Pascal’s Wager and Scare Tactics

Have you ever watched Scare Tactics?

If not, let me explain the basics very briefly. This TV show is on the Sci-Fi Channel and people get in touch with the producers to set up their friends as unsuspecting victims of an elaborately staged prank. The victims are then placed into situations that use scripts, usually featuring scenarios inspired by science-fiction and horror films, and they even use various low-budget movie-style special effects.

In order to understand this article it will help if you've watched a few shows in this series because I'm going to discuss how people react to these pranks and how they are using a version of Pascal's Wager to manage their fear.

I'm not a regular watcher of the show myself, I've only seen it a few times and in general it's not my style of entertainment, but what I have seen has surprised me. I've never seen any of the show's victims fail to get caught up in, and frightened by, some of the most absurd and unbelievable scenarios. The horror hoaxes are often taken from old horror movies most people have seen and it's surprising, to me, that the victims don't catch on early and call bullshit on the whole prank.

For example, in one episode of Scare Tactics, a young woman working in a medical clinic thought she had become the unwitting assistant in the delivery of Satan's baby.

Obviously it's a take on "Rosemary's Baby." I like to think that if they tried to fool me with something like that, then I'd see through the prank early on and then just play along and try to scare the pranksters. I like to think I could say to myself, "Hey, this is impossible and therefore it must be a prank." But would I? I really don't know, my emotional reaction to an elaborately set up prank might just over rule my skeptical, rational mind.

As I considered how other people reacted, and how I might react to such a prank, it occured to me that I might react pretty much the same way other victims on the show do because Scare Tactics' victims illustrate an effective use of a variation on Pascal's Wager.

Now, when I say Pascal's Wager I'm not talking about the stripped down and distorted version of the argument that usually pops up in amatuer debates between theists and atheists, no, I'm talking about the version that was posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in note 233 of his book, Pensées, a posthumously published collection of notes on Christian apologetics. The original version is a bit longer and has some historical importance for people interested in probability theory and the philosophies of pragmatism and voluntarism.

The modern, stripped down and distorted version gets it wrong. It usually goes something like this: "Since you can't know if God exists, you should believe God exists anyway because then you'll get the rewards religion promises and if you're wrong and God doesn't exist then you haven't lost anything."

The problem with that distorted version of Pascal's Wager is that you have to be insane to make it work. Sane people do not decide to believe things because they want to believe them or because they find some advantage in believing them. Sane people reserve judgement until enough evidence is found to be convincing. If you want to trim Pascal's Wager down to essentials it would be better to say: "Since you can't know if God exists, you should act as if God existed anyway because then you'll get the rewards religion promises and if you're wrong and God doesn't exist then you haven't lost anything." That would be closer to what Pascal was saying and it's closer to what Scare Tactics' victims are doing.

"Acting as if" is not quite the same thing as believing, though it might lead to believing eventually. Pascal didn't tell people to just believe things, he told them to try and convince themselves. For example, Pascal wrote:

"Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you-will quiet your proudly critical intellect..."

There you go, all you have to do in order to believe is to act like you believe. Dab on the holy water, go to church, and "by a simple and natural process this will make you believe." Don't worry about if what you believe is real, this acting "will dull you" and "quiet your proudly critical intellect." Then the truth you can't really know won't matter.

Note how Pascal suggests that you "learn of those who have been bound like you... people who know the way which you would follow..." before telling you to go to church. He's talking about hanging around with believers. To a certain extent SciFi's show Scare Tactics illustrates just how easy it is to "believe" in crazy things if the conditions are right and one of the conditions happening on Scare Tactics is that you're being surrounded by others who seem to believe, or rather, who are acting like they believe, in some crazy shit. Fear, a kind of belief, is especially catching and you don't have to know why the other people are afraid to start feeling it yourself.

One example from Scare Tactics that illustrates the point was a prank taken from an old Stephen King movie, "Firestarter," and played on a young woman. One of the first tactics they used in that episode was to present their victim with other actresses who were subtly terrified of this young boy they were keeping locked up in an observation room.

There was nothing too overt, at first, about their fear, but you could sense how nervous they seemed and the victim was picking up on it and getting nervous herself.

Once the victim accepted the fear, even while not knowing why the others were afraid, it seemed to make putting the clues together about what they were afraid of more convincing. What were they afraid of? Why are there these melted objects on the shelf?

Why are they making so sure he takes his pills? So, when the angry, crazy boy seems to make something burst into flames and sends one of the actresses running out of the room screaming, the victim is ready to believe the boy is dangerous and that he can start fires. Forget any rational argument for not believing that the mind has that kind of "mind over matter" power, you've just witnessed the evidence for it.

It suggests that maybe our more rational convictions are build on flimsy foundations, well, at least they are for some people. I still like to think that my convictions about that kind "mind over matter" supernaturalism being impossible would have clued me into the fact I was, at least probably, being pranked.

