Pascal’s Wager | andrewt.net

If you are very observant and read blogs in a very strange way then you may have noticed I have just removed The Dilbert Blog from my links list. This I did because Scott Adams has started making a lot less sense of late than he used to. I can’t be sure of this, and I may have to re-read some older stuff to check he hasn’t always talked nonsense and my brain hasn’t just got better at spotting it, but that’s the theory I’m working on at the minute. Possibly he’s simply never talked in detail about something I already understood before. Who can say?

Anyhow, as is his way, he recently came up with something which already existed and posted it on his blog. In this case, it was the old argument from ignorance (see the highly mockable Atheist Test, question four) and Pascal’s Wager (hence my little story the other week). Naturally, everyone pointed out to him that it was Pascal’s Wager, and his response was to make a blog entry about it.

A few days after that he found that someone else had posted a blog entry about his ramblings. This, he decided, meant it was fair game for him to “stir this fellow into an even frothier foam of cognitive dissonance” by “[making] an argument on such a simple level no rational person could disagree. Then [watching] him disagree”. He abjectly failed to make such an argument, because instead of choosing a definition of “atheism” that could reasonably apply to anyone, he decided to define atheism as the 100% certainty — beyond even the level of certainty with which we say that China exists — that there is no god. Once you start by misrepresenting someone’s beliefs and from there show that those beliefs are irrational you’re really no better than your own characters. This is something Dogbert said some years ago:

Dogbert: I’m trying a little experiment tonight. I’ll attribute a stupid opinion to you, then I’ll aggressively mock you while you sit there saying nothing.
Dogbert: So, according to you, the Internet is a passing fad. YOU MORON! LOOK AROUND YOU! THE INTERNET IS EVERYWHERE! – AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! NOTHING!!
Dilbert: How did that feel?
Dogbert: Quite satisfying. I needed a back-up plan in case you ever get laryngitis.

Adams’ defence for this intellectual vacuity is to claim that he’s only doing it in the name of entertainment (or infotainment, or whatever made-up portmanteau word he’s using that day) and that the value in it is not the words themselves but the “philosotainment benefit of watching the Dilbert cartoonist whip people like him into a frenzy”. So essentially, he’s deliberately trying to goad rational people to anger by deliberately being stupid at them. I moderate internet forums, so I know this is called “trolling” and is generally agreed to be the kind of thing that should be deleted on sight.

And it’s not funny for two reasons. The first is that his supposedly not-really-serious arguments are actually very common arguments used by people in all seriousness to make the same point, and so his post becomes totally indistinguishable from those — which means that he can’t really mock someone for believing it’s real. The second is that he’s being… God, you know, I’m sure there’s a word for people who put up deliberately stupid arguments and then laugh at the sane people who try to explain the flaws…

So I’m not going to carry a link to his blog anymore. I have replaced it with a link to Pharyngula, which is far more sensible because Richard Dawkins reads it.

At the front of the line was a man in a sharp suit. When he got to the gate, the guard, an angel, agreed that he had lived a good life, but asked him why he had not followed some of God’s laws. The man shuffled, embarrassed, before finally admitting that he’d been an atheist. He felt a bit stupid.
“Oh,” said the angel, “fair enough, then,” and opened the great gate before him. The atheist was surprised to be entering Heaven. The line advanced by one, and another man reached the front.
All in all, he was beginning to feel pretty confident. He’d lived a good life, and believed, and he’d followed all of God’s rules. He was a shoe-in.
“Ah,” the guard said, reading his name from the list and recognising it immediately, “Blaise Pascal. Yes, we’ve been looking forward to this.”
“As have I,” Pascal said, proudly.
The angel’s face twisted into the expression a mother might use to quiz a boy who thought she’d be pleased that he’d painted the sofa. “Really?” Pascal paused, confused, and the guard continued, “Only it says here that God thinks you’re trying to pull a fast one on him.”
“What?”
“This ‘wager’ of yours. God isn’t a mind-reader, you know. Free will and all that. He doesn’t know if you believe or not, not really, and your little numbers game is really just an argument to say you believe. You’re trying to con God into letting you in.”
“I’m not! I really, truly believe!”
“How do I know you’re not just saying that to get in, that you haven’t been saying that all along. That’s what you’re little wager would advise, isn’t it, if you didn’t really believe?”
“I never said anything about pretending to believe. I said you should believe!”
“To believe as a choice, disregarding evidence?”
“Yes!” Pascal said, relieved that the angel understood.
“Yes,” said the guard, “we thought you might say something like that. So we’ve prepared a little test…”

“Atheists?” said the demon, “there certainly aren’t any atheists in Hell.”
“But,” he started, starting to question his beliefs now, on his first day in Hell, when one might reasonably argue it was a tad on the late side, “all they had to do was believe! How hard is that?”
The demon made a noise somewhere between “oh?” and “hmm,” in the patient manner of one who’d been going over this for centuries and didn’t imagine having to stop soon. “But they didn’t believe in Hell either. It would seem a bit harsh to expect them to follow rules set out by someone they thought was fiction, with a punishment they thought didn’t exist.”
“So what you’re saying is,” he said, watching with trepidation as the demon selected a pointy looking object from a leather roll-up pack and held it over the flames, “that all we had to do to get carte blanche to sin as much as we pleased was to stop believing?”
“That’s right,” the demon said, as it walked behind the lost soul and plunged the instrument into his back (not that he really had such a bodypart any more, of course). “But you’re in luck. God’s laid down a special rule, just for you. To test your little wager. You can go to heaven, if you want to.”
“How?” Pascal shouted, above the pain. Right then and there there was nothing he wouldn’t do to escape the pain.
“Simple,” the demon replied, moving the instrument savagely, “just believe I don’t exist.”
And for a thousand years he tried.
After that he rather gave up. By that stage his tortured soul didn’t seem worth saving anyway.