Pascal’s bet…
The Pascal (Pa) is the International Measurements System unit for the measurement of pressure. It is defined as one newton per square meter and the recommended unit for atmospheric pressure measurement by the World Meteorological Organization is the hectopascal (hPa), which equals one hundred Pa. The definition of Standard temperature and pressure conditions used for experimental measurements is defined as a temperature of 273,15 K and an absolute pressure of 100 kPa or 1 bar.
This unit’s name is an homage to Blaise Pascal, a French polymath that dedicated his life to the study of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology. He was born in Paris in 1623 and died in 1662.
Both the amount and variety of work done by Pascal are astonishing in this era of extreme specialization, but it was quite common in those early years of the development of the scientific method.
There were a lot of things unknown back then, and therefore a reasonably curious person could cover a sizeable chunk of the available knowledge if he had enough interest and curiosity. But in any case, Pascal’s work is surprisingly diverse.
He found the numeric relationship that exists between binomial coefficients, usually known as Pascal’s triangle. He also made some fundamental works on algebraic series and made the first description of the inductive method for mathematical demonstrations. In physics, he made fundamental work in the fields of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. He found out that hydrostatic pressure is a function that depends exclusively on the elevation difference of a fluid reservoir and not on the fluid’s weight. He also was of the first scientists that questioned the Aristotelian beliefs on the existence of vacuum and established some of the fundaments which are the basis of the scientific method. His works on the fundaments of probability and game theory were the foundations for the development of statistics and probability.
At this point, Pascal’s works became linked with his work on philosophy and theology. Pascal’s family was not particularly religious until 1646 when his father suffered an accident: he slipped in and fell in an ice frozen street of the city of Rouen and broke his hip. This was a potentially deadly injury in those times due to the state of medicine in the XVII century. Pascal called the finest doctors available in France: Monsieur Doctor Deslandes and Monsieur Doctor de La Bouteillerie. After three months of convalescence, Pascal’s father was able to walk again. And both doctors had become family friends.
Both Deslandes and de La Bouteilleire were followers of a man called Jean Guillebert, who was a follower and proponent of a splinter Catholic group called Jansenism, due to it being based in the works of a Dutch theologian called Cornelius Jansen. Jansenism was declared a heresy by the Catholic church. One of the arguments that Jansenism proposed was that only a portion of humanity was predestined to be saved at the end of time. Additionally, Jansenism beliefs proposed that God’s work cannot be resisted, therefore denying human’s free will role in the acceptance of God and his salvation.
Pascal’s theological work was a consequence of his familiarity with Jansenist ideas, and by having gone through a couple of mystical religious experiences which led him to write the Provincial Letters, a collection of eighteen letters where he criticizes “casuistry”, a method of resolving moral problems utilizing the elaboration of general rules from particular cases, which was widely used by the Catholic church in those years. This method went against Pascal’s beliefs and his knowledge because casuistry eliminated the distinction between right and wrong using sophisms or elaborate argumentations.
Pascal’s oeuvre then focused on the apology of the belief in God. He attempted to demonstrate that this belief was not only morally and religiously correct but was also rationally based.
His final work, left incomplete due to his early death at age 39, was the Pensées (Thoughts). These writings consist of around 1000 papers that were edited and published by some of his Jansenist acquaintances in 1670.
And is in these writings where the argument which is commonly known as “Pascal’s bet” was presented.
Pascal’s bet was based on his explorations on probability theory and an early approach to game theory.
In a few words, Pascal argued that when presented with the choice of whether believing that God exists or not, a rational man should choose God’s existence upon its nonexistence. This choice is justified by the probable consequences of this decision:
If God exists and the rational individual bets on this, he receives an infinite amount of gain (eternal life after death in Heaven) and avoids infinite loss (eternal suffering in Hell).
If God does not exist, the rational individual who has bet on its existence suffers a finite loss (some pleasures associated with hedonism, excess and revenge, and the chance to exert evil behavior without further consequences).
If God does not exist and the rational individual chooses not to believe, then he obtains finite gains (satisfaction of all desires, ability to act without ethical or moral limits).
