What I'd have done if I took Pascal's Wager

Every assertion in this post is what I take to be true; there will be no jokes involving saying false things, no hyperbole, etc. Moreover, I’m not going to be clever about what counts as “asserting only what I take to be true,” e.g. by saying things that are only technically true. Throughout this post, I intend to convey whatever the sentences straightforwardly and literally convey, according to the usual conventions of speaking (though, of course, I might make mistakes in executing this intention). You have my word as a Kantian. As for my purpose in saying these things, that’s for you to discern.

So, most of you probably know how Pascal’s Wager works. When you’re acting under uncertainty, and a choice could result in good or bad outcomes, you generally need to weigh possible outcomes in accordance with (i) how good or bad they are, and (ii) how probable or improbable they are. I might be willing to trade e.g. my pleasant day at home for a pleasant day with a soda I got from the convenience store, even though driving to the store could literally kill me, since the probability of that really bad outcome is small enough to make the risk worth it.

Plausibly, for any medium amount of good and any teeny tiny probability, there’s a good great enough that you’d sacrifice the medium-good for a teeny tiny probability of the super-good outcome. I might not be willing to trade my car for a 1 in a million chance of a year of unimaginable bliss in Heaven; but there does seem to exist some n big enough such that I’d trade my car for a 1 in a million chance at n years of Heaven. And so on for probabilities even less than 1 in a million.

However, if Christianity is true and I become Christian, then I (am more likely to) get infinity years of bliss in Heaven. So if Christianity has even the smallest chance of being true, it seems I should undertake whatever finite difficulties I need to in order to manipulate myself into thinking Christianity is true. By doing so, I obtain a nonzero probability of infinity good, which comes out to infinity good.

If you think there’s an easy way of responding to this argument, you’re probably wrong. I won’t be going over that here, though. Just suffice to say, Pascal’s argument has real force, and if you buy it, you’re in for a difficult task. We generally can’t change our beliefs on a whim for the purpose of practical benefits; if you offered me a million dollars to believe that 2+2 is 5, I’d walk away poor. So what you need is some technique in self-manipulation. Pascal recommended simply following the religion as far as your actions go (go to church, say the prayers, etc.) and hoping you eventually develop a sincere belief. This is speculation, but I’d guess this strategy has an abysmally low success rate among reasonably self-conscious people; I feel pretty confident it wouldn’t work on me.

Now, if your only options are to remain an atheist or do what Pascal recommends, then the argument still says you should do the latter, since any probability of infinite bliss is of infinite value. But I think we can do way better at securing for ourselves an eventual sincere belief in the most-probable-exclusivist-religion.1 That brings us here; in this post I’ll talk about what I would have done to maximize my probability of going to Heaven, if I had decided to accept the wager of Pascal. What’s more, I think my strategy is probably the uniquely best one given the circumstances intelligent and reflective people are generally in, and I’d be surprised if a randomly-selected intelligent wager-acceptor were successful through substantially different means.

One under-appreciated strategy for accepting the wager is intentionally inflicting serious brain damage on yourself, after having taken measures that make it more likely you’ll convert after. Say, for example, you send a letter to a religious person saying “Hey! I’m about to make myself really stupid. I know your religion considers this an extremely grave sin, but it’ll have happened by the time you get this letter, and the only thing in your hands is whether to convince me follow your religion and repent of my sin. This should be a relatively easy soul for you to save. Thank you!” and then you send the letter, and then give yourself severe brain damage, and then let fate take its course.

Unless there’s some big problem I’m missing, it really seems to me that this has a better chance of success than Pascal’s recommendation. But I wouldn’t be surprised if one of you pointed out a devastating flaw in this plan; it turns on a lot of empirical facts, e.g. how reliably you can give yourself brain damage that would make you suggestible to religion but also not make you too incapacitated to repent of your sin, etc. But if you actually take Pascal’s wager seriously, and you think the argument works, this is the kind of thing you’d be putting a non-negligible amount of research into.

“But,” you say, “The brain damage strat has a major disadvantage. I also care about whether other people get the infinity goodness of Heaven. If I convert via brain damage, I won’t be able to convince others to be religious; indeed, if others were to learn I did such a grotesque thing for my religion, I may make it less likely that they convert later on. I will not accept whatever infinite gains this strategy will give me, for then I would be sacrificing the infinite good of many others.” I must say to you, my hypothetical objector, who regularly keeps finite goods for yourself instead of giving even greater finite goods to others, that I am skeptical that you would sacrifice your infinite good for the infinite good of others.

