Of Tristable Logic and Applied Philosophy

Of Tristable Logic and Applied Philosophy

In the beginning there was Pascal's Wager. Pascal proposed that to best select whether or not to believe in God or not in lew of any supporting evidence one way or another. So he setup a grid with "Do believe in God" and "Don't believe in God" on one side, and then wrote "There is a God" and "There isn't a God" on the other. Then he considered the outcomes. I'll reproduce the results here:

Now Pascal looked at what happened on when he changed the independant variable (Believe or Don't) and if he believed get got a Good and a Neutral, and if he didn't believe he got a Bad and a Neutral. So he resolved to believe in God.

However, many would suggest that a false belief in God was nothing shy of Blastphemy. But this is where my views diverged from Pascal.

Pascal made several assumptions, a few of which I also accept.

The first one I accept is that we're dealing with the generic Christian view of God. An all knowing and loving, compassionate, forgiving God. Although if there is a God, there's nothing to say that He (He being used in the english context of generic personal reference, and not suggesting anything about God's gender...) lives up to any of these ideals, the alternatives (An incompassionate God, an unforgiving God, or a hateful or evil God) have no possible positive outcomes for a person who even questions God's existance. So since we have already asked the question, we're gonna have to assume we're boned on all the other possible Gods anyway, so we're wasting our time worrying about them.

The second is that, since He is compassionate and forgiving, the fact that we are searching in the first place - striving to better know Him, even if it raises the possibility that He doesn't exist - should mitigate the fact that if we decide to disbelieve, in lew of evidence otherwise, and it turns out that he does exist, he would forgive our error and allow us to have the Good outcome dispite our disbelief, assuming that we were Good little boys and girls, and would overlook any possible sins that being born entails (Why in the WORLD would we be born with original sin in a universe with a FORGIVING God?)

The last is that beliving in God costs effort. Unlike Pascal, I am not trying to live my death, but instead live my life in a way that accounts for death. To do that I need time to work on myself. And since a belief in God usually dictates some kind of worship, then we reduce the expending of time and resources usually allocated for worship. Resources that could be better put to use for personal self exploration, or better yet, paying for, and delivering, boxed lunches to the hungry. But as such, doing good costs effort as well.

This creates a system with 3 bistable inputs and 2 tristable outputs. Of the inputs, 2 are controlable, and one is unknown (Thus providing the need for this exploration in the first place.)

Inputs

• God Exists?
  • Is God
  • Is no God
• Believe?
  • Believe
  • Not Believe
• Be Good?
  • Good
  • Not Good

Outputs

• Outcome
  • Good
  • Neutral
  • Bad
• Effort
  • High
  • Medium
  • Low/None

From this we can then build a truth table and then select the optimal outcome.

The Truth Table

Is God?	Believe?	Be Good?	Afterlife Outcome	Effort Spent
No	No	No	Neutral	Low/None
No	No	Yes	Neutral	Medium
No	Yes	No	Neutral	Medium
No	Yes	Yes	Neutral	High
Yes	No	No	Bad	Low/None
Yes	No	Yes	Good/Neutral (1)	Medium
Yes	Yes	No	Bad/Good (2)	Medium
Yes	Yes	Yes	Good	High

1) If you believe with the catholics, than assumption #2 is only half right. You can't get into heaven without a saviour, and you can't be saved if you don't believe. However, you can go to purgatory.
2) If you believe with the catholics, than as long as you repent for your bad deeds, you're forgiven.

In deciding my own path, I looked at this table, trying to find the healthy balance between effort and outcome. Ideally, one would hope to find a "Good, None" combination. However, the ideal is rarely found in practice. So I looked for the best I could get. Of these I found Not Believe/Be Good to provide the best outcome. The reason being that a Bad outcome is the most bad kind of bad there is, so any outcome that could even possibly include it was ruled out. And since even if the Catholics are right, the worst I get from my choice is a neutral, it seemed to be the best choice. Plus, I do not resolve to hold a belief in God shearly out of a matter of rewards. A false belief shearly because we want to go to heaven is not a good foundation for belief, and worse yet, would require that we not only believe, which costs effort, we would also have to be good. So we're falsely believing in God, and exausting large amounts of enery to do so. Not only is this hard work, but it's also mildly morally depraved, and could possibly be construed as a Bad Deed, negating all the work we spent on being good.