Al Hajek came to give a colloquium talk at my university a month or so ago. At the post-talk dinner he made an effort to talk to every graduate student on a very human level. Not only is he a great philosopher, but he also seems like a really great person. Glad to see him make an appearance on the channel! Gonna have to research Liz’s work as well after this one!
I think expected value calculations stop making sense when dealing with infinities. Consider the following scenario: - Option A: You get 1 billion years of the most enjoyable and fulfilling life you can imagine - Option B: You get the most painful torture you can imagine for 1 billion years. After this, you have a 0.00000000000001% chance of going to heaven forever Expected value calculations would have us go with option B, but intuitively option A is obviously so much better (at least for me). Would anyone actually pick option B if given this choice?
I don't think we need heaven to be of infinite value, for expected value calculations to give us the counter-intuitive answer of going with B. It just needs to outweigh option A, so heaven needs a minimum value of something like... (100% / 0.0000000000001%) x 1 billion years :)
Just because expected value doesn’t work in this case with an infinite doesn’t mean it couldn’t work in other cases with an infinite. But you have shown that expected value doesn’t work in some case with an infinite so it would be up to the person In favor of the wager to tell you which cases it does work and if one of those cases applies to the real world. I’m not exactly sure how that breaks down tho.
I loved the discussion on the St. Petersburg Game. I think I can potentially resolve it: Expected value is a very important consideration, but it's not the only consideration. We also have to consider a variable that I call "probability of success" Games can be played multiple times, let's say that you decide to play an arbitrary x number of times. Given x games played, either you will have lost money overall, gained money overall, or broken even. A "win" means that in an *individual* game you win more than the cost to play. A "success" means that given x games played, you have won more overall than you paid to play. We can then calculate the probability of success for x number of games played. Then we just have to decide if there exists a feasible number of attempts that justifies playing the game by giving us a sufficiently high probability of success.
Are there Bayesian formulations of the wager? As a young atheist, one of the most convincing arguments I came up with was "No good god would put us in the situation of the standard wager." I go back and forth on what this means - it might be a statement of the hiddenness problem, or some sort of Christian problem of informed consent. I still hold this as an argument for universalism 😌
If there is just one finite life then any reduction in the value of that limited life is an infinite waste. Why? Because you are losing something (a positive value) and getting nothing for it (0). Hence +/0! However, the truth is that we have no way of knowing if there is a god and if so, which one and what they may want. Since we don't know there is no way to set probabilities.
Exactly. Neither do we know what rewards/ punishments God might give out for doing what he wants/ doesn't want us to do. So we actually don't know any of the parameters.
Love the thumbnail! I think Dr Michael Rota’s formulation of Pascal’s Wager is the most convincing- it is modest, and relies upon evidence from sociology. You can see an interview with him on The Analytic Christian.
That is exactly the experience of zealous Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. Many of them end up with extreme scrupulosity, which is essentially OCD with a religious character.
@@whitemakesright2177 , call it OCD. Still doesn't change the fact you could commit mortal sin at any moment. How could anyone not get OCD in such a nightmare?
@@ObsidianTeen Sorry, my original comment wasn't clear enough. I was agreeing with you, and adding supporting data from real life. Basically, what I was trying to say is: you're absolutely correct, doctrines like that will drive you crazy. In support of that, look at traditional Catholics and Eastern Orthodox - they do go crazy, exactly as you've described.
Most in the West don’t know that the concept of the so called Pascal Wager was first articulated by Ali , one of most significant companions of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century of the CE.
I know this is very late to the video, and will most likely not be seen, but in the section on Al's delimma, the whole focus is on infinity and or either the largest number and how that can represent salvation. The conversation is centered around how it is optimal to quantify salvation as infinite or as largest possible number since these things cause logical problems to the wager, but why not just set salvation as some arbitrary number, or as the greatest possible realization of ones reality. That is, why should we give it a number when we can just argue that God created reality such that salvation is the best possible outcome for any individual. The mathematics we bring is is purely to give some measurablility to the wager and does not need to objectively measure the actual expectation of an outcome. An analogy would be in Statistics qualitative categorical variables are usually encoded in some mathematical way to render statistical analysis of the data possibls, like saying red = 0, blue = 1 etc, these encoding are useful in drawing inferences from the data, nevertheless they are just encodings, a way of quantifying some qualitative categorical variables and do since these variables cannot be used in mathematical calculations unless they represented numerically. The same is possible of salvation, that is that God created the world such that salvation is categorically set above all other possible outcomes, how we wish to encode that in a mathematical sence is arbitrary to the extent that we can accurately draw inferences from it
I think my biggest counterargument is that it is just a priori more probable that there is a noninterventionsist god that will offer infinite rewards for the intellectually honest than that the Christian god exists. Punishing someone for being sincirely unconvinced of something just has such a low probability combated to basic rewarding-deity conceptions like thay
Great discussion. My take is that Pascal's wager is dubious from the start, in that it uses "expected" utility (defined in the frequentist interpretation by a potential infinity of trials) for a one-time wager - it has to rely solely on subjectivist notions of credence. So, a rational agent who finds the plausibility of the God claim "infinitely small" would (and should) never have to wrestle with the wager.
Yep, an inifintesimal probability is one problem. The other is that expected value is a time quantity so eventually infinite may not be sufficient to overcome present costs.
That would seem to be an ambitious task to render the existence of God to infinitesimally small. It seems that would be mathematically equivalent to disproving God’s existence with certainty, i e proving a contradiction. I think psychologically it wouldn’t make sense to be an atheist and think there is a plausible chance of God’s existence due to Pascal’s wager, so an atheist would be psychologically motivated to interpret the evidence in a way that would render God’s existence practically impossible.
Minor point. I haven't read the paper, but it appears that they frame the utility calculation in terms of basic subjective expected utility (SEU), that is, as developed by Savage (1954). While this is unproblematic here, SEU is now universally rejected by decision theorists, since it admits of clear counterexamples. For example, if you're considering whether to get some vaccine at a small cost that's expected to significantly lower the likelihood of contracting some disease that you could get regardless, but would be a large cost, SEU invariably, but incorrectly, recommends declining the vaccine. The problem is that getting the disease is not independent (either causally or evidentially) of you getting the vaccine, and so it's a mistake to assess expexted utility with SEU. The popular approaches that accommodate cases like this are causal decision theory (CDT) and evidential decision theory (EDT). Also, facts about risk-aversion can be understood as impacting the preference function rather than requiring a whole new decision rule.
