Rights and Wrongs of Belief II Pascal, Blackburn

Blaise Pascal Probability theorist, interested in gambling, odds and rational betting. We must believe in God, or not (James echoed this point). So how should we bet?

Gains and losses Pascal considers the stakes of such a bet at some length. If we must bet, then at even odds one can reasonably bet his/her life on either outcome, at probability 1/3 one can bet his/her life if the payoff is two lives, at probability 1/10 one can bet his/her life if the payoff is worth 10 lives, and so on. So if the payoff is infinite, no chance of winning is too small for the bet to be justified, so long as what you have to lose is finite.

The Heart “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” “It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.”

Simon Blackburn Hume’s question: When is testimony in support of a miracle credible? We consider this by examining the force of testimony, and the special character of miracles. Pascal and James also come in for criticism.

David Hume Scottish Philosopher. Major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Famous for his defense of skepticism about induction.

Contrariety of Evidence When the usually acceptable evidence of testimony conflicts with other sorts of evidence, we become doubtful of the testimony. But miracles, by definition, are events of a kind we have evidence against. So testimony for a miracle is always involved in a contrariety of evidence, i.e. it conflicts with other evidence that we have.

The Upshot “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish, and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.”

On Pascal The other possibilities for religious truth are left out here, but they completely upset the simple table Pascal gives. Further, the argument fails because beliefs are not directly chosen, as Pascal acknowledges.

On James Freedom to believe seems a good thing, on the whole. But there are real drawbacks to endorsing belief without evidence. For every harmless or even positive religious belief, there are other beliefs that are harmful and (all too often) self-serving. Shouldn’t we be critical of such convictions?