I like to think I could have put my fear aside, kept my cool, and turned the prank around. When the boy seemed to make a car burst into flames I wouldn't freak out and I would have looked him in the eye, smiled evily, and said, "That's nothing. You should see what I can do." Maybe then, though less likely, I might then pull a Derren Brown mind trick on him if I saw some suggestibility and belief or fear in his expression.

But that's only what I would like to think. The truth is I just might get taken in by the fear, for awhile, of something my rational mind doesn't even believe is possible. If I am exposed to what seemed like convincing evidence I might just accept what seems to be, or what seemingly more experienced people feel and tell me. Maybe I would be afraid that there was some possibility this boy could make me burst into flames too? Horror movies use to get to me when I was younger, I could get very jumpy after seeing one.

Another fear motivator shows up in Pascal's Wager here:

"If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional."

It's that claim that you must wager and you don't have any other option. Again, we can see this happening on Scare Tactics, people getting pranked have to make choices, they often have to come up with some line of behavior or dialog that might save their lives and rarely does calling out the fact that you think you might be being pranked seem like a good move if there's any chance at all you're not being pranked. Call bullshit on a real, angry, crazy fire-starter boy and he just might set you on fire.

However, on the flip side, no victim of one of the Scare Tactic pranks I've seen has completely bet on the reality of the prank scenario either. Perhaps I missed that show?

For example, the woman who saw the fire-starter boy seemingly blow up a car and kill someone did not try to to kill the boy, she just tried to talk him into thinking she was on his side. If I really thought I had witnessed a murder like that my eyes would have been scanning for something good and heavy I could use as a club once the boy turned his back to me. It's amazing that no one has ever attacked anyone on the show (or did I miss that show?).

For the most part, the victims of the Scare Tactic pranks all seem to be frightened agnostics with regards to the situations they find themselves in. When forced to make any kind of choice they usually come up with the most minimal action possible. They usually try to win through niceness, being nice to a psycho or monster. Never have I seen anyone get physical or violent, no victim I've seen ever just takes off running as fast as they can, all the victims I've seen try to talk their way out of it. They often ask a lot of questions or promise the monster/psycho to never say anything about what they've seen. They are either trying to still learn or trying to quietly and peacefully disengage the situation. While the victims are afraid, none of them ever commits to the reality of the prank scenario. When told they are on a TV show called Scare Tactics there is more relief than surprise. They very quickly drop all belief and fear of the prank scenario.

The fear never really grows into a solid belief that can stand up to the kind of challenges that Christian or Muslim belief sometimes does.

This ties to another aspect of Pascal's Wager. Note how Pascal's argument above is an argument against reason. Pascal thought reason was corrupt and could not be relied upon to decide whether God exists. To defeat that part of Pascal's wager you have to argue that reason is a valid tool and that it does point away from any gods that might exist.

Pascal's position is actually that of a frightened agnostic much like the victims of a Scare Tactics prank except that the prank lasted for Pascal's entire life. If we look at the kind of wager Pascal recommends we see it is an explicitly minimalist one that comes down to being a nice person who doesn't call bullshit on God. This is more of what Pascal wrote:

"Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing."

Pascal's theological wager not only ostensibly promises a reward with no risk, it actually promises gains in this life. No harm will befall you in taking Pascal's recommended actions. You're not asked to fly an airplane into a skyscraper. Just be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful and maybe, like other people, God will like you too if you're nice enough.

Yes, other people might like you better and that is one reward that makes it worthwhile to be nice to people, whether you believe in God or not. However, Pascal isn't being honest about the price being paid for betting on God via his method of "acting as if."

You can't claim real sincerity and honesty if you came to belief in God through Pascal's Wager because if you dull yourself through mere acting and "quiet your proudly critical intellect" then what you've really sacrificed is your intellectual integrity. If you're not applying skeptical and critical faculties to such propositions as those that come with any religion then you simply can't claim intellectual integrity.

Give up your skeptical and critical faculties and you could find yourself falling for a scam like the Catholic Church selling indulgences to fatten their own pockets. And look at how badly some modern Christians fail at intellectual integrity. Look up names like John Freshwater, Ray Comfort or any number of crazy Christians who seem to have been brain damaged by their religion.

The assumption that you have nothing to lose by believing in God, and nothing to gain by not believing in God is false. Different versions of religion require different risks.

Believing in Christianity presumably means following the commandments, having some understanding of the Bible, etc. If you choose a religion you have to follow the rules of whatever religion Pascal's Wager has frightened and baited you into joining.

Pascal lived in a different time, a time when there was virtually only one local "prank" in play, and for Pascal that was the Catholic Church. What if Pascal got the wrong religion, the wrong understanding of God? Pascal doesn't say anything about that. Another hubber, Zabimaru, calls that Homer Simpson's Wager: "Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we're going to church we're just making him madder and madder!"

Today you can't just bet on God, you have to choose which God you're betting on. Study that situation and they all look pretty crazy from where I sit. The less you know, the easier it is to believe in God.