June 3, 2007
The Eclectic Agnostic’s Wager
In my last major post, I look at the idea of “religious eclecticism“, and how I think it’s likely that all religions share the same basic ideas. I also said I’d try and use a variation of Pascal’s wager to help justify my position.
Pascal’s wager goes something like this:
Living your life as if God exists will bring infinite benefit (you go to heaven) if, in fact God exists. If it turns out that God does not exist, then you haven’t missed out on much. If, on the other hand, you were to live as if God didn’t exist, but you turned out to be wrong, then you’d suffer infinitely (hell and damnation). Even if you were right about God not existing, the benefit you’d gain while you were alive would be minimal compared to eternal damnation. In a more graphical format, Pascal’s wager looks like this:
| God exists (G) | God does not exist (~G) | |
|---|---|---|
| Living as if God exists (B) | +∞ (heaven) | −N (none) |
| Not living as if God exists (~B) | −∞ (hell) | +N (none) |
The Wikipedia article on Pascal’s Wager notes a few rebuttals to this wager, most notably that Christianity is not the only religion which claims God will judge you based on your beliefs. Pascal also assumes that God rewards belief, and even if he did one might assume that God wouldn’t be too happy with simply accepting his existence based on the probability of damnation as this is not a “true belief”.
While I don’t claim to have the answers to all these problems, it seems that, given many of the world’s major religions share some fundamental aspects (belief in one ultimate power, be it Allah, God or Brahman, for example) it might be easier to accept a more general belief in a higher power than in the God of a specific religion. Let’s look again at the options discussed in my last post:
- The teachings of all religions are wrong
- The teachings of some religions are wrong
- The teachings of all but one religion are wrong
or - All religions are right
If all but one religion is “wrong”, then we have such a small chance of choosing the right one, it hardly seems worth it. Similarly, if all religions are “wrong”, then we have even less chance unless we try something radically different. If all religions are right, however, or even if many of them are acceptable to God, then by following the fundamental teachings of as many as possible, you would increase your chances of entering heaven.
Posts
20 gram Soul : Belief in Traditional Religion said,
June 10, 2007 at 1:41 pm
[...] with myself, as I tried to address in my posts “Religious Eclecticism” and “The Eclectic Agnostic’s Wager“, but it doesn’t cause issue for specific spiritual beliefs, the conflict occurs when [...]
20 gram Soul : Religious Eclecticism? said,
August 20, 2007 at 2:30 pm
[...] last option is also the one I find most compelling, and in my next post, I’ll attempt to justify this choice using a variation of Pascal’s [...]