11 - The Arbitrary Prudentialism of Pascal’s Wager and How to Overcome It by Using Game Theory

Summary

The traditional ‘evidentialist’ objection to Pascal’s Wager holds that Pascal’s argument illegitimately imports prudentialist norms into the context of belief, where epistemic norms alone should apply. In chapter 11, Elliott Sober alleges that the Wager actually suffers from the opposite problem: if we are willing to embrace prudentialism about belief, we should acknowledge that Pascal does not go far enough! Pascal holds fixed certain facts about what God would have to be like — call these assumptions a ‘theology’ — and invites the reader to opt for belief based on prudential considerations. Mougin and Sober (1994) have argued that you could instead hold fixed your evidence and beliefs about God’s existence, and undertake prudential scrutiny of your background theology. In this chapter, Sober observes that on a more broadly prudentialist approach, both degree of belief in God and one’s theological commitments should be up for grabs. He sketches a dynamic model (along the lines of Brian Skyrms’s dynamics of rational deliberation) for how our beliefs, of both types, might evolve towards a stable equilibrium. Different starting points lead to different end points, raising new challenges for Pascal’s Wager.