On Pascal's Wager

A recent set of conversations with several people got me thinking about something I once believed in firmly. For those of you unfamiliar is Pascal’s Wager or Pascal’s gambit this Wikipedia article sums it up well. Basically Pascal argues that since there’s a possibility that God does exist and the economics of the afterlife depend on your belief in God that it is better (in a economic sense spiritually) to believe in God. In other words a belief in God may cause some temporal losses in this life, but the potentially infinite losses in the afterlife of living with an atheistic viewpoint far outweigh and losses in this life. And if it turns out that God doesn’t exist then the most you have to lose is some kind of finite loss here in this life.

                Having grown up Christian, Pascal’s wager appealed to me when I grew older and found contradictions in religion which raised doubts in me. Pascal having contributed significantly to physics and mathematics was for me a good role model to base my philosophy of life on. I was in fact very ok with the fact that even though I might be missing out on some life experiences because of my beliefs (or possibly persecution or ridicule) it was worth it. And if in fact God didn’t exist then we’d all die and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest.

                This whole line of thought has really bothered me in recent years, in that technically there is not justice if there is a God. There is justice perhaps in a religious sense, but not justice in a truly equal justice sense. If God exists and the atheists are wrong then all the believers get to mock the atheists and send them to hell. In fact no matter what religion you are, you will still get to say “well at least I believed in a God/gods” as they get some kind of satisfaction in hell for choosing the wrong God. If atheists that don’t believe in any afterlife are right then they will never get the satisfaction of saying “ha I was right”. They will simply just die and disappear like the rest of everyone.

                All humor aside, I have started to look into my initial evaluation of Pascal’s wager. Recently I have looked into apatheism and almost convinced myself that I was one. The truth is that I am not. If there was a God and I knew about it I would change my life. If that/those God or gods was/were just, merciful, and loving I would change my lifestyle to helping them accomplish their goals. Those goals would ultimately be the happiness of others. In my opinion this is accepting people for who they are (after all they would be their creations and would want them accepted as just that) and helping them become caring and loving human beings. If this/these God/gods was/were unjust I would have to rethink my life. I am very strongly inclined to stick to a value system. If the higher deity was unjust I would have to outweigh my eternal punishments with compromising my values. I don’t know what I would do in the situation, but I’m afraid I would choose eternal punishment over worshipping a cruel heartless deity. So the only reason I’m not an apatheist is because I fear compromising my values to worship a cruel God to save myself. This fear gives me uncertainty so I cannot with surety say that if there was a cruel God it would not change the way I live my life.

                So why do I bring up apatheism in a discussion about Pascal’s wager you ask. Well it’s because Pascal’s wager is an “argument of assumptions” as the citation on Wikipedia calls it. He approaches it from a Christian viewpoint which in my opinion is the first mistake. If one believes and worships Jesus Christ then they are wrong according to the God of Islam or Judaism. Will I get into heaven as a Christian if Jesus wasn’t in fact the son of God, but merely a prophet or maybe just a regular Jew? I don’t know. Will I get into heaven with a Christian God as a Muslim? I’ve been told by many that I wouldn’t. So here’s my problem with the whole wager, it’s based on assumptions that have just as much uncertainty as the existence of a deity. There’s no statistics or numbers to create a valid economic model.

                So I am an apatheist in that if I found out there was a loving God, I wouldn’t change a thing in my life. I live by a standard that is to love others and respect and honor their values. I avoid doing things to others that I know would hurt me. I try to avoid judging others because they act different or say weird things, or maybe even believe things that seem absurd to me. I do judge, it’s in our human nature to, but I know that it’s against my value system to do it. I don’t think I’m in a position to claim that others are sinning, but can only determine what a sin is for me. I don’t do things I consider “sins”; in the same respect if your “sins” are not negatively affecting someone else’s life, then I’m in no position to call it a “sin”. So I feel that if God is a loving merciful God, he would see that I am accomplishing his goals even if I didn’t believe in him. And if he is loving and merciful he can overlook my faults and will understand that he did not show proof of himself enough for me personally to believe in him. If he is not loving and merciful than even if I did believe in him I doubt my life would be worth much to him. So I will take Pascal’s wager from an apatheist perspective. My losses here in this life are none, since I would live my life as a loving caring person with or without a God. My losses in the afterlife are (based on my assumptions) infinite if God is not loving, or none if he is. Either way I have the same chances in the afterlife according to my assumptions, so it’s economical to live the life I do.