@@lizjackson111 Thanks for the reply! What gave me the impression was the bit shown of the paper at about 10:30, in particular, the line which says "Recall that to calculate the expected utility of each option, you multiply the probability of each state (heads, tails) by the utility (or value) that corresponds to each option." The suggested procedure, as far as I can tell, just is SEU. You can't multiply down and add across to calculate expected utility on CDT (unless the actions and states are causally independent, roughly speaking) or on EDT (unless the actions and states are evidentially independent). In the case of VACCINE, suppose we had: | DISEASE (pr = 0.5) | NO DISEASE (pr = 0.5) | EU VACCINE | -11 | -1 | -6 NO VACCINE | -10 | 0 | -5 Not getting the vaccine has higher expected utility than getting the vaccine, and in fact dominates it, per SEU. But suppose that getting the vaccine is not independent from getting the disease, such that P(DISEASE|VACCINE) = 0.1, and P(DISEASE|~VACCINE) = 0.6. This changes nothing to the calculations above, but on on EDT, EV(VACCINE) = -2, whereas EV(~VACCINE) = -7, and so getting the vaccine is recommended. CDT delivers the same (correct) result, although the decision calculation is not quite the same. Regardless, the procedure of "multiply down, add across" presented in the paper delivers the Savage procedure, and the wrong answer in cases like VACCINE. I'll add, if the probability by which you multiply isn't simply the prior on the outcome, but the probability of the outcome conditional on the action being considered, then the resulting procedure will reflect EDT. While I think that's the right approach, if you're trying to be neutral with respect to disputes between EDT and CDT (per fn. 1), then you cannot take this approach, either. Note that the suggested rule would deliver the one-box solution in Newcomb's, for example. It might be that the best approach would be to say that SEU is an adequate model for this case because the states are causally and evidentially independent of the various choices, and so even though SEU is incorrect generally, it will agree on this case with CDT, EDT, and perhaps some other decision rules, and so will be adequate here.
I always feel a bit gross from Pascal's Wager - there is always the ominous "or else..." hovering in the background, like a Mafioso encouraging you to accept his very generous offer.
Yep. And perversely, it rewards precisely those religions which make the most outlandish and barbaric claims. For instance, a form of Christianity in which Hell is finite is given less credence under Pascal's Wager than a form of Christianity in which Hell is eternal.
I would agree that’s true for the version that’s about eschatology, but there’s another version based on moral realism. If atheism is true and moral values are not real than it doesn’t really matter if you’re a Christian or atheist, you’re still just molecules in motion. If Christianity is true, and let’s say universalism is also true, than being a Christian and pursuing a virtuous faithful life would still be objectively good, and living an atheistic life would be less good.
Pascal's wager is only about one type of God that separates mankind into one of two extreme destinations after death. There are other conceptions of God.
That’s correct. I generally think Pascal’s wager is strong. But I think one frequent wrong presupposition is that the scenario of God existing is identical to the scenario of believing him rendering Heaven and disbelieving him rendering Hell. It doesn’t break God existing into probability he exists and universalism being true, of annihilationism being true, of God caring more particularly that you believe in Evangelical Protestant doctrine, Islam, etc.
Thumbnail is awesome 😁 I wonder what folks would say to this: Point 1: A report of salvation, to be remotely credible, must satisfy the following criteria: 1) There must be a report of a God capable of granting us heaven or hell after death. If the promise of heaven or threat of hell is from a being incapable of making good on such promises or threats, then we have no reason to wager. 2) This report must include God communicating to us the conditions of salvation. If there is no promise of heaven or threat of hell, then we have no reason to wager. 3) The conditions of salvation must be possible for us to fulfill. If we must follow God’s commands to be saved, but cannot find, understand, or perform God’s commands, then we cannot wager. 4) The conditions of salvation must specify that only those who live according to God’s commands receive heaven and/or avoid hell. If everyone immediately goes to heaven regardless of what they did in life, then we have no reason to wager. 5) This report must come from a major religion. Fulfillment of the above criteria implies a religion, and it’s unbelievable that a tiny religion would turn out to be the right one such that a thousand people end up in heaven while over a hundred _billion_ end up in hell. So for this report to reach a bare minimum of credibility, it must be fairly widespread. (How widespread a religion should be to be considered credible is a question for another time.) If this is right, then there are exactly 4 possible credible reports of salvation: Those found in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as these are the only 4 major religions. (You would have to adjust the criteria for the eastern religions. Maybe there is no God that sends people to hell, or Naraka, on Buddhism, but there is a karmic metaphysical structure that does. Of course, this depends on the exact sect of Buddhism / Hinduism.) Point 2: Decision theory considerations prove that if a report of salvation comes anywhere close to satisfying all of these criteria, then it would be profoundly irrational to not investigate that report, assuming you are well-off enough to spend the effort. (You could be missing out on salvation!) In this sense Pascal's Wager is successful. The Wager proves that it's incredibly foolish to not spend some effort in investigating Christianity. Considering the quality of Christian scholasticism, we might say that we should spend a _great_ deal of effort investigating Christianity. But again, this runs up against other obligations of life. Not everyone can spend thousands of hours investigating Christianity. Point 3: However, after the investigation, you will either end up a Christian or not. If you do, you will because of the arguments and evidence in favor of Christianity. But if you discover that the arguments and evidence at best lead to agnosticism, or even lead you away from Christianity, then it will be impossible for you to go to church, pray to God, take communion, read the Bible as the Word of God, say the sinner's prayer sincerely, and so on. The challenges to Christian belief will psychologically prevent you from acting as a Christian. (Just as the Christian's conviction that Christianity is true prevents them from reciting the Shahada and practicing the five pillars of Islam.) So the "impossible to wager" objection succeeds. The non-wagerer can always say criterion 3 cannot be fulfilled due to the challenges to belief.
Thanks for the comment, and I'm glad you liked the thumbnail! I'm sympathetic to the 'impossible to wager' objection. But here's some feedback on your comment nonetheless :) One response to your comment challenges some of your claims to the effect of 'if such-and-such condition holds (or does not hold), then we have no reason to wager'. A natural response is that this is not a necessary condition on having a reason to wager. Even if, e.g., we have no reports of a particular God G and G's salvific plan, so long as there's a non-zero chance that G exists (which is an extremely low bar and can be met even if there are no reports of G), and so long as wagering on G has infinite expected utility while not wagering does not, then we have reason to wager on G. (Or, at least, we have a reason to wager on G if you think we have reason to maximize expected utility.) Of course, one can challenge the claim that not wagering on G does not have infinite expected utility. For instance, one might think that there are other wagers that one could take which have infinite expected utility. Likewise, one could challenge the aforementioned reasoning on several other fronts. But all this is compatible with my point. My point is simply that it doesn't follow *merely* from the absence of a report of G and G's salvific plan that we have no reason to wager. In principle, we could still have a reason to wager, so long as (i) G has non-zero probability, (ii) wagering on G has infinite expected utility, (iii) not wagering on G does not have infinite expected utility, and (iv) we have some reason to maximize expected utility.
