Pascal’s Featherbed
Happiness, Truth, and Pragmatic Arguments for Theistic Belief
Abstract: Recent social scientific research suggests that religious belief often leads to favorable health and happiness outcomes. This article explores whether such outcomes can justify adopting religious belief on pragmatic grounds; it uses as a test case Jeff Jordan’s recent reworking of William James’s pragmatic argument for theism, which he calls the “Jamesian wager”. I conclude that the Jamesian wager fails, for two reasons. First, although religious belief may turn out to be false, the wager fails to consider whether falsity would make any resulting happiness illusory, and as a result, less ethically worthy. Second, the wager fails to give adequate consideration to the potential harms of religious belief. In the course of defending these criticisms, the relationship between happiness and truth is explored, as is the question of how to weigh religion’s benefits against its harms.
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Recent years have seen the emergence of much fascinating social scientific research into the causes and consequences of religious beliefs of various types. Prominent examples of this research include Ronald Ingleheart and Pippa Norris’s global study finding a correlation between religious belief and “existential insecurity” (the more vulnerable people of a given country are to health and financial threats, the higher the level of religiosity those people exhibit) (Ingleheart and Norris 2004); Harold Koenig, Michael McCullough and David Larson’s massive study linking religious belief with favorable health outcomes, such as lower rates of heart attacks (Koenig et al. 2001); and David Sloan Wilson’s evolutionary account of religious belief, which stresses religion’s utility for producing feelings of group cohesion and solidarity (Wilson 2002; cf. Haidt 2007). These studies suggest that religious belief has a good deal of “secular utility”—that is, that it has significant beneficial consequences for human happiness in this life (as opposed to the afterlife). Not unexpectedly, philosophical defenders of religious belief have pointed approvingly to some of these studies: if religious belief enhances one’s happiness in this life, these defenders ask, is that not a sufficiently good reason for attempting to inculcate religious belief in oneself (or to hang on to it, if one already possesses it)? That question is the subject of this essay.
In fact it is a complex question, and in order to make tackling this question a more manageable task, I will narrow my focus to evaluating one recent defense of religious belief on pragmatic grounds, namely, Jeff Jordan’s defense of (what he calls) “the Jamesian wager.” The name is an allusion to William James’s famous paper, “The Will to Believe” (James 1956), which defends the legitimacy of religious belief on account of its ability to improve one’s life in this world. Jordan presents himself as working in the Jamesian tradition, and indeed, Jordan is currently one of the leading philosophical defenders of pragmatic arguments for theistic belief. Moreover, the Jamesian wager is the centerpiece of Jordan’s recent book-length study of pragmatic arguments for theistic belief (Jordan 2006).[1] Thus, it is a good test case for the prospects of pragmatic arguments that stress religion’s secular utility.
In this essay, I will argue that the Jamesian wager is unsound, for two main reasons. First, Jordan fails to consider whether the falsity of religious belief (should this in fact be the case) detracts from the ethical worth of the happiness that stems from such belief (in such a case the happiness is an “illusory” happiness, one might say). The relationship between happiness and truth is an important issue, albeit one that has yet to be given its due in the philosophical literature on happiness. My discussion of this issue should thus be of interest to ethicists generally, not just philosophers of religion. My second reason for rejecting the Jamesian wager is that despite an explicit effort on his behalf to do so, Jordan fails to give adequate consideration to the potential harms of religious belief. I will reveal this inadequacy, and explore some of the subtleties involved in the important task of rationally weighing religion’s potential harms against its potential benefits.
Notwithstanding my conclusion that Jordan’s Jamesian argument fails, however, I do in this essay not go so far as to conclude that all such pragmatic arguments for theistic belief are bound to fail. I do not have such a powerful argument; and indeed, my criticisms of Jordan’s argument will identify potentially fruitful avenues of argument that pragmatic defenders of religion would be wise to explore, in order to move the debate forward.
Pascal vs. James
Jordan judges the Jamesian wager to be more convincing in the final analysis than Pascal’s own, much better-known wager, which defends religious belief as a rational bet to make given the chance that it leads to infinite happiness in the next life. While Jordan is keen to defend Pascal’s wager against what he considers to be the most important objections, he recognizes that many critics judge these objections to be fatal to wager. In particular, many philosophers invoke the so-called “Many Gods” objection against Pascal: these critics (for example, Mackie 1982, p. 203, and Martin 1983) note that as long as there is some non-zero chance that a “deviant” God exists who punishes religious believers (for being too credulous, say) and rewards skeptics (for their carefulness of belief, say), then in such a case non-belief carries a chance of infinite happiness, just as religious belief carries a chance of infinite happiness in the case of a more traditional god. The result is that Pascal’s wager ends in a stalemate, since both belief and non-belief each carry a chance of gaining salvation and a risk of losing salvation.
Although Jordan is not himself convinced by the Many Gods objection (see his lengthy reply to it on pp. 73-101), he considers a chief advantage of the Jamesian wager to lie in its ability to escape the stalemate that results from adding a deviant God to the Pascalian decision matrix. Essentially, the Jamesian wager breaks the otherworldly tie between a deviant and traditional God by invoking the beneficial this-worldly consequences of traditional religious belief; according to Jordan, these benefits tip the decision-theoretic balance back in favor of religious belief.