                My whole argument with all of this is merely that any model of any God or religion is based on assumptions. Those assumptions could be guided by inspiration, answers to prayers, a holy book, etc… It’s fine to have a belief system, and it’s perfectly ok to live your life according to your beliefs. When you start telling others that their models will end them up in hell is where I have a problem. They are basing their model of different assumptions, and you have no right to take that away from them. So I will say this: the house always wins. Whatever or whomever you bet your lifestyle on it won’t change the house rules. No one knows for sure what those rules are, so whatever your wager just try to keep your hands on your own spiritual chips.

How An Idealist Lost His Ideals

For those of you who have studied about the MBTI personality preferences, I am an INFJ. Some people think the whole thing is just a giant scam, or don’t believe in it because the online test didn’t describe them. Well the truth is I have taken several tests before and even the same test multiple times while getting different answers. So the best thing to do is study the personality types and understand more what your preferences are rather than trying to interpret what each question is asking on some silly online test. I will say for me INFJ fits me very well.

For those who aren’t familiar with the personality types or the INFJ type I will briefly sum it up. If this is boring you can skip the next few paragraphs. We are known as “idealists” or “the protector”. This comes from a combination of the following functions:

Our primary function is introverted intuition (Ni). This means we are always analyzing situations and predicting future events based on observed patterns. An example of this for me is the fact that I can plan out hypotheticals such as: “if I won the lottery I would…” and could honestly spend about an hour describing in detail how I would spend each penny. We also have a certain thirst for understanding and often come to realizations like “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.” INTJs share this in common, and many times (myself included) INFJs feel they are INTJs because we share the same rare primary function.

Our secondary function is extraverted feeling (Fe). Although introverted we have a deep sense of emotional connection to other people. I have been told often that I am way too sensitive, and worry about offending people in situations that it would be impossible to be offended by. We have a strange protection of people’s feelings, and also a sensitivity to others interactions with us. We also have are much more open to self-disclosure (this blog is probably a good example) and use it to connect with others.

Our tertiary function is introverted thinking (Ti). This is a process of taking data and developing ideas or models in order to make sense of something or describe it concisely and clearly. It involves categorizing things and finding distinctions and patterns. I have developed this in my studies as a physical scientist. Although it is my tertiary function it helps me to model things into a “big picture” and to help me understand how life works. I do have to admit since this is my tertiary function it is often more difficult for me in the physical sciences to develop a non-personal approach to the subject. I enjoy talking with INTPs (although they have Ti as their dominant function) because it is interesting to philosophize with them.

Our inferior function is extroverted sensing (Se). I guess this is sort of experiencing some kind of “oneness” with the world. It being my inferior function I don’t notice it as much so it is difficult for me to describe in detail.

Not being a social scientist of any sort I can’t really give the expert rundown of my personality type. One thing that is very clear is that we are value or ideal driven. It’s the whole “I’d die for the cause” mentality or “this is worthless because it has no meaning”. Those are both extremes, but sum up the underlying drive for at least me personally. I do like one line from the Wikipedia article on INFJs: “Sensitive and complex, they are adept at understanding complicated issues and driven to resolve differences in a cooperative and creative manner.” If I could describe my personality in one sentence it would be: A private but caring and sensitive thinker. Now that we have all that boring personality stuff out of the way, I will tell the story of how an idealist lost his ideals and his struggle to find them again.