But noone is talking about the incompatibility between God and Hell... -One shouldn't be afraid of a perfectly good infinite being. -He would have communicated the truth of his existence much more clearly and unambiguously if he actually wanted people to believe in him. -He would have made the people that believe in him distinctly morally better people -There would be unity among those who claim him as their God rather than constant infighting -The idea of eternal punishment is so obviously anthropogenic and not from an infinite being. All of these common sense level problems have to be ignored in order for Pascal's Wager to be taken seriously, which basically requires a cosmic tyrannical narcissist to have any grounds in the first place.
I don't see why any of those points is true, especially the first. Bad people should be very afraid, actually, and not just them. Fear and Trembling, and all that.
@@gascogne Why should bad people be afraid of a perfectly good infinite being? They would be in perfectly loving hands that would readily rehabilitate them even if it takes an eternity of creative situations and events beyond our comprehension. God's redemptive power isn't constrained to 80 years on Earth.
I prefer this wager: 1) If God exists, he intentionally hid himself from humanity since there is no sign of this God. (For more detail, search for the divine hiddenness problem). 2) Since he is hidden from us, God expects us to NOT believe in him. 3) So, belief in God is against God's expectation for us. 4) Going against God's expectation is wrong. 5) So, God would punish those who believe in him, and reward those who do not. 6) So, we should not believe in God.
@@DDDarwin27 to make the claim “there is no sign of God” is to completely disregard everything outside one’s experience. It is akin to saying we have never been to the moon. There is evidence. There are signs. Not all evidence is equal and nor are all signs. But it does not therefore follow that there is “no sign of God.” The fact that we exist, I would argue, is a sign. Christ was the single biggest sign as it was God assuming human nature. You don’t have to believe it (you do it you want to be rational and or have any hope of salvation) but that doesn’t have bearing on its truthfulness.
There seems to me to be something deeply troubling and almost insulting to religion to reduce it to a set of probabilities. It also assumes doxastic voluntarism which is highly controversial.
Thanks for the comment! Importantly, though, the wager doesn’t ’reduce religion to a set of probabilities’. It is simply aiming to show that one should commit to a religion as there is strong practical reason to do so. This doesn’t at all reduce religion to a set of probabilities. Second, the wager doesn’t assume doxastic voluntarism, as explained in the video. Wagering on God need not involve voluntarily forming a belief in God; it need only involve committing to a religious life, which comprises various voluntary actions - attending religious services, praying (perhaps only saying conditional prayers if one doesn’t yet believe), and so on.
@@MajestyofReason Fair point on the first, but religions like Christianity and Islam require explicit beliefs in doctrines which cannot be simply affirmed through actions. In fact, both make it clear that actions without faith (which requires some level of certainty in certain propositions) are useless and will not bring salvation on their own. It may be the case that acting in a religious way for long enough may "fool" the brain into proper belief formation, but the genuine nature of such a conversation is questionable and it's not guaranteed that acting in a certain way will translate into the beliefs required for salvation.
@@analyticallysound2716 those religions appear to prescribe or require faith, yes, but it’s very controversial in the literature on faith whether faith requires positive belief. There are lots of accounts of non-doxastic faith - just search that term up in PhilPapers or Google scholar🙂
@@analyticallysound2716 and plus, even if faith requires belief, the wager would still seem to go through, since committing to God and going through those religious practices and reading religious literature etc. maximizes your chances of forming the belief, which in turn maximizes your chances of infinite utility. So the wager does not require the assumption that one can be saved without faith. It only requires that the way to maximize one’s chance of salvation, including maximizing one’s chance of forming the relevant beliefs, is to commit to God and perform these various actions. Expected utility theory then says we should do precisely this.
@@MajestyofReason Also a fair point, however as Dr. Jackson briefly mentioned on the "many gods" objection, it really does seem to reduce the assumed pragmatic power of the argument. Now it's not simply a question of my belief in a proposition being an "off/on" switch and it becomes a hope that I become convinced of the evidence for a particular religion after doing what I can to try and become convinced. Even then, I may have chosen to try and be convinced of the wrong religion all along. As someone who has studied Islam and Christianity extensively and found both with their pros/cons, it's extremely difficult to weigh what would be more probable at all and different people weigh evidences differently. I also dislike how this wager in general seems to favour religions with the highest potential negative payoffs (e.g. eternal hell). I don't even have to try and force myself to be a hindu or a buddhist to get a good rebirth in their religions because I just need to be a "good" person to maximize my karma, with goodness being defined as pretty universally virtuous behavior. Overall, I can see why this argument is almost never used anymore by most theists. It's just not convincing for me [but perhaps had I been a different person, I would have weighed the evidence and found it convincing and chose to wager instead >:-) ].
How is that a fix? Infinite-finite-impossible doesn’t narrow anything down since those are the only options that anything has to begin with. Do you mean to imply that finite isn’t an option b/c OA? Alex would like a word with you
@whatsinaname691 well Mr. Name 691, if you must know, the finite being is plausibly not capable of infinite reward so that is one infinity we don't have to deal with and the probability of other infinite Gods is either 0 or 1 which gets rid of all the other infinities we were worried about (this is a terrible response)
P is for presupposition. I can’t believe anyone still takes Pascal’s wager seriously when you have to presuppose an unfalsifiable supernatural deity exists in the first place just for the premises of the wager to have any weight.
*I can’t believe anyone still takes Pascal’s wager seriously when you have to presuppose an unfalsifiable supernatural deity exists in the first place just for the premises of the wager to have any weight.* Dude....You are describing consciousness. Just replace these words, 'supernatural deity' with 'active experience' and you have the same arguments. We believe in unfalsifiable things every day and night. It is not irrational or unreasonable to believe they exist.
@@thepalegalilean I’m talking about the inability to prove or disprove the truth of a proposition. There are some propositions which are falsifiable that have yet to be empirically demonstrated, or “proven” if you will. There are other propositions that are falsifiable and have been shown to be true, or with a high enough degree of reliability to be true. The god proposition in general is almost impossible to either prove or disprove. One problem is, which god, and how is it defined? The other problem is how can anything supernatural be falsified? How can god even be a candidate explanation for anything if the supernatural itself is also unfalsifiable? To then stake your entire world view and all your life choices on such a proposition is beyond irrational.
Any probability applied to something that hasn't been demonstrated to exist just doesn't work. Whether it's this model or Bayesian calculations... The inputs are your subjective beliefs about these things which factor in your biases and indoctrination, etc... It's no different than not doing one of these calculations.