But no matter, let’s suppose this is a sincere objection. It’s a moot point, since my preferred strategy would have a much higher success rate anyway, and it wouldn’t look too scandalous to others, and it would leave mostly intact your ability to evangelize to others.

My strategy comes with one major disadvantage, namely, that you cannot be deliberate about it; it has to operate at a level where it will avoid conscious detection. If you knew and took seriously the fact that you were adopting this strategy, I think it wouldn’t work nearly as well, if at all; it is for this reason that my title is in the subjunctive, since I doubt it’d work if I, right now, were convinced to take the wager.

Here is our obstacle. It’s hard to be correct, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to be incorrect in the way you think is most advantageous. To form a belief, you usually need to at least think you have good evidence for the belief, even if it’s easy to let yourself do a bad job of assessing whether you have good evidence. It’s hard to self-consciously believe something just because of the practical benefits of the belief; but you can’t just set out to rationalize the conclusion you want on the basis of bad evidence, since it’s also hard to self-consciously believe something that you’ve decided to rationalize. What a pickle! I need it to be arranged that I believe the most-probable-exclusivist-religion on the basis of some (presumably bad) evidence, but I also can’t consciously set out to make this happen without ruining my plan. But what tool do I have at my disposal, other than my conscious volition? Whatever I cannot do by my conscious decision, I simply cannot do, except by a lucky accident.

And so a lucky accident comes to the rescue.

To get into why, it’d be good to make some general remarks. As I said, being correct is hard. To be correct, you often have to sit with the discomfort of ignorance, you have to resist your natural inclination to declare the matter settled, and you have to avoid taking the easy path to the point where it’s painful. Consider a detective investigating an apparent suicide, a detective who knows Jones murdered the victim and made it look like a suicide (on the basis of good evidence, let’s say, albeit evidence that isn’t demonstrable to others). Everyone else wants to consider the case closed, and they consider the detective a foolish nuisance: “Jones has an alibi, and there’s no evidence whatsoever of anyone but the victim having been in the apartment. The simplest explanation is that it’s a suicide.” And how easy would it be for the detective to just accept the simple story! If he doesn’t, then others will boast about having a satisfactory explanation, all while he has to shamefully admit he doesn’t have a story for what went on that night. The detective knows from experience that reality frequently disagrees with the most superficially satisfying explanations, that the truth often ends up being something you wouldn’t have anticipated in advance. Even when you just can’t think of any sensible story on which the case is a murder, then reality often ends up being something you just didn’t think of.

Like I said, you need to be lucky to rationalize the right falsehoods; you can’t really set out to rationalize whatever belief you deem most practically beneficial. But some kinds of beliefs will have an advantage and be more likely to be chosen by nature as the one you rationalize. First, of course, there will be a preference for things you want to believe. Second, unspecific beliefs that offer easy explanations for weird phenomena will be preferred. It’s a lot easier to explain ghost sightings by positing ghosts than by saying there’s some combination of weird optical, psychological, etc. phenomena that make people think they saw ghosts. Were we to have a theory of ghosts that would let us predict anything specific about ghost sightings, that would be bad for the believer in ghosts, since reality probably wouldn’t agree with the predictions. But in fact, thinking there are ghosts gives an easy explanation for any ghosty weirdness whatsoever, so it’s easy to see why you’d believe in ghosts if you had even a slight incentive to. Indeed, such is especially easy before the relevant naturalistic explanations are demonstrated. If you have to appeal to naturalistic phenomena that we don’t even know about yet, then you’ll look like a silly dogmatist. Third, it’s helpful if you find a social scene with people who will think you’re being ridiculous and obstinate if you come to any other conclusion. No matter how hard we try, our animal brains perceive others’ reactions as carrying useful information as to what’s true and false, and we can easily use this fact to our (practical, not epistemic) advantage.

Luckily, the above factors can work together to make it easy for us to rationalize a belief in the most-probable-exclusivist-religion. So, then, if I wanted to take the wager, what steps would I take to cooperate with the convenient circumstances nature put me in?

My first and most important rationalization would be a very easy one to pull off. If I’m to be successful, I have to assess the evidence for the most-probable-exclusivist-religion and genuinely come out thinking the evidence is in its favor. Therefore, first, I need to allow myself to believe there’s a real chance I didn’t even need to take the wager in the first place, that I’ll assess the evidence and it really will come out in favor of the most-probable-exclusivist-religion. I’d need to make myself feel like it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if it turned out the thing I wanted to believe for practical benefits turned out to have a large degree of evidential support. This shouldn’t be hard; it’s easy to find philosophical arguments that’ll make you think there’s at least a strong case for theism, and as for religion, well, the wager does advise us to follow the most probable exclusivist religion.

