Betting Against Pascal

This post is not an attack on any person's belief or lack thereof. Though I do not understand Christianity, I respect those who practice it so long as they respect others in turn. This about the backfiring of a popular apologetic argument, which ended my brief foray into Christianity.

I grew up in Taiwan, immersed in Chinese culture where philosophy, science, and religions of various sorts coexist without any sense of contradiction. This mentality of syncretism and non-exclusivity makes it difficult for me to grok the appeal of Christianity.

It was in part my failure to understand Christianity and curiosity about its success that encouraged me to 'give it a try'. I chose Roman Catholicism because it is the faith practiced by the Irish American side of my family. My beloved aunt, who is a sister (nun) and a lifelong educator, gave me guidance and reading materials, and I found an enthusiastic sponsor at Saint Jude's Shrine in downtown Baltimore.

If Pascal is right, I would side with this guy

The details of my experience are for another post, but suffice to say that Christianity and I did not part on good terms. I came away from it even more mystified by the popularity of Christianity than I was before. Catholic theology in general and apologetics in particular made little sense to me, no matter how my mentors framed it. The single most obnoxious argument in their arsenal was Pascal's Wager.

Seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal posited that, with no rational means to prove or disprove the existence of the Christian god, it is safer to bet on his existence, as one has everything to gain by believing (i.e. Heaven) and everything to lose by not believing (i.e. Hell). This is known as Pascal's Wager, or Pascal's Gambit.

There are a number of serious problems with this argument--false dichotomy being the most immediately obvious--but the one that really put me off was its implications on the character of the Christian god. Pascal's Wager hinges on the assumption that the Christian god, if he exists, saves those who believe him and damns those who do not. 'Believing in the Christian god' entails acknowledging him as an omnipotent being and the creator of the human species, if not the entire Universe.

However, Christianity originated only two thousand years ago, within a rather small ethnic tradition. In order to preserve Pascal's premise, then, we must conclude that the Christian god intentionally withheld his revelation--and therefore salvation--from the vast majority of humanity for most of history. If so, he is a negligent parent at best and an egomaniacal despot at worst.

Given Pascal's conditions, I would wager against the existence of the Christian god. If he exists and would damn anyone who did not believe in him, then I want no part of his kingdom. If he exists and is the just and loving god some modern Christians make him out to be, then he would presumably save anyone who leads a good life, believer or nonbeliever. If he does not exist, then it makes no difference whether I believe in him or not.

When I left the Church without ever being baptized or confirmed (they do it in one big ceremony for adult converts), my sponsor was not surprised. My aunt kept a brave face, though I knew she must have been devastated. She told me to "follow your own Light", to which I replied that I did, and always would.

Hodge and Podge

As explained in Nothing Unreal Exists, I lack a certain confidence in the realness of reality. I do not know the reasons for this, but a few experiences in my childhood definitely reinforced that doubt. This is one of the more bizarre ones.

Six years old, I woke with my face pressed against the straw mat upon which I had taken my afternoon nap. I saw something translucent and huge, taking up most of my visual field (though I could see through it). Its complexity and dynamism led the eye constantly, so that I could not focus on any part of it.

The Hodge-Podge.

It was not any thing that I could (or can) identify, but it looked like chaos and decay. My six-year-old mind compared it to the rotting corpse of a sparrow I had recently found while digging in my grandmother's flower trough. The vision grew more and more intense and menacing. Then, it changed.

A similarly translucent, equally indescribable vision of order and stasis replaced it. Its smooth perfection proved felt as monstrous as what came before. My eyes could find no purchase on its featureless...featurelessness. As a child, I compared it to an ornament belonging to my mother--a wooden bird meticulously covered with pure white feathers, lifeless and unyielding.

Just when the vision of order grew unbearably intense, it changed back into chaos, then to order, and so on. It kept flip-flopping faster and faster, which produced an odd sensation of involuntary movement, like free-falling without direction. Then, it just stopped.

I do not remember what I thought at the time, once the terror left me. When it recurred a few months later, however, I grew anxious. I decided that there was something wrong with me--probably a malignant brain tumor. When my grandmother and parents dismissed my concerns and other symptoms failed to manifest, I gradually forgot about the incident.

Every few years, it would happen again. Sometimes it comes while I lie in bed trying to sleep or wake, but I also experience it while meditating or just sitting quietly. I can discern no warning signs, but always recognize it when it starts--sometimes with one vision, sometimes with the other. Though objectively I know it never lasts more than five minutes, the hallucination suspends my perception of time and feels unsettlingly eternal.

I have tried to explain it away or attribute meaning to it, but nothing seems to stick. If a hypnogogic or hynopompic hallucination, why does it happen while I am wide awake? Did I accidentally ingest some mind-altering substance? Just as the vision defies description, so it defies my other attempts to make it fit into my worldview of the moment.

Nothing Unreal Exists

I seem to lack an intuitive confidence in reality that most people exhibit.

The first piece of philosophy that made any sense to me was Zhuang-zi's 'butterfly dream'. For those unfamiliar with the story: Zhuang-zi has a vivid dream of being a butterfly, then wakes up and wonders whether he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man.

In other words, we have no means of independently confirming our perceptions of reality.

That idea later drew me to the practice of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. For the same reason, the only part of Western Classical philosophy that immediately interested me was Skepticism. Perhaps ironically, my uncertainty about perception also led me to place a high value on the scientific process and empiricism.

Even verifying an observation with instruments or other observers relies on information gathered by our senses and interpreted by our brains, which (as illustrated by the butterfly dream and cognitive experiments) are notoriously inconsistent. However, given that all other methods are also prey to the fallibility of human cognition, science provides the most reliable known framework for interpreting the world around us.

I accept consensus reality as a plausible theory, and usually behave in a manner consistent with it. Even if suffering is an illusion, it still feels unpleasant, so I do my best to avoid it. All the same, I consider it good practice to entertain other hypotheses, hence my fascination with fiction in general, and speculative fiction in particular.

Recently, my partner coined a phrase ('conspiracy chic') that gave me insight on a pet peeve of mine: I revile fiction that puts too much emphasis on its (supposed or actual) basis in reality. I do not mean historical fiction or hard sci-fi, but rather conspiracy thrillers, true crime stories, and the like. Well-known examples include The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and The Blair Witch Project.

Realism in fiction (or lack thereof) does not bother me, but I reject the notion that I ought to find a story more compelling just because it is 'real'. Dan Brown begins The Da Vinci Code with a list of 'facts'; the (very poor) pedigree of those 'facts' aside, that gimmick relies on the conceit that fiction is inferior to non-fiction.

I understand that people want to believe stories, but I do not grok how a story's alleged reality makes it more believable. As I see it, a 'true' story has a higher burden of proof than a fictitious one. This does not mean I cannot enjoy true stories, but somehow I always feel a need to independently verify them, which damages my ability to suspend disbelief. Fiction frees me from that uncertainty.

Beyond my own peculiar preferences, fiction communicates many things as well as--if not better than--non-fiction. Consider the fables and parables that litter various philosophies and philosophies, or thought experiments in theoretical physics, not to mention the entire linguistic concept of metaphors. Literal existence is not a requirement for relevance.

Just as we can question reality without losing touch with it, we can value fiction without conflating it with reality. Besides, all ideas and all fiction (and all fake non-fiction, too) have some measure of reality--if not in their effects on our agency, then at least in the chemical, electrical, and metabolic activities our bodies go through when we think about them. That opens another can of butterflies in terms of theories on how reality works.