And finally, if God exists and the rational individual chooses not to believe, then he suffers an infinite loss, i.e., to spend eternity suffering in Hell, without any hope of redemption.
To make things clear, what Pascal proposes can be analyzed using a decision matrix:
According to decision theory, the only significant value is + ∞, since ∞ is by far greater than any other possible value (any negative or finite positive value).
A generation later, Voltaire rejected and criticized Pascal’s idea and argumentation stating that “the subjective interest of an individual to believe in something is not a proof of the existence of that thing”.
The intention of Pascal was not to demonstrate God’s existence, since he was already a believer, but to prove that the belief in God was a rational pragmatic decision.
Voltaire also objected to Pascal’s argument arguing that a pragmatic decision to believe was not actual faith. Pascal’s Jansenist ideas were already based on the concept of a limited fraction of salvable humanity.
A further objection to Pascal’s bet came from French philosopher Etienne Souriau, who based his objections on the argument that the whole bet’s validity depended on whether God accepted the bet and was willing to honor it, a fact which of course is not proved.
Further objections were presented by contemporary thinkers such as Diderot, who argued that this route of thought could be applied not only to Catholicism or Protestantism but to any conceivable religion in existence.
Pascal dismissed all religions other than those based on Christianity by stating that none of the other existing religions can be seriously considered by a rational individual. Of course, any number of objections can be raised against this defense, since his line of thought is discarding any individual that does not follow the Enlightenment’s era thinking.
Pascal implicitly argues that if God exists, he must be infinitely comprehensive, so he would distinguish between the decision to believe or not.
For example, other objections have been raised whether a voluntary decision to believe in God is comparable with an authentic, faith-based belief. Several variations on Pascal’s bet have been developed over time either justifying, denying, or adapting Pascal’s argumentation to any fundamental dispute conceivable.
This story made me think about applying Pascal’s argumentation to one of the fundamental issues of our civilization’s great dilemmas: How do we act when facing the threat of global warming and the consequent climate change effects.
And I found out that this line of thought had already been developed by many smart people.
Since at least 1992, some thinkers have analyzed the consequences of human action in front of global warming by using a line of thought analog to the one followed by Pascal in his bet.
A US college professor called David W. Orr specialized in environmental Studies and Politics authored a paper that dealt with the consequences of our decisions about catastrophic climate change.
He argued that there were two significant differences between Pascal’s bet and our behavior regarding climate change:
In the first place, climate change is more likely than Pascal’s God to exist, as there is quite more scientific evidence for one but not the other.
Secondly, the calculated penalty for inaction against climate catastrophe would be large but is not generally considered to be infinite. I can object that for our current civilization’s existence the consequences of inaction would not be infinite but would be quite large.
Warren Buffett has written that climate change “bears a similarity to Pascal’s bet on the Existence of God. Pascal, it may be recalled, argued that if there were only a tiny probability that God truly existed, it made sense to behave as if He did because the rewards could be infinite whereas the lack of belief risked eternal misery. Likewise, if there is only a 1% chance the planet is heading toward a truly major disaster and delay means passing a point of no return, inaction now is foolhardy.”
I usually do not have any inclination to follow arguments presented by the extraordinarily rich members of our civilization, since most of the time they are usually based on personal or corporate greed and self-interest. But in this case, the consequences of inaction have large consequences for both the rich and the poor.
Human inaction against climate change, even if the probability of the kind of phenomenon would be quite low (and that is certainly not the case, considering the extreme climatic changes our planet is going through) implies such a large loss (the continuity of current human civilization) that inaction is simply not the way a rational individual should follow. In any case.
Climate change deniers are simply not behaving rationally, they are like Pascal’s non-believers. They are following a line of thought that ends up in a large loss, choosing short time gains against long-term benefits.
Which kind of world is preferable? A planet populated by a greed-based civilization with a destroyed biosphere and trapped in a rampant global warming cycle, or a world that prioritizes a sustainable way of life and a healthy biosphere with the smallest possible damage caused by humanity?
The rational choice is even more obvious as Pascal’s bet decision, only more so.