Since I am highly value driven, growing up in a religious home suited me very well. I defended my faith with honor, but was also very careful not to offend others’ beliefs. There were things, however, in the Mormon
faith that made me feel like an outcast in the religion:

The “the tolerance trap”: It was difficult for me because the LDS religion teachings include that of avoiding the “tolerance trap” which for me is insensitive to others feelings. Being a very strong extroverted feeler, I personally don’t like making others feel like they are bad people for doing something different. It was easy for me to go to church and get fired up about “yes this is the truth, and God will strike down the sinner”, but then in my daily interactions I was embarrassed by what my church actually preached. In defense of the LDS church I feel they have made great strides to be much more tolerant and “new-age”. There were other issues that also bothered me like the fact that blacks were not allowed to hold the priesthood until 1978, the touchy feely side of me found this to be very offensive. Other examples include the conduct of leadership within the church, and what I viewed as nepotism within the general leadership of the church. I can’t blame the Mormon “gospel” for those things, but it did help me separate myself socially and culturally.

The “One True Church”: I think this has been a big turn off for me for religion in general. MOST (there are exceptions) religions claim to have the truth, and that all others don’t have any or only just a part of the truth. This conflicts with my personality strongly because of my introverted intuition and extroverted feeling. I just can’t handle conflict socially or ideologically. I longed so much to connect with everyone, but there was always this thing between us. “You never talk politics or religion at the dinner table”. I hated that I couldn’t connect with others, and would often try and find similarities between our faiths instead of talking about how much church was true. I hated that it was my responsibility to tell others they were wrong. I hated that my church preached of all the other churches that they are “all wrong; and [God] said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’” It also bothered me for a long time because it doesn’t seem logical for God to let so many religions on the earth. I couldn’t handle the fact that people receive different spiritual manifestations and all claim to be “the one truth”. It seems inconsistent to me.

Every Member a Missionary: Just like any other church, the Mormons are very into their missionary movement. I hated the whole missionary thing for two reasons: I’m an introvert and I hate pushing my beliefs on others. As a Mormon you are encouraged from when you are young to make friends and share your beliefs. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up because I really didn’t like socializing in the same way most people do. I prefer to have a small group of close friends that I am comfortable with. Also my extroverted feeling was always afraid of offending people with my religion. Once I went out with some missionaries as a teenager and we knocked on a door. The lady who answered said she had some bad experiences with some Mormons and didn’t want to talk to any more. I apologized profusely for her previous experiences and apologized for bothering her. She opened up to me and almost let us in. The missionary I was with criticized me and said that she was just making up excuses not to talk to us. I knew that was probably true, but also highly insensitive of this other missionary. All in all missionary work to me is annoying, I figured if my friends really were interested they would show interest. Since they didn’t I just let it be.

Trusting Leaders: A prominent Mormon apostle Dallin Oaks once stated, “it’s wrong to criticize leaders of the church, even if the criticisms are true.” If someone does something that is against my principles (in sometimes their own principles) that person loses some credibility in my sight. On my mission I disagreed with some of the leadership because I felt some of what they had to say did not fall in line with my belief system and values. In these times I was treated as rebellious, disobedient, and “in need of repentance”. I often times became defensive and even more passionate about these beliefs because they were being threatened. Some of them included pushing people to commit to be baptized, stop “wasting my time” on people who wouldn’t be baptized in the near future, and refusing coca-cola from people who offered it even though there is no rule in Mormonism about it. These are issues I felt strongly about for other reasons, but the fact that leaders labeled me as disobedient to God’s will for following what I perceived as God’s will was no less than irritating.

People Worship: There is a lot of talk about authority figures in the LDS church. I do not find it strange or offensive for people to think that Mormons worship Joseph Smith. They talk about him so much, and teach that Joseph Smith “has done more, save Jesus only, for salvation of men in this world, then any other man that ever lived in it.” There is never ending talk of how “Sheri Dew” has changed someone’s life or perspective. Students at church schools camp out overnight to get a front row seat if a prominent LDS leader comes to give a speech. For someone like me who’s motivator is strongly against praise (in fact I really hate being praised as much of a self-esteem booster it is) it is a real turn off to see this kind of behavior.

