Scott Adams is at it again, trying to defend Pascal’s Wager, which he defines as follows:

In a nutshell, Pascal was a dude who argued you should consider Christianity because if it’s true, the downside of not believing is eternal Hell. But if you become a Christian and there’s no God, all you’ve lost is your Sunday mornings. (Here I am simplifying.)

What follows is his response to the standard critiques of Pascal’s gambit, conveniently summarized on Wikipedia.

Chief among the alleged flaws in Pascal’s argument is that you still have to pick the correct religion among many, or else you go to Hell anyway.

Sure. But picking any religion that promises salvation slightly improves your odds over picking an option that doesn’t. You’re still probably doomed, given your bad religion-picking skills, but a one-in-a-million chance of reducing the risk of eternal Hell is a move worth taking, mathmatically speaking.

Where to begin. I suppose we could start with the fact that this is a blatant appeal to gullibility. Reducing the risk of what Hell? Has Adams ever been to Hell? Has he ever met anyone who has been there, maybe brought back some lovely vacation photos? Of course not. Hell is a place that people believe in for no other reason than that certain other people have said so. Believing what people tell you, just because they tell it to you, is gullibility.

Secondly, not only does Adams assume that Hell really exists, he also assumes that faith in God will save you from going there. That’s a bit of a problem, because faith in God is not even a possibility.

For example, suppose I tell you that God has spoken to me, and has promised that in 5 minutes, a $100 bill will miraculously appear in your pocket, as a gift. Or suppose I say God has revealed to me that you should call all your loved ones and say goodbye because in 5 minutes a blood vessel is going to burst inside your brain and cause you to die in about 60 seconds. In other words, suppose I claim to speak to you on God’s behalf, whether I’m promising something good or something bad. If you believe what I say, who are you putting your faith in–God or me?

Ok, it’s 10 minutes later, and you’re not dead, nor is there an extra $100 bill in your pocket. Who lied to you, me or God? If you called your family to say goodbye, whom did you put your faith in, me or God? When you call them back to let them know you didn’t die after all, will you blame God or blame me?

The point is, God does not show up in real life, and thus we have no interaction with God that could possibly result in our having faith in Him. Everything we know about Christian doctrine (or Islamic or Jewish or Hindu, etc) are things we obtain by paying attention to the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men. We can put our faith in men, but we cannot put our faith in God, because He does not show up to give us anything to believe in . That means we have no alternative but to believe what men tell us, just because they say so. And that, again, is gullibility, not faith.

This leads to a third point: why would God consider faith to be such an important quality that He would decide our eternal destiny based on whether or not we’ve got it? Most Christians take the biblical reference to “walk by faith, not by sight” as meaning that there is some special virtue in believing that for which there is no real world evidence. If we could find things in the real world that were consistent with God’s existence, then our belief in God would be based on the evidence rather than on faith alone, you see. But what is it that we’re believing? We’re believing the things that men tell us, knowing that they do not fit the real-world truth, just because men tell us we ought to believe them.

So the thing that supposedly makes faith into a virtue that deserves to be rewarded is our willingness to believe what men tell us despite the fact that the things they say are clearly not consistent with real world truth. In other words, our gullibility. But if there are things in the real world that are evidence consistent with God’s existence, then shouldn’t we be deciding the issue of God’s existence based on the evidence, instead of on silly appeals to gullibility like Pascal’s Wager?

Adams actually tries to address something like this last point in his post:

Another noted “flaw” in Pascal’s wager is that you can’t rule out the possibility that only skeptics are spared from Hell. Perhaps, it is argued, God loves the spunky fact-loving personality of skeptics and saves them alone, or saves them in the greatest percentage.

That argument passes the math test, but does it pass the sniff test? It’s a viewpoint that exists only as a debate tool. While we can’t rule it out, surely it is the worst bet if you must pick a theory of God. No rational person on earth, including skeptics, has concluded that God prefers skeptics over believers.

