A Rebuttal to Pascal

By: Jimmy Hackeet 

As best I can tell, my earliest memory is waking up in a pile of vomit. An abrupt end to naptime, but nothing more serious than a change of clothes. I was in daycare, pre-preschool. I was a harmlessly sick child, in and out of the doctor’s office, but never for anything too serious. A living example of, “This too, shall pass.” I am sad to report that I never, and not for lack of effort, developed the skills of a successful vomiter, always seeming to make quite a mess of the whole affair, always seeming to split between the mouth hole and the nose holes in improper

proportion. Contrast to a friend of mine growing up, who we will call Carlos, a Cuban American who as a child possessed the composure of a neurosurgeon. I once recall him being ill, staying at our house while his parents were at work. I remember him effortlessly going to the bath to throw up, casually walking to the toilet, leaning over the bowl, evacuating, and then getting back to life. No laying on the ground in front of the toilet, no incidental splattering. Just stand and deliver. Truly an amazing feat, and for a child no less. We couldn’t have been any older than 4th grade.

Now, as always, I ask for the humble reader to indulge me, for Carlos had one other talent that was at least one standard deviation ahead of the rest of us, a one-armed hook shoot in basketball that never missed. This kid had a rocket launcher equipped with heat seeking missiles. It was thinking about this feature, and its setting, the recess field, when I began thinking about two things. Happy memories, and what we are doing to create more. What are any of us engaged in, on a daily basis, that will contribute to something as meaningful as recess is to a child? What is the long-term mission of humanity?

We have, in a rather mysterious way, lost sight of the magnificent fact that we all truly do exist, as conscious beings, in a universe whose existence might ultimately never be explained. Each of these facts should cause some sort of wide spread species level sense of ecstasy. Perhaps that is why we have simply learned to ignore these facts. But in ignoring them, we still found it necessary to answer them. We substitute religion as placeholders until we have more time for a deeper investigation. And I think there is a good argument to be made for this trade. The primitive world was a scary place, and I am not advocating for some sort of anti-modernist reversal to “simpler times.” I am rather viewing humanities struggle as a long-term investment in a project worthy of the facts mentioned above.

I will posit that the often-repeated Pascal’s Wager is wrong on probabilistic / logical grounds. And we will start with his premise. One should act as though God exists, since if God does exist, you are ensuring an afterlife in Heaven. In the face of equal odds (God exists / God does not exist), only a fool would wager a bet that had the potential to lead to eternal suffering (hell). I will not go through all the arguments of Pascal. They are easy enough to read, and I have covered enough here for my rebuttal.

Pascal’s miscalculation is not in his wager, but rather his imprecision in what he is betting on. In fact, Pascal is not betting on God at all. Rather he is betting on heaven. He is betting on reward. This is reducing human life, and reason for his argument states that to bet against God is unreasonable, to satisfying a desire for existence. Funny enough, this is the outline of rationality that Nassim Taleb works out in Skin in the Game. What is rational is that which leads to human survival. Fair enough, and I certainly accept the premise that survivability should guide human decision making. But my concern is equating God with Heaven. This is an impermissible mistake in the logic of Pascal. It must be corrected. As such, I propose the following.

Accepting the premise of eternal life as man’s ultimate goal, we must work to construct such a universe. To motivate us to construct such a universe, we must assume heaven does not exist, but worthy of existing. And the goal of humanity should be the creation of heave. We must work to create a perpetual and just universe. In fact, it’s hard to conceive that any other goal would be worthy of the position that humans possess. In fact, as it stands, humans have no concrete reason to believe life exists in other places of the universe. We may be the only vestige of justice in the universe, possibly in existence. We then have to consider that, by its nature, justice is superior to injustice. That for justice to exist permanently, human life must also perpetuate permanently. For that to occur, the universe (or some other vessel) must also be perpetual. The quest of mankind is not belief in heaven. It is to do the hard work of establishing a perpetual, justice universe.

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P.S. This writing was inspired by Brian Cox, Nassim Taleb, and of course, Pascal.