Pascal’s Wager really only applies to gods which are both exclusivist and offer an afterlife judgement based on belief in them. That doesn’t particularly apply to the Greek pantheon even in its forms where a savior figures exists, for Judaism where belief or the afterlife isn’t a central focus, and so on.
@@noonesomeone669 Then Pascal wagner is not the complete picture. Pascal lived in an area which Christianity is dominant and so that all he could think of. If you never ate Japanese food, you would not know scallops can be eaten raw. In addition, there many gods in the world that have similar attribute to the Christian god. Christian just believe one more god than atheist
@@user-sc5rc1mb6n Pascal’s Wager is an argument that cannot be separated from its original culture and religious context. Christians don’t believe in how many fewer gods that are required to get to one than a polytheist, rather they believe in a very specific framework that leads to their conceptions of divinity. The I believe in one less god argument is on shaky ground from the start since the underlying views of the agents within theism differ widely between the various groups involved. It is a snappy bit of dialogue but nothing more.
When it comes down to it I don't think you need anywhere near this level of complexity to refute the wager. The simplest reply, in my view, is that it is highly likely that an all-knowing, all-powerful God, would reject some of the more barbaric and extremely unforgiving depictions of him in the bible (which has MANY dubious sources), and would rather accept all people into heaven who want to go there, since we are his children and could easily have made errors while on Earth and been confused about whether God exists or not. The probability of that prior being true, I think, is considerably higher than the strict worldview held by some Evangelicals, that you can only get to heaven through Jesus and if not you go to hell - and if you were born on an island somewhere without access to a bible or a missionary - oops you're screwed! That is literally William Lane Craig's view on it haha (watch his debate with Hitchens on the matter - Hitchens points out that under Craig's worldview - millions of people born before Jesus came to Earth are technically doomed to hell, and Craig's response is - hey, that's still pretty decent timing, only a few million! Its really unbelievable). The story is simply ridiculous, not to mention if you want to take the bible as being an inerrant, literal document you will be forced to confront many other contradictions and also historical and archeological refutations of certain accounts in it. It just doesn't work. So on this view, there really is no compelling reason to believe in this kind of God. There has to be a specific argument, in particular made by its strongest cheerleader Liz (who is a Christian), that Christianity - specifically the version adopted by evangelicals - the strict "you will go to hell for not believing" form used to terrorize children, is true. And here Pascal's wager obviously is not evidence, and none of the arguments typically invoked to argue for God don't count as evidence either since they are in almost every case arguments for deism and not a specific form of theism. And neither by the way, is any argument stemming from Christianity's popularity since that is obviously just a logical fallacy. I *am* willing to risk being thrown in hell by a malevolent psychopathic God who thinks that someone being confused on Earth about his existence is a sufficient sin for them to be burned alive for eternity. I think the proposition is ridiculous and childish. If God existed, it would be far more reasonable, and there would not be such "infinite torture rooms" to begin with. And so Pascal basically beats himself with his own wager.
I would also be much more surprised to discover a God exists that intensely rewards and punishes people for their belief states, than I would be to discover a God exists which brings everyone into heaven. I might even be able to identify logical contradictions in a loving God doing the former.
Arguments for deism also count as arguments for theism . Since a theistic god has a lot of qualities of a diestic god so whenever you make an argument for the qualities of a deistic god they also work as arguments for a theistic god.
@@slashmonkey8545 I've got a concern about that, let me express it with an analogy. Murderers are humans with a few more specific properties added on top. If I argue you are a human, is that automatically also an argument that you are a murderer? Clearly not. Could you be making this mistake?
@@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke No I don't think so. Because a lot of the arguments for God would in fact lead you in believing qualities for god that are consistent with both like being a necessary existence, being the cause of the world, being limitless etc. I think you just have to look at the arguments and see if they actually support the qualities of a theistic God if they do in fact support them then obviously they are evidence for it.
Id say no. I don't get why X intentions/desires are ascribed to the being out of thin cloth rather than Y intentions/desires out of thin cloth. In virtue of what is it less likely that a god would reward atheists and agnostics for passing the test of not buying into the established religions? Perhaps it wants to play with it's food. Perhaps it wants to use these tests as a filter valuing epsitemic progression over acceptance of a specific proposition. Because humans have thought of god in a different way of expressing God's intentions or expectations doesn't seem to be a good reason to ascribe those intentions or characteristics rather than what I propose. The expectations of what such a being would or would not do comes from thin cloth.
@@jmike2039 Hello Jmike! I would say several things here. First of all, I interpret you as either saying that the probability of a God that would want us to be religious is equal to the probability of a God that would want us to not be religious or as saying that the probability of some God wanting us to be religious is equal to the probability of this God wanting us not to be religious Let's take the first interpretation: I would be suspicious of the claim since I am suspicious that the evidence is equal. This would require us to say that the evidence for there being a good God that rewards us for doing good or punishes us for doing bad is equal to the evidence for there being a God that rewards or punishes us not in accordance with what morality demands. This seems implausible as I am not aware of any (minimally good and maximally any simpliciter) evidence for the later conception of God, but aware of much (minimally much simpliciter and maximally much good) evidence for the former. Let's now look at the second interpretation: If he have any idea about what is good, it seems like we can say what a good God would want us to do, namely, the good and then he would administer appropriate afterlife consequences. Similar things seem to apply to other God concepts that just have some desires separate from the good.
@@pinecone421 Hi Pinecone! This is correct I would say! My conception of arguments for theism is broad here such that arguments for believing in God count as arguments for theism.
You should invite them over for Monopoly and see how all that probabilistic knowledge works out in practice!
Al Hajek came to give a colloquium talk at my university a month or so ago. At the post-talk dinner he made an effort to talk to every graduate student on a very human level. Not only is he a great philosopher, but he also seems like a really great person. Glad to see him make an appearance on the channel! Gonna have to research Liz’s work as well after this one!
He’s amazing! He’s also coming to Princeton in the fall, so I’ll be able to meet him in person soon🙂
This is the best discussion of pascal’s wager I have listened to so far. I love how philosophy of religion touches on so many different topics.
I think expected value calculations stop making sense when dealing with infinities. Consider the following scenario:
- Option A: You get 1 billion years of the most enjoyable and fulfilling life you can imagine
- Option B: You get the most painful torture you can imagine for 1 billion years. After this, you have a 0.00000000000001% chance of going to heaven forever
Expected value calculations would have us go with option B, but intuitively option A is obviously so much better (at least for me). Would anyone actually pick option B if given this choice?
I don't think we need heaven to be of infinite value, for expected value calculations to give us the counter-intuitive answer of going with B. It just needs to outweigh option A, so heaven needs a minimum value of something like... (100% / 0.0000000000001%) x 1 billion years :)
Just because expected value doesn’t work in this case with an infinite doesn’t mean it couldn’t work in other cases with an infinite. But you have shown that expected value doesn’t work in some case with an infinite so it would be up to the person In favor of the wager to tell you which cases it does work and if one of those cases applies to the real world. I’m not exactly sure how that breaks down tho.