Doubt Your Doubts: “Doubt your doubts before your doubt your faith” was a popular phrase from a talk given by apostle Dieter Uchtdorf last October. I heard it from some people trying to help me come back to the faith. I won’t even go into the infinite irrational loop of what doubting doubts infers. I just want to talk about how the church (for obvious reasons) discourages intellectual thought. I will have to restate, the church discourages intellectual thought that might disagree with doctrine (they sure do love their apologists). Anyone who does some studying can find that scientists can fairly accurately date the earth to be around four and a half billion years old. I learned in seminary that God told Joseph Smith the earth is around six thousand years old and will only exist for seven thousand years temporally. There are other things that bothered me scientifically, and I had a difficult time being able to come up with a reasonable explanation to this clear contradiction. My personality hates contradictions in models and ideas so this bothered me for a long time. There were things I was able to explain like the idea behind God guided evolution, but others like the age of the earth or Noah’s ark I never really could come to terms with. When I asked questions I was always told “the answer is not important” or “you’ll learn when you die”. I hated that because I couldn’t understand the religion as a whole if there were pieces that didn’t fit into place.

Obedience With Exactness: You know that part in Pirate’s of the Carribean where they talk about the code and it turns out that they’re “more like ‘guidelines’”? Well that is exactly how I feel about rules in society. Clearly we have laws and there are some things that are just not ok in our society (because we have deemed it inappropriate as a collective). But there are other things that I would view as just suggestions that will help you. I think Jesus’ teachings are really good examples of that. He said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Does that mean rich people are unrighteous? Not at all, just that once you have wealth it is obvious that it will be easier to be greedy or arrogant. As missionaries we had rules regarding many things: no playing videos/watching TV/listening to music and rules for when to go to bed and when to get up. There were specific rules as to how many people we needed to talk to each day and some other weird things like in my mission we were not allowed to drink coca-cola. For a list of all the rules LDS missionaries have worldwide you can consult the missionary handbook. I understood the rules, and why we had them but for me I was not getting enough sleep and it was affecting my ability to work as a missionary. I would often sleep in or take naps because I would work harder and be happier after. I was told that I wasn’t baptizing people because I wasn’t obeying with exactness. Mormon apostle once recounted hearing from Mormon prophet Heber J Grant “My boy, you always keep your eye on the President of the Church and if he ever tells you to do anything, and it is wrong, and you do it, the Lord will bless you for it.” This kind of blind obedience could never sit with me, and I could not handle the fact that God would punish me for standing up for my beliefs.

There are many other problems I had being in the church that conflicted with either my personality or things that just bothered me. I feel I have covered many of the topics earlier in my blog. These things really did make me feel like an outcast and that I didn’t belong. I wondered for years what was wrong with ME because no one else seemed to have these problems or struggles. Indeed I felt like no one understood me in general (and still feel that way for the most part), but in the church I felt even more misunderstood.

All of that being said I do want to point out some characteristics of the LDS church that were really close to my heart:

Charity: The Book of Mormon has a whole chapter dedicated to this topic just as 1 Corinthians 13 is one of my favorites. Jesus taught to love everyone even the sinner. Jesus indeed (if the man existed and really was the savior of the world) truly loved us all. It’s a touching story fiction or not. I still get emotional thinking about it just because of the emotion in the story itself. Honestly I loved that some people in the church were all about the whole “love everyone and everything”. The idea that love is the key to happiness and salvation is a really appealing idea to me, and I still believe that is true. No one should need religion to expand their capacity to love.

