CASPAR’S WAGER
Blaise Pascal invented the mathematics of gambling. His own most famous bet was a pretty big one; commonly know as Pascal’s wager: Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.
Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
– Blaise Pascal, Penses, 1670
It is basically the same logic that we use to decide if we are going to buy tickets in the National Lottery. The prize is huge, the stake is small. The chances of winning might be slim, but if you don’t enter you won’t win squat. The clever bit, in Pascal’s mind, was that however infinitesimal you believe the chance that there is a God, the jackpot is so HUGE that you would be crazy not to buy a ticket. Unfortunately, this is completely wrong.
I propose instead Caspar’s Wager, which runs like this.
Let’s see; a whole bunch of Sundays on my knees, or a fuller life lived as I please? Good god, I wager that anyone who keeps herself so carefully hid does not wish to be bothered by me.
– Caspar Addyman, Help Yourself, 2013
Actually, I made the bet quite a long time ago. A lot of people do. Even tiny children will ask the Fathers and Rabbi’s why it isn’t enough just to live a good life.
Oh how simple life seemed when we were young. I remember when I was about eight years old and our class were asked by our sociological jurisprudence counsellor to give three examples of absolute rules we lived by. I can vividly remember the answers I confidently provided
Never start a major land war in Asia.
Never have sex and livestock in the same sentence.
and
Never bet against a co-discoverer of probability theory.
Well, time tells that it would have been a nincompoop who pooh-poohed Pierre de Fermat’s Last Theorem, but I do choose to take issue with Blaise Pascal’s last hefty bet. I disagree completely with his reasoning; I’ll wager he’s got it completely backwards.
In fact, I’ll stake my terrestrial and my eternal life on it. Every now and again I am reminded, as politely as possible, by my religious ‘friends’ that unless I repent my godless ways I will be damned to burning hell for all eternity. I tell them it’s a price worth paying for my Sunday lie-in. But this irreverence does little to dissuade them.
Smiling ever more broadly, they casually suggest that I join them for their Tuesday evening study group, where their priest/rabbi/Sufi/Baphomet can tell me some really great things about Jesus/Yahweh/Mohammed/Satan. I meet their expectant hopefulness with a slight curl of my lip and explain that I don’t let men in dresses tell me what to do. (Well, there was that one time, but I honestly didn’t realise he was a man.) Alas, I tell them, in good faith, I will never be able to join their happy band.
But like all purveyors of opiates, they are wheedling, pushy and persistent and won’t I just think again? I just say no. Sensing my steely resolve but still possessed of a glimmer of zeal, they change tack and mention Pascal’s prescription for people of precisely my persuasion.
No! And I can prove it.
CLAIM: We ought to act as if God didn’t exist.
PROOF: There are two possibilities to consider.
Case 1: Assume God doesn’t exist.
Trivially we have done the right thing.
Case 2: Assume God exists.
Again there are two cases to consider.
2B: God is good.
Not to Be: God is evil.
If God is evil then he’s played the Ace of Spades and whatever we do we’re going to lose. Again there is no point worshipping him/her/them/it/us.
If God is good then we’ve been put on Earth to live. Let’s get on with it. Praising God adds nothing to the worth of our own achievements. Furthermore, despite an exhaustive search, there has of yet been no evidence of God’s existence. Therefore, we might conclude that it is irrational to waste what little time we appear to have on worship of one particular imagined incarnation of an extremely elusive deity. We would decide it was better to try and figure things out for ourselves, spend the time as if we didn’t have an eternity more of it to use later. Of course, if Not 2b then we were wrong, but whatever we’ve done, God will understand our honest mistake. And, being good, he won’t be a dick about it. So that’s okay then.
Q.E.D.
Of course Pascal argued from assumptions in classical probability whereas I am arguing from the meaning of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. But we can go beyond good and evil because there’s an even shorter version of this argument that uses Bayesian statistics. It starts from the easily demonstrated fact that : “Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence.” *
Alas, we don’t have the time nor the inclination for a lesson in Bayesian statistics. Which is a shame because of this proposition, I have wonderful proof. And the margin of novel is too small to contain it.
It’s a better argument too since most of everyday thinking happens using some unconscious approximation to Bayesian reasoning. Grossly stated, Bayes theorem says, “Before you leap to any conclusions, consider how well they fit the facts.”
Imagine a fearsome creature with talons and leopards spots looms towards you somewhere dark and gloomy. You haven’t got time to wait for conclusive proof so you have to act on incomplete evidence. You have to take an uncertain leap one way or another, but your conclusion still has to fit all the facts. Those other facts may change the odds dramatically. In the forest you might leap one way, in a nightclub quite another. And knowledge of which nightclub you are in helps you estimate the probability that this woman is a woman. Take that Pascal. Take that Original Sin.
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* No, it really is. Look it up on the internet.
http://oyhus.no/AbsenceOfEvidence.html