I loved the discussion on the St. Petersburg Game. I think I can potentially resolve it:
Expected value is a very important consideration, but it's not the only consideration. We also have to consider a variable that I call "probability of success"
Games can be played multiple times, let's say that you decide to play an arbitrary x number of times.
Given x games played, either you will have lost money overall, gained money overall, or broken even.
A "win" means that in an *individual* game you win more than the cost to play.
A "success" means that given x games played, you have won more overall than you paid to play. We can then calculate the probability of success for x number of games played. Then we just have to decide if there exists a feasible number of attempts that justifies playing the game by giving us a sufficiently high probability of success.
this was an awesome discussion!
Are there Bayesian formulations of the wager? As a young atheist, one of the most convincing arguments I came up with was "No good god would put us in the situation of the standard wager."
I go back and forth on what this means - it might be a statement of the hiddenness problem, or some sort of Christian problem of informed consent. I still hold this as an argument for universalism 😌
If there is just one finite life then any reduction in the value of that limited life is an infinite waste. Why? Because you are losing something (a positive value) and getting nothing for it (0). Hence +/0! However, the truth is that we have no way of knowing if there is a god and if so, which one and what they may want. Since we don't know there is no way to set probabilities.
Exactly. Neither do we know what rewards/ punishments God might give out for doing what he wants/ doesn't want us to do. So we actually don't know any of the parameters.
Love the thumbnail! I think Dr Michael Rota’s formulation of Pascal’s Wager is the most convincing- it is modest, and relies upon evidence from sociology. You can see an interview with him on The Analytic Christian.
Every moment is a new Pascal's Wager, for one could commit mortal sin at any moment. The pressure could drive one to suicide. A nightmare.
That is exactly the experience of zealous Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. Many of them end up with extreme scrupulosity, which is essentially OCD with a religious character.
@@whitemakesright2177 , call it OCD. Still doesn't change the fact you could commit mortal sin at any moment. How could anyone not get OCD in such a nightmare?
@@ObsidianTeen Sorry, my original comment wasn't clear enough. I was agreeing with you, and adding supporting data from real life. Basically, what I was trying to say is: you're absolutely correct, doctrines like that will drive you crazy. In support of that, look at traditional Catholics and Eastern Orthodox - they do go crazy, exactly as you've described.
But the negative utility of the pressure is still only finite😉
Most in the West don’t know that the concept of the so called Pascal Wager was first articulated by Ali , one of most significant companions of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century of the CE.
Loved it.
I know this is very late to the video, and will most likely not be seen, but in the section on Al's delimma, the whole focus is on infinity and or either the largest number and how that can represent salvation. The conversation is centered around how it is optimal to quantify salvation as infinite or as largest possible number since these things cause logical problems to the wager, but why not just set salvation as some arbitrary number, or as the greatest possible realization of ones reality. That is, why should we give it a number when we can just argue that God created reality such that salvation is the best possible outcome for any individual. The mathematics we bring is is purely to give some measurablility to the wager and does not need to objectively measure the actual expectation of an outcome. An analogy would be in Statistics qualitative categorical variables are usually encoded in some mathematical way to render statistical analysis of the data possibls, like saying red = 0, blue = 1 etc, these encoding are useful in drawing inferences from the data, nevertheless they are just encodings, a way of quantifying some qualitative categorical variables and do since these variables cannot be used in mathematical calculations unless they represented numerically.
The same is possible of salvation, that is that God created the world such that salvation is categorically set above all other possible outcomes, how we wish to encode that in a mathematical sence is arbitrary to the extent that we can accurately draw inferences from it
legends!
I think my biggest counterargument is that it is just a priori more probable that there is a noninterventionsist god that will offer infinite rewards for the intellectually honest than that the Christian god exists. Punishing someone for being sincirely unconvinced of something just has such a low probability combated to basic rewarding-deity conceptions like thay
Ah, the Day of the Kentucky Derby... a great day to upload a video about wagering...
Great discussion. My take is that Pascal's wager is dubious from the start, in that it uses "expected" utility (defined in the frequentist interpretation by a potential infinity of trials) for a one-time wager - it has to rely solely on subjectivist notions of credence. So, a rational agent who finds the plausibility of the God claim "infinitely small" would (and should) never have to wrestle with the wager.
Yep, an inifintesimal probability is one problem. The other is that expected value is a time quantity so eventually infinite may not be sufficient to overcome present costs.
That would seem to be an ambitious task to render the existence of God to infinitesimally small. It seems that would be mathematically equivalent to disproving God’s existence with certainty, i e proving a contradiction. I think psychologically it wouldn’t make sense to be an atheist and think there is a plausible chance of God’s existence due to Pascal’s wager, so an atheist would be psychologically motivated to interpret the evidence in a way that would render God’s existence practically impossible.
@@bman5257 God's attributes make him practically impossible.
@@goldenalt3166 how so?
@@bman5257 infinite properties like omniscience/omnipotence.
Minor point. I haven't read the paper, but it appears that they frame the utility calculation in terms of basic subjective expected utility (SEU), that is, as developed by Savage (1954). While this is unproblematic here, SEU is now universally rejected by decision theorists, since it admits of clear counterexamples. For example, if you're considering whether to get some vaccine at a small cost that's expected to significantly lower the likelihood of contracting some disease that you could get regardless, but would be a large cost, SEU invariably, but incorrectly, recommends declining the vaccine. The problem is that getting the disease is not independent (either causally or evidentially) of you getting the vaccine, and so it's a mistake to assess expexted utility with SEU. The popular approaches that accommodate cases like this are causal decision theory (CDT) and evidential decision theory (EDT). Also, facts about risk-aversion can be understood as impacting the preference function rather than requiring a whole new decision rule.
I didn’t take us to be assuming SEU (here or in the paper) but if we said something that suggested that, that would be helpful to know!
