(This is a continuation of yesterday’s idea. To start at the beginning, click here.)
Too many gods
Another problem with the question, “What if you’re wrong?” and also with other variants of Pascal’s Wager, is that it assumes one particular god—or at least a narrow subset of gods. Humans have worshiped literally thousands of gods at one time or another. If you want to get a sense of the sheer numbers we’re talking about, check out Godfinders. Also interesting is Wikipedia’s s list of deities, which breaks the gods down by region and category.
Any thoughtful inquiry as to the rightness or wrongness of any god belief needs to examine more than one god. Surely, it is possible to be wrong about several of these gods without being wrong about them all. If it seems too daunting a task to investigate the characteristics and requirements of each of the gods on these lists, a prudent person should at least check a representative sampling of the various categories of gods. What if you’re right about creator gods, but not supreme gods? What about earth gods or sky gods, sun gods or weather gods? Each variation must have his or her own personality, style or way that they can be placated or appeased. It seems highly likely that what is needed to serve any one of these gods would differ greatly from what is required to serve another. The question, “What if you’re wrong?” oversimplifies this problem to an embarrassing degree.
The basic model
The founding fathers of the United States used the term “Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. This refers to a Deist god. That is, the kind of god that sets everything in motion, doing its “first cause” duty, then respectfully bows out of the picture. Such a god has no interest in the day-to-day activities of individuals and does not require worship or obedience of any sort. All it takes to obey Nature’s God is to observe Nature’s Laws. Nature’s God doesn’t care how you live your life since any consequences are built in, automatic and implacable.
The Deist god is nearly the simplest deity possible, but we can go one step further. It is usually supposed that the Deist god was intentional. It planned what it was doing. To be thorough, we should also consider that everything may have come about by some unintentional creative field—a first mover force of nature that had no plan or intention at all—though I don’t know if anyone ever worshiped such a god or not.
Consequences
So, “What if you’re wrong?” Given a stripped-down, minimalist god, our response to the question can be no other than, “So what? What difference does it make? It doesn’t matter.” For the question to even make sense, the god being examined needs to have a very specific set of characteristics.
Pascal’s Wager (as Pascal originally proposed it) works because the specific god mentioned will reward believers with eternal lives full of happiness, which must then be weighed against a single, finite life of uncertainty. My inquisitor and most of the people using this argument add an extra requirement that their specific god also punishes non-believers with everlasting torment. The gentleman who asked me this question never brought up the reward aspect, but went straight for the punishment Yet it doesn’t matter which side of the bet they want to emphasize. For us to worry about the question at all depends not only on whether their god exists, but also, if it does exist, whether it is the sort of god they describe.
What are the chances of that?