Blaise Pascal's Bet on God

[Guest guest]

Hello James,

 

difficult for me to answer this because I am still not sure what exactly it

is you suggest, but let's give it a try.

 

It looks like you want to introduce "mental energy" as a quantity into the

equations. Are you implying that one who believes in God spends more mental

energy than one who doesn't believe? Or vice versa? Or does one of them

receive additional mental energy and the other one expends mental energy?

For mathematical modeling, you need to be precise in your meaning here.

 

Also, if a person neither gains nor loses, that doesn't make a thing a

lose-lose proposition. Suppose you are modeling the cash flow in your

household. Suppose further that you just said good-night to your child.

Cash-flow wise you probably neither profited nor lost by saying good-night.

Gain and loss were both zero, yet you can't call saying good-night to your

child a lose-lose proposition with respect to your cash flow.

 

Coming back again to that expenditure of "mental energy", its introduction

into Pascal's equations most likely would not make any difference anyway,

because any finite quantity would be irrelevant to the resulting infinite

mathematical expectation of "believing" and, therefore, to the validity of

the argument.

 

Best wishes,

 

Michael

 

 

> -----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----

> Von: d_agenda2000 [d_agenda2000]

> Gesendet: Monday, March 18, 2002 05:08

> An:

> Betreff: Re: Blaise Pascal's Bet on God

>

>

> OK,

> without my doing the Math, I wanted to make the point that

> proposition 3

>

> "if we do not believe in God, and God does not exist, we have neither

> gained nor lost; the outcome is 0." ....is questionable.

> Belief requires some mental energy and it is associated with

> actions. We make up our minds to believe in God, become religious (in

> many cases) and attend services.

> Now the Atheist, having made up their mind not to believe in God,

> participated in "godless" activities... hasn't he gained by expending

> his energies appropriately...if indeed proposition (3)"God does not

> exist" has any probability? That is, why according to Pascal,

> nonbelief is a Lose-Lose proposition = 0.

>

> just asking,

> james