@@lizjackson111 Thanks for the reply! What gave me the impression was the bit shown of the paper at about 10:30, in particular, the line which says "Recall that to calculate the expected utility of each option, you multiply the probability of each state (heads, tails) by the utility (or value) that corresponds to each option." The suggested procedure, as far as I can tell, just is SEU. You can't multiply down and add across to calculate expected utility on CDT (unless the actions and states are causally independent, roughly speaking) or on EDT (unless the actions and states are evidentially independent). In the case of VACCINE, suppose we had:
| DISEASE (pr = 0.5) | NO DISEASE (pr = 0.5) | EU
VACCINE | -11 | -1 | -6
NO VACCINE | -10 | 0 | -5
Not getting the vaccine has higher expected utility than getting the vaccine, and in fact dominates it, per SEU. But suppose that getting the vaccine is not independent from getting the disease, such that P(DISEASE|VACCINE) = 0.1, and P(DISEASE|~VACCINE) = 0.6. This changes nothing to the calculations above, but on on EDT, EV(VACCINE) = -2, whereas EV(~VACCINE) = -7, and so getting the vaccine is recommended. CDT delivers the same (correct) result, although the decision calculation is not quite the same. Regardless, the procedure of "multiply down, add across" presented in the paper delivers the Savage procedure, and the wrong answer in cases like VACCINE. I'll add, if the probability by which you multiply isn't simply the prior on the outcome, but the probability of the outcome conditional on the action being considered, then the resulting procedure will reflect EDT. While I think that's the right approach, if you're trying to be neutral with respect to disputes between EDT and CDT (per fn. 1), then you cannot take this approach, either. Note that the suggested rule would deliver the one-box solution in Newcomb's, for example.
It might be that the best approach would be to say that SEU is an adequate model for this case because the states are causally and evidentially independent of the various choices, and so even though SEU is incorrect generally, it will agree on this case with CDT, EDT, and perhaps some other decision rules, and so will be adequate here.
I always feel a bit gross from Pascal's Wager - there is always the ominous "or else..." hovering in the background, like a Mafioso encouraging you to accept his very generous offer.
Yep. And perversely, it rewards precisely those religions which make the most outlandish and barbaric claims. For instance, a form of Christianity in which Hell is finite is given less credence under Pascal's Wager than a form of Christianity in which Hell is eternal.
I would agree that’s true for the version that’s about eschatology, but there’s another version based on moral realism. If atheism is true and moral values are not real than it doesn’t really matter if you’re a Christian or atheist, you’re still just molecules in motion. If Christianity is true, and let’s say universalism is also true, than being a Christian and pursuing a virtuous faithful life would still be objectively good, and living an atheistic life would be less good.
Faith or Works?
Friday sunset to Saturday sunset or all of Sunday?
Pascal's wager is only about one type of God that separates mankind into one of two extreme destinations after death. There are other conceptions of God.
Pat yourself on the back
That’s correct. I generally think Pascal’s wager is strong. But I think one frequent wrong presupposition is that the scenario of God existing is identical to the scenario of believing him rendering Heaven and disbelieving him rendering Hell. It doesn’t break God existing into probability he exists and universalism being true, of annihilationism being true, of God caring more particularly that you believe in Evangelical Protestant doctrine, Islam, etc.
Infinity is gumming all of this up. I wonder if rates of utility could allow for some clarity
Thumbnail is awesome 😁
I wonder what folks would say to this:
Point 1:
A report of salvation, to be remotely credible, must satisfy the following criteria:
1) There must be a report of a God capable of granting us heaven or hell after death. If the promise of heaven or threat of hell is from a being incapable of making good on such promises or threats, then we have no reason to wager.
2) This report must include God communicating to us the conditions of salvation. If there is no promise of heaven or threat of hell, then we have no reason to wager.
3) The conditions of salvation must be possible for us to fulfill. If we must follow God’s commands to be saved, but cannot find, understand, or perform God’s commands, then we cannot wager.
4) The conditions of salvation must specify that only those who live according to God’s commands receive heaven and/or avoid hell. If everyone immediately goes to heaven regardless of what they did in life, then we have no reason to wager.
5) This report must come from a major religion. Fulfillment of the above criteria implies a religion, and it’s unbelievable that a tiny religion would turn out to be the right one such that a thousand people end up in heaven while over a hundred _billion_ end up in hell. So for this report to reach a bare minimum of credibility, it must be fairly widespread. (How widespread a religion should be to be considered credible is a question for another time.)
If this is right, then there are exactly 4 possible credible reports of salvation: Those found in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as these are the only 4 major religions. (You would have to adjust the criteria for the eastern religions. Maybe there is no God that sends people to hell, or Naraka, on Buddhism, but there is a karmic metaphysical structure that does. Of course, this depends on the exact sect of Buddhism / Hinduism.)
Point 2:
Decision theory considerations prove that if a report of salvation comes anywhere close to satisfying all of these criteria, then it would be profoundly irrational to not investigate that report, assuming you are well-off enough to spend the effort. (You could be missing out on salvation!)
In this sense Pascal's Wager is successful. The Wager proves that it's incredibly foolish to not spend some effort in investigating Christianity. Considering the quality of Christian scholasticism, we might say that we should spend a _great_ deal of effort investigating Christianity. But again, this runs up against other obligations of life. Not everyone can spend thousands of hours investigating Christianity.
Point 3:
However, after the investigation, you will either end up a Christian or not. If you do, you will because of the arguments and evidence in favor of Christianity. But if you discover that the arguments and evidence at best lead to agnosticism, or even lead you away from Christianity, then it will be impossible for you to go to church, pray to God, take communion, read the Bible as the Word of God, say the sinner's prayer sincerely, and so on. The challenges to Christian belief will psychologically prevent you from acting as a Christian. (Just as the Christian's conviction that Christianity is true prevents them from reciting the Shahada and practicing the five pillars of Islam.)
So the "impossible to wager" objection succeeds. The non-wagerer can always say criterion 3 cannot be fulfilled due to the challenges to belief.
Thanks for the comment, and I'm glad you liked the thumbnail! I'm sympathetic to the 'impossible to wager' objection. But here's some feedback on your comment nonetheless :)
One response to your comment challenges some of your claims to the effect of 'if such-and-such condition holds (or does not hold), then we have no reason to wager'. A natural response is that this is not a necessary condition on having a reason to wager. Even if, e.g., we have no reports of a particular God G and G's salvific plan, so long as there's a non-zero chance that G exists (which is an extremely low bar and can be met even if there are no reports of G), and so long as wagering on G has infinite expected utility while not wagering does not, then we have reason to wager on G. (Or, at least, we have a reason to wager on G if you think we have reason to maximize expected utility.)
Of course, one can challenge the claim that not wagering on G does not have infinite expected utility. For instance, one might think that there are other wagers that one could take which have infinite expected utility. Likewise, one could challenge the aforementioned reasoning on several other fronts. But all this is compatible with my point. My point is simply that it doesn't follow *merely* from the absence of a report of G and G's salvific plan that we have no reason to wager. In principle, we could still have a reason to wager, so long as (i) G has non-zero probability, (ii) wagering on G has infinite expected utility, (iii) not wagering on G does not have infinite expected utility, and (iv) we have some reason to maximize expected utility.
But noone is talking about the incompatibility between God and Hell...
-One shouldn't be afraid of a perfectly good infinite being.
