Against the Wager

Multiplicity, exclusivity, and vanishing probability

My previous post attempted to give a faithful and precise account of Pascal’s Wager.

First, the easy (but important) rebuttal: There are many more than two choices.

The math of the wager is very strong if the number of possible choices is very small. If it were simply a matter of either believe in Pascal’s (17^th century Catholic) God or go to hell, he has a point and you probably better get your butt in a seat at the next Mass.

But this formulation is not reality.

In Christianity, the core question is some variation of “what must I do to be saved?” For Christians after the first few hundred years¹ that meant a bodily resurrection and an eternity in a not-clearly-defined Kingdom of God. (There was also the possibility of going right to heaven after death, but this developed later and was far from a universal belief.)

The answer to the question “what must I do?” has become “believe the right thing.”

In fact, this is at the core of an orthodox (literally “correct belief”) religion. Going back to the early Church Fathers seeking to unify persecuted and fracturing churches across a crumbling Roman empire, belief in correct doctrine was the unifying factor.

The apparently simple answer—believe the right thing—is not so simple. We immediately run into other questions.

Can we make ourselves believe anything at all? What is the right thing to believe? Do I believe it hard enough?

For Evangelicals in America, religious practice has basically become a litmus test of wondering whether one believes the right thing fervently enough. Performative actions and public statements are seen as evidence of this proper faith. This would have been nonsense to the writers of the New Testament who would have struggled to find links between what happens in today’s megachurches and pistis (πίστις), the word now translated as “faith”.

How Many Flocks?

We understand that the goal of Christianity is to get to eternal reward in the afterlife. But the issue is that there are many roads to that desirable afterlife. And many of them do not cross.

In America, you can find churches separated by a few hundred yards that think the attendees of the other are going to hell. In their minds, no matter how passionately you devote yourself to your belief, no matter how good a life you lead, it doesn’t matter. If you pick the wrong thing to believe you’re going to hell.

In the real world, none of this is simple. There is considerable nuance. There certainly are denominations that allow for the possibility of other believers being saved, and many that are founded on this principle. (And I’m sure they are often reminded that the denominations they embrace with ecumenical love think they are going to hell².)

What we’re trying to do here is to define the number of specifically not-overlapping possible answers to the question “what must I do to be saved?” With a lifetime of careful work, we could not arrive at a precise accounting, but it’s reasonable to say that all denominations believe their belief is the right belief, many believe that their way is the only way. Furthermore, there are many of them.

It's also important to realize that most of these “ways” are very, very new. What American Protestants label “old-time Religion” is newer than photography and railroads. People hold these ideas near and dear. They have split denominations and shaped worldviews, even motivating many of our top politicians. And these are ideas that just popped up in the last 200 years. In the sweep of history, this is nothing.

There are non-trivial distinctions between belief systems, according to the belief systems themselves. If you choose to believe that differences don’t matter, you may have a point. You may even be right. But, in the process of making that personal decision, you’ve chosen a belief and a position. (Maybe you even just created a new one yourself.)

If we want to be precise, what really matters are belief systems with mutually exclusive salvation criteria in which each denies the salvific adequacy of the others. Even three or four devastate the claim of Pascal’s Wager, and there are far more than that.

So, what’s the number? Scholars count Christian denominations between several thousand to tens of thousands. (The Center for the Study of Global Christianity counts 45,000 denominations, but this is an organizational count that does not consider compatibility of doctrines.) If we consider not only extant but historical Christian belief frameworks, and wanted to restrict ourselves to largely non-overlapping systems, then it seems safe to count at least in the hundreds.

The Challenge of Outsiders

It’s also worth considering that there are, indeed, other religions. When we consider them, we are first confronted with the idea that not everyone envisions an eternal heaven with streets made of gold and angels playing harps. Some religions are non-theistic. Some religions have no clear conception of the afterlife at all. Some religions seek non-existence as the end goal, and there many other ideas in play.

This is not the place to enumerate all the possibilities, but I’m working very hard to bring devout readers along with me. (And I’m genuinely trying to do so without talking down to anyone. If this reads as such, it is my error alone and is not my intent.)

Please take at least a moment to consider that there are entire continents of people with very different ideas about what God might be, what happens after death, and what people must do in life to get to the “good state” after death. These people are sincere, and some of their traditions predate Christianity.

If we include all of those, we’re at least in the thousands of possibilities. And, again, remember that most of these (but not all) are non-overlapping and many are specifically exclusivist.

I’m painting with a very broad brush, but the idea is at least directionally correct:

• Humans propose many different answers to the questions around God or ultimate reality, the afterlife, and salvation.

• Many of those answers exclude the others.

The “Many Gods” Problem

This is not a new critique. Voltaire pointed it out less than a century after Pascal’s death, and Diderot (c. 1750) nailed it home with his famous quip about the Wager: “An imam could reason just as well this way.”

I think the real difference today is perspective: we have a better understanding of the diversity of historical belief systems, and an appreciation of the scope of global religious practice.

There’s no need to spend a lot of time here, as the point is clear: It’s not a choice of believe or don’t believe. Simply realizing there are thousands of answers makes Pascal’s Wager much more interesting and the conclusion much less clear.