It’s important to remember, of course, that in the course of the above thoughts, I am not consciously reasoning as I portray. Again, if I knew I was rationalizing, it wouldn’t work. Realistically, as far as I can tell, all that happens is I associate a nice feeling with not having to take the wager in the first place, and a thought enters my head saying hey, actually, it wouldn’t be too crazy if that happened, and I neglect to do the hard thing and consider whether it would in fact be an overly-convenient coincidence. So still, as far as I can tell, I am not taking the wager; I think I am just considering the evidence and going where it takes me.

But, still, there is a huge gap between “it wouldn’t be super surprising if this were true” and “this is true.” How do we bridge it? Well naturally, like any good truth-seeker, my next step is to consider the strongest evidence in favor of the most-probable-exclusivist-religion. And luckily this religion will have the second feature of easy-to-rationalize beliefs described above: they’re unspecific enough as to give superficially satisfying explanations, all while naturalists have to say “I don’t know how this happened naturalistically, but I know it did.” So I look for empirical evidence for the religion in question, and find evidence I do. I may even find what seems to be overwhelming evidence for the religion in question.

All this is good; you should look for the best arguments in favor of views you disagree with. However, still, in the back of my mind, I know that if I am not convinced, then I have to truly take the wager, instead of living the dream where the practically beneficial belief is the one supported by the evidence. With this fear in my heart, it will be easy to neglect to do the hard thing; easy to avoid resisting the simple and convenient explanation for things; easy to avoid sitting with my uncertainty and lack of knock-down explanations.

To go over a similar case, consider the following true fact: there is overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak. But as it turns out, the evidence against a lab leak is even more overwhelming. (If you think COVID was a lab leak, then pretend I used the opposite example.) Were I to be presented with only with the evidence for a lab leak, and did I not know better, I’d think it was a totally shut case; I’d think, “I cannot think of any way these pieces of evidence could turn out as they did without COVID just being a lab leak; the probability that things are this way is tiny conditional on any non-lab-leak theory; I can’t think of any evidence that would be more decisive than what I have.” But, of course, when you want to be correct, it occurs to you that you’re not maximally good at thinking of alternatives, and that being correct doesn’t always mean having a knock-down theory of what’s going on, instead of knowing there’s a hundred individually-unlikely-but-collectively-likely explanations. Fortunately, in our hypothetical, I do not care most about being correct, and so when I get the strong evidence for the most-probable-exclusivist-religion, it’s easy to just not do the painful thing of trading my simple hypothesis for one that’s unimpressive and only non-obviously probably correct.

So here I am, thinking I’ve just been following the evidence, and now I feel good. I take myself to have strong evidence for the thing that would be amazing if true, and indeed it doesn’t even seem like a convenient miracle that things turned out that way. The only step left is to sit with victory for a while, and not seek out evidence against my beliefs with an open mind (and why would I, after all? the evidence is so conclusive, and those who deny it are obviously rationalizing). After a while, things will solidify. I’ll be used to thinking my evidence is conclusive, and used to reflexively avoiding the avenues by which I could discover I’m wrong, thinking they’re utterly hopeless. I will see people not buying my responses to their counterarguments, but this is what I expect; even when you’re right, you can’t get through to everyone.

Now, where does this leave me? Well, for one, with infinite expected years of bliss in Heaven. But, remember, I am also worried about my ability to evangelize. And as far as I can tell, I’m as well-off as I can be; sure, I’ll be the best persuader if my beliefs are correct, but that’s not an option if I’m taking the wager. But I still take myself to be a truth-seeker, and I have strong evidence for my views (at least as long as we look at that evidence in isolation), so I’m as good an evangelist for a false position as anyone can be. Now, objectively, if someone were to know my path, I’d be completely and utterly discredited; just like how I can’t have a belief I know to be a rationalization, so to someone else who knows my belief is a rationalization, my words are merely noise. Maybe I’m a useful repository for information, for the best arguments for a given belief, but the fact that I take the evidence to be conclusive should mean absolutely nothing. But, of course, people do not know my path; I sincerely report to others that I am just following the evidence, and I express the level of confidence I really take myself to have. I would have told no lies, except only one innocent one told to myself long ago.