-He would have communicated the truth of his existence much more clearly and unambiguously if he actually wanted people to believe in him.
-He would have made the people that believe in him distinctly morally better people
-There would be unity among those who claim him as their God rather than constant infighting
-The idea of eternal punishment is so obviously anthropogenic and not from an infinite being.
All of these common sense level problems have to be ignored in order for Pascal's Wager to be taken seriously, which basically requires a cosmic tyrannical narcissist to have any grounds in the first place.
This video should be called Mathematizing Mythology
God and hell are incompatible. You choose one or the other. That's the whole point.
@@harlowcj The OP’s comment is saying they are metaphysically incompatible-as in Hell cannot exist while God exists, not that the two can’t mingle.
I don't see why any of those points is true, especially the first. Bad people should be very afraid, actually, and not just them. Fear and Trembling, and all that.
@@gascogne Why should bad people be afraid of a perfectly good infinite being? They would be in perfectly loving hands that would readily rehabilitate them even if it takes an eternity of creative situations and events beyond our comprehension. God's redemptive power isn't constrained to 80 years on Earth.
I prefer this wager:
1) If God exists, he intentionally hid himself from humanity since there is no sign of this God. (For more detail, search for the divine hiddenness problem).
2) Since he is hidden from us, God expects us to NOT believe in him.
3) So, belief in God is against God's expectation for us.
4) Going against God's expectation is wrong.
5) So, God would punish those who believe in him, and reward those who do not.
6) So, we should not believe in God.
Premise 1 is false. So it never gets off the ground.
@rickbaker261 it is true, since there is no sign of God.
@@rickbaker261any reason for why it is wrong?
@@DDDarwin27 to make the claim “there is no sign of God” is to completely disregard everything outside one’s experience. It is akin to saying we have never been to the moon. There is evidence. There are signs. Not all evidence is equal and nor are all signs. But it does not therefore follow that there is “no sign of God.” The fact that we exist, I would argue, is a sign. Christ was the single biggest sign as it was God assuming human nature. You don’t have to believe it (you do it you want to be rational and or have any hope of salvation) but that doesn’t have bearing on its truthfulness.
Yeah premise one is false.
There seems to me to be something deeply troubling and almost insulting to religion to reduce it to a set of probabilities. It also assumes doxastic voluntarism which is highly controversial.
Thanks for the comment! Importantly, though, the wager doesn’t ’reduce religion to a set of probabilities’. It is simply aiming to show that one should commit to a religion as there is strong practical reason to do so. This doesn’t at all reduce religion to a set of probabilities. Second, the wager doesn’t assume doxastic voluntarism, as explained in the video. Wagering on God need not involve voluntarily forming a belief in God; it need only involve committing to a religious life, which comprises various voluntary actions - attending religious services, praying (perhaps only saying conditional prayers if one doesn’t yet believe), and so on.
@@MajestyofReason Fair point on the first, but religions like Christianity and Islam require explicit beliefs in doctrines which cannot be simply affirmed through actions. In fact, both make it clear that actions without faith (which requires some level of certainty in certain propositions) are useless and will not bring salvation on their own. It may be the case that acting in a religious way for long enough may "fool" the brain into proper belief formation, but the genuine nature of such a conversation is questionable and it's not guaranteed that acting in a certain way will translate into the beliefs required for salvation.
@@analyticallysound2716 those religions appear to prescribe or require faith, yes, but it’s very controversial in the literature on faith whether faith requires positive belief. There are lots of accounts of non-doxastic faith - just search that term up in PhilPapers or Google scholar🙂
@@analyticallysound2716 and plus, even if faith requires belief, the wager would still seem to go through, since committing to God and going through those religious practices and reading religious literature etc. maximizes your chances of forming the belief, which in turn maximizes your chances of infinite utility. So the wager does not require the assumption that one can be saved without faith. It only requires that the way to maximize one’s chance of salvation, including maximizing one’s chance of forming the relevant beliefs, is to commit to God and perform these various actions. Expected utility theory then says we should do precisely this.
@@MajestyofReason Also a fair point, however as Dr. Jackson briefly mentioned on the "many gods" objection, it really does seem to reduce the assumed pragmatic power of the argument. Now it's not simply a question of my belief in a proposition being an "off/on" switch and it becomes a hope that I become convinced of the evidence for a particular religion after doing what I can to try and become convinced. Even then, I may have chosen to try and be convinced of the wrong religion all along. As someone who has studied Islam and Christianity extensively and found both with their pros/cons, it's extremely difficult to weigh what would be more probable at all and different people weigh evidences differently.
I also dislike how this wager in general seems to favour religions with the highest potential negative payoffs (e.g. eternal hell). I don't even have to try and force myself to be a hindu or a buddhist to get a good rebirth in their religions because I just need to be a "good" person to maximize my karma, with goodness being defined as pretty universally virtuous behavior.
Overall, I can see why this argument is almost never used anymore by most theists. It's just not convincing for me [but perhaps had I been a different person, I would have weighed the evidence and found it convincing and chose to wager instead >:-) ].
The usual (Thomistic?) Christian tradition adopts the superreligion "infinity+1" stance 😹
Ontological argument saves the day because all Gods under consideration are either infinite, finite, or impossible.
How is that a fix? Infinite-finite-impossible doesn’t narrow anything down since those are the only options that anything has to begin with. Do you mean to imply that finite isn’t an option b/c OA? Alex would like a word with you
@whatsinaname691 well Mr. Name 691, if you must know, the finite being is plausibly not capable of infinite reward so that is one infinity we don't have to deal with and the probability of other infinite Gods is either 0 or 1 which gets rid of all the other infinities we were worried about (this is a terrible response)
P is for presupposition.
I can’t believe anyone still takes Pascal’s wager seriously when you have to presuppose an unfalsifiable supernatural deity exists in the first place just for the premises of the wager to have any weight.
*I can’t believe anyone still takes Pascal’s wager seriously when you have to presuppose an unfalsifiable supernatural deity exists in the first place just for the premises of the wager to have any weight.*
Dude....You are describing consciousness. Just replace these words, 'supernatural deity' with 'active experience' and you have the same arguments. We believe in unfalsifiable things every day and night. It is not irrational or unreasonable to believe they exist.
F is for friends who. . .
@@JohnusSmittinis
No, F if for Fire that burns down the whole town. Get it right!!
@@thepalegalilean I’m talking about the inability to prove or disprove the truth of a proposition. There are some propositions which are falsifiable that have yet to be empirically demonstrated, or “proven” if you will. There are other propositions that are falsifiable and have been shown to be true, or with a high enough degree of reliability to be true. The god proposition in general is almost impossible to either prove or disprove. One problem is, which god, and how is it defined? The other problem is how can anything supernatural be falsified? How can god even be a candidate explanation for anything if the supernatural itself is also unfalsifiable? To then stake your entire world view and all your life choices on such a proposition is beyond irrational.