The Circle of Life: Mormonism gave me meaning in my life. This life had a purpose and was just a small step in my eternal progression to becoming like God. Most people find that absurd that someone could believe that they will eventually become a God, but growing up in it seemed to make perfect sense. We somehow all existed as “intelligences” (whatever that means), and God made us into spirits. He then made the earth for us to gain a mortal body and test our faith. After we die we resurrect and if we were righteous will continue to progress until we become Gods of our own worlds just like him. Having purpose in my life really gave me focus in my life.

Apology Accepted: I know that Mormon apologists really do stretch quite a bit. But in their defense at least they try. I really like Mormon doctrine in that they seemed to make a little more sense than the rest of Christianity. I’m not saying that they DO make more sense, but growing up I felt their arguments were better held together (this is coming from a biased viewpoint I understand that). Point being I felt that if the Mormon church wasn’t true, how could anything else be true because it really did seem to make the MOST sense (I still had trouble understanding a lot of contradictions within the doctrine).

Family Focus: Yes the LDS church is strongly against same-sex marriage. I actually defend their right as a religion to teach it, but don’t agree with their political involvement (I had a rant earlier on my blog about it). One thing I do like though is what the church TEACHES (I emphasize the teach because there are a lot of LDS families that are definitely dysfunctional) a focus on successful happy families. This to me once again really resonated with my value system of raising kids in a happy loving home. It made it easier to feel at peace knowing I could find a spouse very easily within the church with the same family value system as me.

Emotions: This has two sides to it for me. First the church teaches that an answer to prayer comes from strong emotional feelings, and that those feelings are the “spirit” talking to you. I had many instances where I felt “the spirit” and that made the religion true because obviously God was talking to me. This ended up backfiring however when I felt strong feelings about the church not being true later in life. The other part is that it gave me something to defend. I was emotionally involved with it, and it was my value system. I was truly willing to die for the cause, and would have defended my beliefs no matter the ridicule if I felt it was threatened. When you have a cause as an INFJ it’s very difficult to give it up.

Service: The LDS church has a strong emphasis on serving others. I love that about the church because it gave me opportunities to serve without having to look very hard. I did not like that it focused around serving other members of the church as a priority, but still I enjoyed helping others however I could

Social Opportunities: As an introvert it’s difficult to make social connections with people. I don’t like having to deal with other people without some sort of connection or purpose. I can be friendly and cordial but that doesn’t mean I like what I refer to as “shallow” social interactions. The church gave me a way to meet people and have social interaction with some kind of purpose. Although most people at church drove me nuts and I had a strong distaste for them and their social games I made a few friends as well.

There are many other reasons (I’m sure) that the LDS church was close to my heart. It was my entire way of life. Everything revolved around an eternal purpose. My value system was upheld by my religion. I had something that I could look forward to my entire life, which was returning to my father in heaven.

My whole story is covered on the first post of my blog. But I wanted to go into some of the more difficult aspects of what it’s like to truly feel lost after losing your religion. I have mentioned both why the church meshed with my personality and also why it was a huge turn off for me. This caused me to truly go through self reflection and try to understand if this truly was a cause worth fighting for. I have heard from many people within the LDS church talk about those who leave the church (and I would guess many people have said the same about me) that it is because it’s the “easy way out”. It was definitely not easy, in fact it was one of the hardest things I have done and have to live with in my life. Looking back now and understanding who I am I realize more why it was so difficult, but also how I was able to do it.

Loss of Meaning in Life: If I accepted that the LDS faith was not the truth, then I also accepted that I had lost the meaning of life that I had currently. This actually sparked from studying science and realizing that science has more holes than most people know about. If science had holes, couldn’t religion as well. I had to reanalyze the whole purpose and meaning to life. That was very difficult. To this day I don’t think I have an answer, but my new meaning in life is trying to find meaning in it. Instead of being focused around my salvation and that of my family, I am now focused on humankind as a whole. I am always trying to figure out how my life can affect others positively. I am willing to stand up for anyone that is being persecuted, not just the religious. I don’t know if there will be an afterlife and that was very depressing to me for a long time. I’ve learned to accept it, and whether there is or not I would like to make an impact on this life without regards to the life hereafter.

