portion of it to be in gasoline sold to consumers.
All to stop Global Warming, of course.
But the fact is, once you account for factors of production, corn ethanol actually produces
MORE CO2 for the energy you get from it than gasoline.
So in the past few years, most environmentalist groups have turned against corn ethanol--but
all of those legal requirements are still in place, mostly because the corn growers
still love it.
And boy, do they have lobbyists!
It's even worse than Pascal's Wager, where the cost of betting wrongly is supposedly
zero.
Here, if we bet wrongly, we may be stuck with an eternity of government programs that don't
work, and even make the problem worse.
Of course, there's nothing at all wrong with doing a proper cost-benefit analysis and seeing
what the best course of action is to take.
And there's other advantages to things like alternative fuels to be considered.
That's exactly what Bjorn Lomborg has been advocating for years.
Of course, the response of the environmentalists is to call him a "climate change denier,"
even though he DOESN'T deny anthropogenic global warming!
He just doesn't buy in to their so-called "solutions."
We see Pascal's Wager in our foreign policy, too.
"We just can't wait!
We have to overthrow our dictator-of-the-week!
You don't want all those people to suffer, do you?"
So if we act now and overthrow the dictator, the people will be happy.
If we wait, the people will be miserable that much longer.
The problem is, very rarely does it seem to work out that way.
Iraqis aren't much better off now than they were under Saddam, and terrorist groups were
able to gain a toehold there where they weren't under Hussein's regime.
Afghanistanis keep suffering horrible oppression long after the US overthrew the Taliban.
And many Egyptions have had enough of their country being run by the extremist group Muslim
Brotherhood, which Obama has been supporting and giving aid to.
Even more moderate responses don't seem to achieve results.
The sanctions against Iraq under Bill Clinton resulted in an estimated half million children
dying.
When then-Ambassador Madeline Albright was asked about this on 60 minutes, she replied,
quote: "we think the price is worth it."
But nothing much happened to Hussein or anyone in his regime.
So just like religion, the costs of taking this action to get those future gains are
NOT zero.
And there's just not much evidence that those future gains will come.
There are lots of other examples where statists do this, too, from the War on Drugs to the
Minimum Wage to lots of bogus scares like the Ford Pinto.
But really, although we could spend all day relating Pascal's Wager to the fearmongering
that government proponents love to engage in, there's a bigger issue: statism itself
is one big Pascal's Wager.
"Let's weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that we need government to solve our problems.
Let us estimate these two chances.
If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
Wager, then, without hesitation that government is good."
Pretty much every single problem with Pascal's Wager as it applies to God applies here.
First of all, which government?
Socialist?
Communist?
Democratic?
Republic?
Fiefdom?
We seem to be constantly inundated with one controversy or another over HOW the state
should rule our lives, as both parties try and implement their agenda and vie for our
votes.
As we've seen, the cost of betting on government solutions and losing is NOT zero.
And again, it's just fearmongering disguised as intellectual discourse.
"But who will build the roads?"
There was actually a political cartoon going around awhile back with a factory and the
owner outside of it, chagrined because the stateless society he was in didn't build a
road for him.
It would have been an excellent parody of the statist position, if the cartoonist hadn't
been serious!
Do people ACTUALLY think we'd have no roads without government?
Bet on government, and you'll get roads.
Bet against government, and everyone will be standing on their front porch scratching
their heads wondering how they're going to get anywhere.
Yeah, right.
If that's not Pascal's Wager, it's certainly close enough.
The main thing about Pascal's Wager is this: you're given a false choice.
Eternal life or no eternal life.
Roads or no roads.
A safe environment or the destruction of the world.
Wars, marijuana, health care, Minimum Wage, on and on and on and on and on, Pascal's Wager,
or something very similar, is used to defend all of these.
Which is not to say that there are no good arguments for any of them, but Pascal's Wager
certainly isn't one of them.
And as we'll see in part 4, it's the case that a lot of statists just can't wrap their
heads around society functioning any other way.
Stay tuned.