@@thepalegalileanAs in "if you believe in active experience, you'll get an infinite reward."??
That makes no sense.
Any probability applied to something that hasn't been demonstrated to exist just doesn't work. Whether it's this model or Bayesian calculations... The inputs are your subjective beliefs about these things which factor in your biases and indoctrination, etc... It's no different than not doing one of these calculations.
I like the idea of this atheist God. Please tell me more.
Which one ?
Yay
I think the real god is Zeus. Therefore, if you bet on the Christian God, you will lose. My Indian friends are betting on Krishna.
Fair. Every human is wagering on some god or none.
Pascal’s Wager really only applies to gods which are both exclusivist and offer an afterlife judgement based on belief in them. That doesn’t particularly apply to the Greek pantheon even in its forms where a savior figures exists, for Judaism where belief or the afterlife isn’t a central focus, and so on.
@@noonesomeone669 Then Pascal wagner is not the complete picture. Pascal lived in an area which Christianity is dominant and so that all he could think of. If you never ate Japanese food, you would not know scallops can be eaten raw. In addition, there many gods in the world that have similar attribute to the Christian god. Christian just believe one more god than atheist
@@user-sc5rc1mb6n Pascal’s Wager is an argument that cannot be separated from its original culture and religious context. Christians don’t believe in how many fewer gods that are required to get to one than a polytheist, rather they believe in a very specific framework that leads to their conceptions of divinity. The I believe in one less god argument is on shaky ground from the start since the underlying views of the agents within theism differ widely between the various groups involved. It is a snappy bit of dialogue but nothing more.
When it comes down to it I don't think you need anywhere near this level of complexity to refute the wager. The simplest reply, in my view, is that it is highly likely that an all-knowing, all-powerful God, would reject some of the more barbaric and extremely unforgiving depictions of him in the bible (which has MANY dubious sources), and would rather accept all people into heaven who want to go there, since we are his children and could easily have made errors while on Earth and been confused about whether God exists or not.
The probability of that prior being true, I think, is considerably higher than the strict worldview held by some Evangelicals, that you can only get to heaven through Jesus and if not you go to hell - and if you were born on an island somewhere without access to a bible or a missionary - oops you're screwed! That is literally William Lane Craig's view on it haha (watch his debate with Hitchens on the matter - Hitchens points out that under Craig's worldview - millions of people born before Jesus came to Earth are technically doomed to hell, and Craig's response is - hey, that's still pretty decent timing, only a few million! Its really unbelievable). The story is simply ridiculous, not to mention if you want to take the bible as being an inerrant, literal document you will be forced to confront many other contradictions and also historical and archeological refutations of certain accounts in it. It just doesn't work.
So on this view, there really is no compelling reason to believe in this kind of God. There has to be a specific argument, in particular made by its strongest cheerleader Liz (who is a Christian), that Christianity - specifically the version adopted by evangelicals - the strict "you will go to hell for not believing" form used to terrorize children, is true. And here Pascal's wager obviously is not evidence, and none of the arguments typically invoked to argue for God don't count as evidence either since they are in almost every case arguments for deism and not a specific form of theism. And neither by the way, is any argument stemming from Christianity's popularity since that is obviously just a logical fallacy.
I *am* willing to risk being thrown in hell by a malevolent psychopathic God who thinks that someone being confused on Earth about his existence is a sufficient sin for them to be burned alive for eternity. I think the proposition is ridiculous and childish. If God existed, it would be far more reasonable, and there would not be such "infinite torture rooms" to begin with. And so Pascal basically beats himself with his own wager.
Disagree
I would also be much more surprised to discover a God exists that intensely rewards and punishes people for their belief states, than I would be to discover a God exists which brings everyone into heaven. I might even be able to identify logical contradictions in a loving God doing the former.
Arguments for deism also count as arguments for theism . Since a theistic god has a lot of qualities of a diestic god so whenever you make an argument for the qualities of a deistic god they also work as arguments for a theistic god.
@@slashmonkey8545 I've got a concern about that, let me express it with an analogy. Murderers are humans with a few more specific properties added on top. If I argue you are a human, is that automatically also an argument that you are a murderer? Clearly not. Could you be making this mistake?
@@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke No I don't think so. Because a lot of the arguments for God would in fact lead you in believing qualities for god that are consistent with both like being a necessary existence, being the cause of the world, being limitless etc. I think you just have to look at the arguments and see if they actually support the qualities of a theistic God if they do in fact support them then obviously they are evidence for it.
It's really sad to me how "it'd be nice if it were true" gets SO much academic attention.
Atheism is a wager, too!
With different risks and rewards, or are you still thinking of heaven and hell?
@@HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke Yep. :)
Non-mathematical people getting confused about infinity,
It's the strongest argument for theism coming in 🦵
Id say no. I don't get why X intentions/desires are ascribed to the being out of thin cloth rather than Y intentions/desires out of thin cloth. In virtue of what is it less likely that a god would reward atheists and agnostics for passing the test of not buying into the established religions? Perhaps it wants to play with it's food. Perhaps it wants to use these tests as a filter valuing epsitemic progression over acceptance of a specific proposition.
Because humans have thought of god in a different way of expressing God's intentions or expectations doesn't seem to be a good reason to ascribe those intentions or characteristics rather than what I propose.
The expectations of what such a being would or would not do comes from thin cloth.
I'd say it's an argument for believing theism but not necessarily that theism is true
@@jmike2039
Hello Jmike!
I would say several things here.
First of all, I interpret you as either saying that the probability of a God that would want us to be religious is equal to the probability of a God that would want us to not be religious or as saying that the probability of some God wanting us to be religious is equal to the probability of this God wanting us not to be religious
Let's take the first interpretation:
I would be suspicious of the claim since I am suspicious that the evidence is equal.
This would require us to say that the evidence for there being a good God that rewards us for doing good or punishes us for doing bad is equal to the evidence for there being a God that rewards or punishes us not in accordance with what morality demands.
This seems implausible as I am not aware of any (minimally good and maximally any simpliciter) evidence for the later conception of God, but aware of much (minimally much simpliciter and maximally much good) evidence for the former.
Let's now look at the second interpretation:
If he have any idea about what is good, it seems like we can say what a good God would want us to do, namely, the good and then he would administer appropriate afterlife consequences. Similar things seem to apply to other God concepts that just have some desires separate from the good.
@@pinecone421
Hi Pinecone!
This is correct I would say!
My conception of arguments for theism is broad here such that arguments for believing in God count as arguments for theism.
I completely refuted it in my comment above :)