15a. Indiana Jones & Pascal's Wager. Part 1/2.
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Remember when you were little and your mom told you to eat your spinach so you'd grow up big and strong? Or in college, when you set your clock ten minutes ahead, to fool yourself into getting to class on time?
We all engage in useful fictions – things that we choose to believe, because, they just make life easier. And when we do this, we are being pragmatists. Pragmatism is based on the theory that finding true beliefs is less important than finding beliefs that work, practically, in the living of your life.
In this view, it doesn't really matter whether spinach actually helps muscle growth; if eating spinach will improve your life, and believing that it'll make you strong convinces you to eat it – then it's a useful belief, which is all that matters. Pragmatism is relatively recent as philosophical movements go. But some of the most well-known American pragmatists – like William James, and, I would argue, Indiana Jones – have an ideological ancestor in 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.
You can be a pragmatist about basically anything – knowledge, spinach, metaphysics, ethics, or whether it's actually 11:30 right now or 11:40. But Pascal took a pragmatic approach to one of the biggest issues in philosophy: God's existence. [Theme Music]
Pascal was a theist, which, given his place in history may not be all that surprising. But what is weird is that Pascal's argument for God's existence had very little to do with whether God was actually real. Instead, it had everything to do with with whether belief in his existence was practical. This reasoning became known as Pascal's Wager, and it's really a gambler's argument for religious belief. Pascal's thinking went like this: Either God exists or he doesn't, and reason will never give us an answer. So you must choose blindly to believe or not to believe in God – you can't abstain from choosing If you choose to believe in God and he exists, you get an infinite reward – heaven. If you choose to believe in God and he doesn't exist, you're not really out much. If you choose not to believe in God and he doesn't exist, you also don't gain much. If you choose not to believe in God and he does exist, you get infinite punishment – hell. Therefore, the smart bet is to put your chips on God existing, every time.
Pascal argued that, if there is the slightest chance that God exists – even if that chance is low – only a fool would bet against his existence, given that the stakes are so high. In the face of incomplete information, Pascal decided, we should play the odds, and believe whatever offers us the greatest benefit. It's kind of brilliant, right? But there are a couple of ways you could argue against this. You might say Pascal's done the math wrong – that choosing to walk the straight and narrow in the service of an imaginary deity actually does cost you something. Like, you might miss out on stuff that you would otherwise want to do – like, sleeping in on Sunday mornings, or living a heavy-metal-rock-star lifestyle, or, I dunno, coveting stuff. By this logic, you'd lose out if you abstained from all of that in the name of something that ended up not being real. But Pascal, like William James, disagreed with this line of reasoning, because he saw great personal benefit in being a believer. He thought theists have better lives, not because God is blessing them as some kind of reward, but because belief simply has inherent benefits – like the security of feeling that the world is ordered and meaningful… That someone is always looking out for you… That death isn't the end. Now, even if you agree that religious belief is comforting, you might still question Pascal's motives. Does believing in something because it's the safest bet really win you a ticket to heaven? Doesn't God want you to be less self-interested when it comes to believing in him? Well, not according to Pascal.
He thought how and why you choose to believe doesn't really matter, because the fact is, God doesn't care how he gets you, as long as he gets you. OK, so how do you will yourself into believing in something, just because it's where the smart money is? Easy! Pascal said you essentially brainwash yourself into true belief, so that what starts out as self-interest can eventually grow into an honest conviction. And you do this, basically, by walking the walk and talking the talk. Start going to church. Start praying. Hang out with other believers.
At first it might seem weird and disingenuous, but over time, it'll become an ingrained part of your belief system. You know what it's kind of like? Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It's probably pop-culture's finest allegory of pragmatic belief in action. Throughout the whole Indiana Jones trilogy – I'm just gonna pretend the fourth one was never made – Indy is painted as a pretty agnostic character. He hunts religious relics for a living, but the powers that those relics are said to possess are just “hocus pocus” to him. So, at the end of The Last Crusade, (spoilers) Indy manages to find the Holy Grail, in an ancient temple, after getting through a bunch of booby traps. And each trap is kind of a test of faith.
He has to know where to kneel, and how to spell the name of God, and he has to jump into an abyss with the hope that he will somehow survive. Indy ends up passing all of these tests. But not because he suddenly stops being agnostic and starts believing in God – at least not that we know of. Instead, he just does what he has to do. He's literally going through the motions. There's something about that, that would make Pascal proud. Because, to him, it would probably look like Indy was on the path to eventually, truly believing.