Before describing in some detail the structure of this alternative Jamesian wager, however, one final point of comparison between Pascal’s wager and the Jamesian wager is in order. In particular, I wish to note the modest ambitions of the Jamesian wager compared with its Pascalian predecessor. For starters, according to Jordan, the Jamesian wager applies only if a very specific condition obtains, namely, the arguments for and against God’s existence are fairly balanced in rational force, so that there is roughly an evidential tie. Additionally, the wager concludes only that belief in God is rationally permissible, not that it is rationally required. Although when laying the argument out Jordan states its conclusion simply as “one should believe in God” (p. 29), his detailed defense of it relies on a premise asserting only that “it is rationally and morally permissible” to believe some proposition p (such as “God exists”) in certain cases where large benefits are in the offing (pp. 51 and 52, my emphasis). Hence, we must interpret Jordan’s Jamesian wager as concluding only that religious belief for pragmatic reasons is rationally and morally permissible, in the case of an evidential tie between the arguments for and against God’s existence.
This is a far cry from the version of Pascal’s wager that is now canonical in the literature, according to which, even if there is a strong preponderance of evidence against God’s existence, each person still has a prudential duty, not just permission, to inculcate religious belief in himself or herself. This is because even if God’s existence is on balance unlikely, so long as there is at least a speck of a chance that God exists and requires theistic belief for salvation, it follows that theistic belief carries infinite expected utility, and thereby becomes rationally obligatory belief. Reflecting on the difference between this strong canonical conclusion and the much more modest conclusion of the Jamesian wager, I am reminded of a remark by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), who once referred to Unitarianism as “a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.”[2] I am tempted to judge the Jamesian wager similarly, and refer to it as a featherbed for a falling Pascalian—that is, as an argument that will appeal to people who would like Pascal’s wager to be sound, but who cannot bring themselves to embrace its more grandiose ambitions and otherworldly focus. All the same, even the Jamesian wager’s less grandiose claim that religious belief is morally and rationally permissible, provided the evidence for and against God is tied in strength, is still a grander claim that many philosophers will antecedently accept. Hence, it is worth exploring whether the Jamesian wager establishes its conclusion.
The Jamesian Wager
Key to the Jamesian wager is what Jordan calls the “Next Best Thing” rule (pp. 14-15). According to this proposed rule of rational choice, if in a case of decision under uncertainty, some option x has a best case outcome at least as good as all rival options’ best case outcomes, and a worst case outcome at least as good as all rival options’ worst case outcomes, and furthermore, x has better outcomes than its rivals in all other cases, then it is rational to choose x. In other words, in a case where options are tied at extremes, but one option is superior in all middle ranges, the Next Best Thing rule says to choose that option. This is quite relevant, for as we have seen, a decision-theoretic tie results (according to many critics of Pascal’s wager) from the inclusion of a deviant God into the relevant decision matrix. Rather than end the argument there, however, the Next Best Thing rule directs us to examine which option, religious belief or non-belief, carries greater expected value in this world. And in this regard, Jordan argues, religious belief clearly comes out ahead, even in the state of affairs where there is no God—a state of affairs that Jordan calls “naturalism.” Jordan encapsulates this claim in a premise he cites frequently, which reads “theistic belief has an outcome better than the other available alternatives if naturalism obtains” (p. 28). I will henceforth refer to this premise as THIN (Theists = Happier In Naturalism, that is, theists are happier than non-theists even in the case of naturalism).
In defense of THIN, Jordan cites recent social scientific research on religious belief (pp. 90-94). An especially influential compendium of such research is Koenig et al. 2001, which claims that religious believers are on average happier and healthier than non-believers. According to a recent meta-analysis of studies of religious belief and happiness, for instance, 80 percent of such studies have found at least one significant, positive correlation between the two variables (Koenig et al. 2001, pp. 117). On the subject of health, a recent meta-analysis reported that frequent religious attendance (at least once a week) is associated with a 25-33 percent decrease in mortality during follow-up periods from five to twenty-eight years (the length of the follow-up varying from study to study) (ibid., pp. 322-330).
For the sake of argument, I will follow Jordan in trusting the results of these social scientific studies, in order to focus on the more philosophical issues raised by the Jamesian wager. The reader should be aware, though, that these studies have recently been subjected to a vigorous, book-length critique by a prominent scientist (Sloan 2006), which raises serious methodological concerns about the research, such as failures to account for confounding variables as well disturbing evidence of researchers making post-study changes in hypotheses to match the data. I will set aside these empirical controversies for present purposes, however, in order to focus on my two main philosophical objections to the Jamesian wager, which I believe to be decisive against it in its current form.
Before describing these two objections, however, it is worth briefly mentioning that I am also choosing to set aside a third possible objection. This is an objection to one of the Jamesian wager’s conditions of application, namely, the condition that supposes there is an evidential tie between arguments for and against God’s existence. Jordan judges it reasonable to believe such a tie obtains (p. 110), but many readers will demur. Still, I believe it would be unwise of such readers to rest their case against the Jamesian wager on doubts regarding this supposed evidential tie. The question whether such an evidential tie obtains is a large question, and to answer it in a thorough fashion would require a time-consuming—and contentious—comparative survey of the most important arguments for and against God’s existence. More narrowly targeted objections to the Jamesian wager are preferable to this, and it such objections that I intend to defend. Thus, for purposes of this paper I am prepared to grant Jordan the supposition that an evidential tie obtains, and ask whether, given this supposition, the Jamesian wager succeeds in justifying belief in God despite the evidential tie.
Prior to moving forward in this fashion, though, I do wish briefly to make one critical point. For we must ask which religious doctrine Jordan has in mind when he claims there exists an evidential tie. Jordan says “theism” (p. 110), which he defines this as follows: “Theism is the proposition that God exists. God we will understand as that individual, if any, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect” (pg. 1; emphasis in the original). In other words, theism is the belief that the god of natural theology exists. However, even following Jordan and supposing that the philosophical arguments for and against this sort of divine individual are evenly balanced, we would have to go on to ask whether bare belief in such an individual—bare belief in “natural religion,” we might say—is enough to bring with it the pragmatic health and happiness benefits that the Jamesian wager emphasizes.