Social Struggles: This is something that continues to be a problem in my life. I hate conflict and hate offending others. I feel very strongly about leaving the church being a good thing in my life, but at the same time I don’t want others to feel hurt about my loss of testimony. I still have good friends who are LDS, and my family is still very strong in the church. I have a conflict inside of me when family discussions revolve around religious principles because I of course want to stand up for my new value system, but do not want to attack that of my familiy’s. It sounds silly (and probably arrogant to some) but I don’t want my loss of testimony to affect other’s feelings about the church. I do want people to come to understand my point of view and what I feel is “free their minds” from the bondage of religious thought, but at the same time I respect so much their strong beliefs. I have a connection to them because I understand them and where they are coming from. I feel helpless and defenseless though because it’s difficult for any of them to understand me. Anything I say to explain my point of view can be seen as an attack on their faith and so I am left to hold my tongue. Perhaps that’s why I started this blog as an outlet to try and express my feelings.

Loss of Ideals: This is something that made it difficult and easy to part from my past. It was probably the most difficult thing for me to accept that my religion was not true (I avoid using the term false, because I look at a lack of truth rather than apparent falsity). Leaving something you loved your whole life is difficult. I struggled many nights trying to find an excuse to find parts of it true, and parts of it false. For a long time I felt that Mormonism was part of the path God had for me, and though it wasn’t the truth it was the beginning of the journey that I needed. I’m not sure at of if God has a path for me or if he even exists, but I have comfort knowing and accepting my past as part of who I am. It opened my eyes and helped me to gain a better understanding of life. Leaving religion is truly depressing but eye opening, and can really expand your viewpoint and understanding of other people. I kind of treat the LDS church like a relationship and one personality site explains my feeling perfectly. As reffering to INFJ relationship it states: ”Are able to move on after a relationship is over (once they’re sure it’s over)”. Once I knew I didn’t believe it anymore I was able to move on quickly with my thoughts about life. I developed a new value system. My new value system is based on open mindedness and seeking understanding and truth. I don’t ever expect to find the “truth” but I enjoy the journey. I love learning about other religions, and why people believe what they believe. I’ve developed a new tolerance for people of all walks of life and attitudes. I may not agree with many people, but I’ve learned to try to understand where they are coming from. I have also discovered that my ideals did not come from the LDS church. They came from my loving parents and myself. I have learned that my love for others, my determination to serve, and my respect for others are things that my parents taught me. They’re qualities that I love developing, and although the church provided ways in which to develop them, it was not the cause FOR developing them. I wish that was true for all people, but since it’s not I guess I am grateful for churches.

There were many other struggles I had internally when parting with religion. I still have to deal with the side effects of it. Sometimes I really wish I would have just been born into a family without Mormonism, but that is a depressing thought because I would not give up my family for anything. I also have a few close friends that would make going through it all worth it just for their company. I have two close friends from my missionary work that I would be willing to suffer through the whole two years again even if it was just for the chance to meet them and gain their friendship. I would never wish my bad experiences on anyone else, but I wish I could give everyone the understanding that I have received through them. Sometimes it pains me to know the only way for someone to understand me is to go through the same struggles I have gone through. I wish it was easier, but few good things come easy.

In closing I just want to say for those others out there who think you are misunderstood and alone: you are not alone. You may be misunderstood, but I promise you there are others like you. Find strength in the fact that of all the billions of people in the world, someone else has gone through something similar and hopefully you can find them. If you believe in a God, the God that I believed in and still hope for is one that understands all of us individually. He would know why we do what we do, and doesn’t care so much about rigid commandments but more about our individual successes and how we contribute to the success of others. As always I will end with some really emotional fluff in that I hope we can all just learn to love each other, and accept others for who they are. We may not understand sometimes, but the least we can do is love and sympathize.