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drethelin comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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If I take the outside view and account for the fact that thirty-something percent of people, including a lot of really smart people, believe in Christianity, and that at least personally I have radically changed my worldview a whole bunch of times, then it seems like I should assign at least a 5% or so probability to Christianity being true. How, therefore, does Pascal's Wager not apply to me? Even if we make it simpler by taking away the infinite utilities and merely treating Heaven as ten thousand years or so of the same level of happiness as the happiest day in my life, and treating Hell as ten thousand years or so of the same level of unhappiness as the unhappiest day in my life, the argument seems like it should still apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
How do you account for the other two thirds of people who don't believe in Christianity and commonly believe things directly contradictory to it? Insofar as every religion was once (when it started) vastly outnumbered by the others, you can't use population at any given point in history as evidence that a particular religion is likely to be true, since the same exact metric would condemn you to hell at many points in the past. There are several problems with pascal's wager but the biggest to me is it's impossible to choose WHICH pascal's wager to make. You can attempt to conform to all non-contradictory religious rules extant but that still leaves the problem of choosing which contradictory commandments to obey, as well as the problem of what exactly god even wants from you, if it's belief or simple ritual. The proliferation of equally plausible religions is to me very strong evidence that no one of them is likely to be true, putting the odds of "christianity" being true at lower than even 1 percent and the odds that any specific sect of christianity being true being even lower.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the other popular religions don't really believe in eternal paradise/damnation, so Pascal's Wager applies just as much to, say, Christianity vs. Hinduism as it does Christianity vs. atheism. Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus don't believe in hell, but as far as I can tell. Muslims do. So if I were going to buy into Pascal's wager, I think I would read apologetics of both Christianity and Islam, figure out which one seemed more likely, and going with that one. Even if you found equal probability estimates for both, flipping a coin and picking one would still be better than going with atheism, right?
Why? Couldn't it be something like, Religion A is correct, Religion B almost gets it and is getting at the same essential truth, but is wrong in a few ways, Religion C is an outdated version of Religion A that failed to update on new information, Religion D is an altered imitation of Religion A that only exists for political reasons, etc.
Good post though, and you sort of half-convinced me that there are flaws in Pascal's Wager, but I'm still not so sure.
You're combining two reasons for believing: Pascal's Wager, and popularity (that many people already believe). That way, you try to avoid a pure Pascal's Mugging, but if the mugger can claim to have successfully mugged many people in the past, then you'll submit to the mugging. You'll believe in a religion if it has Heaven and Hell in it, but only if it's also popular enough.
You're updating on the evidence that many people believe in a religion, but it's unclear what it's evidence for. How did most people come to believe in their religion? They can't have followed your decision procedure, because it only tells you to believe in popular religions, and every religion historically started out small and unpopular.
So for your argument to work, you must believe that the truth of a religion is a strong positive cause of people believing in it. (It can't be overwhelmingly strong, though, since no religion has or has had a large majority of the world believing in it.)
But if people can somehow detect or deduce the truth of a religion on their own - and moreover, billions of people can do so (in the case of the biggest religions) - then you should be able to do so as well.
Therefore I suggest you try to decide on the truth of a religion directly, the way those other people did. Pascal's Wager can at most bias you in favour of religions with Hell in them, but you still need some unrelated evidence for their truth, or else you fall prey to Pascal's Mugging.
Even if you limit yourself to eternal damnation promising religions, you still need to decide which brand of Christianity/Islam is true.
If religion A is true, that implies that religion A's god exists and acts in a way consistent with the tenets of that religion. This implies that all of humanity should have strong and very believable evidence for Religion A over all other religions. But we have a large amount of religions that describe god and gods acting in very different ways. This is either evidence that all the religions are relatively false, that god is inconsistent, or that we have multiple gods who are of course free to contradict one another. There's a lot of evidence that religions sprout from other religions and you could semi-plausibly argue that there is a proto-religion that all modern ones are versions or corruptions of, but this doesn't actually work to select Christianity, because we have strong evidence that many religions predate Christianity, including some of which that it appears to have borrowed myths from.
Another problem with pascal's wager: claims about eternal rewards or punishments are not as difficult to make as they would be to make plausible. Basically: any given string of words said by a person is not plausible evidence for infinite anything because it's far more easy to SAY infinity than to provide any other kind of evidence. This means you can't afford to multiply utility by infinity because at any point someone can make any claim involving infinity and fuck up all your math.
I can't speak for the other ones, but Buddhists at least don't have a "hell" that non-believers go to when they die because Buddhists already believe that life is an eternal cycle of infinite suffering, that can only be escaped by following the tenants of their religion. Thus, rather then going to hell, non-believers just get reincarnated back into our current world, which Buddhism sees as being like unto hell.
There are also various Christian's who believe that other Christian's who follow Christianity the wrong way will go to hell.
I can't upvote this point enough.
And more worryingly, with the Christians I have spoken to, those who are more consistent in their beliefs and actually update the rest of their beliefs on them (and don't just have "Christianity" as a little disconnected bubble in their beliefs) are overwhelmingly in this category, and those who believe that most Christians will go to heaven usually haven't thought very hard about the issue.
C.S. Lewis thought most everyone was going to Heaven and thought very hard about the issue. (The Great Divorce is brief, engagingly written, an allegory of nearly universalism, and a nice typology of some sins).
I would also add that there are Christian's who beleive that everyone goes to heaven, even atheists. I spoke with a protestant theology student in Berlin who assured me that the belief is quite popular among his fellow students. He also had no spirtiual experiences whatsoever ;)
Then he's going to be a prist in a few years.
To steelman it, what about a bet that believing in a higher power, no matter the flavor, saves your immortal soul from eternal damnation?
That is eerily similar to an Omega who deliberately favours specific decision theories instead of their results.
Just trying to see what form of the Pascal's wager would avoid the strongest objections.
I don't think this is just about the afterlife. Do any religions offer good but implausible advice about how to live?
What do you mean by 'good but implausible'?
I was thinking about the Christian emphasis on forgiveness, but the Orthodox Jewish idea of having a high proportion of one's life affected by religious rules would also count.
Judging something as 'good' depends on your ethical framework. What framework do you have in mind when you ask if any religions offer good advice? After all, every religion offers good advice according to its own ethics.
Going by broadly humanistic, atheistic ethics, what is good about having a high proportion of one's life be affected by religious rules? (Whether the Orthodox Jewish rules, or in general.)
It may be worth something for people to have some low-hanging fruit for feeling as though they're doing the right thing.
That sounds like a small factor compared to what the rules actually tell people to do.
If the higher power cared, don't you think such power would advertise more effectively? Religious wars seem like pointless suffering if any sufficient spiritual belief saves the soul.
If the higher power cared about your well being, it would just "save" everyone regardless of belief or other attributes. It would also intervene to create heaven on earth and populate the whole universe with happy people.
Remember that the phrase "save your soul" refers to saving it from the eternal torture visited by that higher power.
I don't think we disagree.