Even if there were only a handful of possible answers, it’s a real problem. The answer is no longer “believe and go to heaven”, but “pick the right belief system and go to heaven.”

How to choose?

How Have You Chosen?

Where do your beliefs come from?

For most people, the answer is: you inherit your religious beliefs from your family. A recent global Pew study of adults ages 18–54 shows that most people stay in the religion in which they were born: Hindus and Muslims >95% and Christians >80%.

If you got your beliefs from your family, where did they get their beliefs from? Your beliefs are a product of geography, culture, and time of birth. If you were born in America in the 20^th century, you’re much more likely to be a Christian than a Zoroastrian or a Druid. But this does not, of course, make your belief more likely to be correct.

People do believe for other reasons. There are dramatic conversion experiences. Saint Paul is one of the classic examples and there are many others. There are plenty of conversion experiences to other religions, as well. No religion has the market cornered on conversions.

People do sometimes reason themselves into religious beliefs or into particular religions—it is possible to sit down, examine the evidence, and decide what you should believe.

But doing so, within the span of human religious belief, is not the norm. Many believers would claim that they have carefully thought through their beliefs, but they come to the conclusion that they were right all along. Maybe, or maybe we are just making ourselves feel better.

How Could We Know?

To conduct a thought experiment: what conclusive evidence could exist? What evidence would tell us one religion is definitely correct?

If the end goal is a happy eternity, the only possibility I could imagine would be actually bringing a dead person back from the end of time and asking them how it worked out. You can’t take a recently dead person, because some traditions allow for intermediate states and experiences. We’re only interested in eternity.

Near-death-experiences could offer some insight, or they might not. Being near death, or even being dead for a time and coming back, is not the same as dying, is it? Even here, experiences are different across cultures and religions, so there’s no strong evidence for one religion over another.

Mystical insight, revelation, or emotional conviction are not proof points. Even if these are powerful, they are often unique to the individual, and traditions across the globe have recognized them as such. An early Sufi thinker wondered if there were as many paths to Allah as there were breaths of creatures.

There are other ways to evaluate belief systems. Looking at the weight of historical evidence is one common choice, but it’s not a great one. First, it’s almost certainly wrong and prejudicial to assume that the time in which you are alive is privy to all truth. If survival and popularity are proof points, any now-major religion would have initially failed this test. Survival must be no measure of truth.

Logical consistency is another common criterion, but there are two problems. Fictional stories are perfectly coherent. Coherence and internal logic are not points of proof.

Second, we should acknowledge that many religious thinkers have pointed out that reason is not up to the task. It’s not about logic.

In fact, Pascal begins his logical argument with the observation that logic is powerless here. Mystics (people who have direct, experiential contact with some aspect of God or Ultimate Reality) report that contradiction abounds, that real experience cannot be captured in words, and logic is violated.

You can’t expect it to make sense, so it’s illogical to prefer one belief system over another based on logic!

A useful exercise (which is difficult) is to try to see your belief system from the perspective of an outside. Of course, what you’ve believed since childhood appears perfectly logical to you, but maybe not to an outsider.

The Real Wager

Pascal’s Wager, when we consider these factors, is really this:

• There are many possible answers to what one must do to have a desirable afterlife state.

• The choice matters because many of them say the others are wrong.

• If you believe the choice does not matter, that’s a choice in itself. (You could be right or wrong.)

• Given the vast number of choices, the probability that any one is correct is very small.

• The practical outcome of this model is this: any specific religious belief system has an extremely low probability of being the uniquely correct one. The probability your belief system is correct is tiny, on the order of one in thousands.

Yes, I’m using a lot of words to explain something that seems very simple, but people work very hard to hide from this truth. And, again, it matters. (We’ll get to that next.)

Are Some More Likely Correct?

Also, many of you will push back and argue passionately that I’m making an error here in assuming all religions are equally probable. (Formally, I’m assuming a uniform probability distribution. You might also argue that priors matter.) Yes, we’re probably safe in discounting the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as an obvious absurd joke. But where’s the line and who’s to say? Catholicism would be a head-scratcher to many historical polytheists.

Allowing for varying probabilities does change the Wager, but there is simply no way to assess which is right. The Christian points to the message of the Gospel, the Muslim to the transcendent power of the text of the Qur’an, and the Hindu to several thousand years of literary and philosophical sophistication. They all can claim powerful personal experiences and positive effects on cultures—lives changed and saved.

It’s not that we can’t assess those probabilities and priors. It’s that we all do, and reach radically contradictory conclusions.

You Just Have to Believe?

Furthermore, remember that:

• Most people do not choose their religion. They are born into it.

• There are no reliable ways to determine which, if any, religious belief system should receive preference.

• If we do attempt to choose our religion, we are relying on subjective and contestable criteria.

The typical answer is “it’s just a matter of faith” or “you just have to believe.”

Fantastic answer, but few who give that answer will seriously engage with the questions I’ve asked above. What if you’re wrong? How sure are you that you’re not wrong?

And what is the cost of ignoring those questions?

The cost is Everything, and I’ll address it next.

1. That phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

2. Are you getting tired of the phrase “going to hell”? I’m tired of having to write it, but it reflects the convictions of far too many Christians.