That’s an odd claim to make, especially considering that Adams gave a link to the Wikipedia entry on Pascal’s Wager, in which the following quote appears:

Suppose there is a god who is watching us and choosing which souls of the deceased to bring to heaven, and this god really does want only the morally good to populate heaven. He will probably select from only those who made a significant and responsible effort to discover the truth. For all others are untrustworthy, being cognitively or morally inferior, or both. They will also be less likely ever to discover and commit to true beliefs about right and wrong. That is, if they have a significant and trustworthy concern for doing right and avoiding wrong, it follows necessarily that they must have a significant and trustworthy concern for knowing right and wrong. Since this knowledge requires knowledge about many fundamental facts of the universe (such as whether there is a god), it follows necessarily that such people must have a significant and trustworthy concern for always seeking out, testing, and confirming that their beliefs about such things are probably correct. Therefore, only such people can be sufficiently moral and trustworthy to deserve a place in heaven — unless god wishes to fill heaven with the morally lazy, irresponsible, or untrustworthy.

—Richard Carrier, The End of Pascal’s Wager: Only Nontheists Go to Heaven

In other words, yes, it is entirely plausible to suppose that God might prefer to reward those who made a reasonable and determined effort to uncover the truth, as opposed to blindly indulging in deliberate gullibility. What’s more, when we look at the real world, we find that God, or whatever supreme power may exist, does indeed seem to give preferential rewards to those who reject gullibility in favor of a more rigorous and objective pursuit of truth. Skepticism, remember, does not mean wantonly refusing to believe in anything at all. Rather, skepticism means requiring verifiable evidence before accepting some idea as true. In other words, taking the scientific approach that has lead to modern medical advances, improved engineering, longer lifespans, better crop yields, and so on.

Adams seems almost aware of the absurdity of his position:

I realize it’s unscientific to try and compare one absurdity to another. But if you assume our perceptions are often flawed, you have to allow the possibility that some apparent absurdities are due to our limited powers of perception. So, for example, while the notion of a loving God who allows eternal damnation seems absurd, it is less absurd than assuming the world is run by invisible unicorns, or that God discriminates against those who believe in him.

This is a common apologetics gambit called the Charlatan’s Excuse, or Blame the Pigeon. When you find out the snake oil doesn’t actually cure gout or grow hair or whatever the salesman promised, he avoids giving you your money back by insisting that it’s your fault somehow–you didn’t rub it on right, or you used too much or too little or you left the bottle in the sun, or whatever. But the problem does not lie with you. The reason the snake oil doesn’t work is because it’s bogus, not because you lack the skills needed to use it properly.

Likewise, when “comparing absurdities,” we should not overlook the possibility that Hell is absurdly inconsistent with the idea of a loving God precisely because it is an absurd idea. We’re not talking about quantum mechanics or obscure technical jargon here. If the idea of an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-loving God seems inconsistent with the existence of a realm created by God for the purpose of causing most of His children to suffer eternal agony, it’s just possible that this is because the two ideas are inconsistent. And certainly it is far less absurd to suppose that God might prefer to reward those who diligently seek the truth over those who lazily and irresponsibly indulge in (and promote) blind gullibility.

Adams nevertheless continues trying to put the shoe on the other foot:

But what’s the reasonable explanation for God preferring skeptics? If God appreciates reasoning skills, he can’t be too impressed by the fact he created the entire Universe and skeptics still can’t find any good clues he exists. God would only be impressed by skeptics if God did NOT exist. You can’t top that for absurdity.

But remember, God is supposedly rewarding believers for their faith–i.e. for believing despite the universal absence of any supporting, verifiable evidence. If the evidence existed, then not only should we be using it to address the question of God, but it is the skeptics, and not the gullible believers, who are to be praised for insisting on finding it. The whole reason why believers resort to Pascal’s Wager is precisely because no “good clues” exist. And again, if all the skeptics are doing is pointing out the non-existence of these clues, and it’s true that they don’t exist, then the skeptics’ only “crime” is that they are telling the truth. Why would God not prefer the truthful skeptic over the gullible believer?

Picking the “right” religion is a long shot no matter how hard you try. But if rational thought has any value at all, it’s in narrowing down options and improving our odds of making good choices. Rational thought hasn’t led anyone to conclude that there’s a God who only saves people who don’t believe he exists. We can’t rule it out, but can’t we rate its likelihood compared to a God who prefers that his lumps of clay hold him in higher esteem than their own eye crud?

The problem with rational thought is that its conclusions are only as valid as the data you give it to work with. Adams is clearly working from gullible premises, such as the assumption that there’s a Hell to be saved from, that God will send you there if you don’t have faith, and that you can have faith in God by blindly and gullibly swallowing whatever men say about Him, just because they say so. If there exists any God who is reasonable and just, He will be more likely to prefer those who diligently seek the triumph of truth over gullibility. And if there exists a God who, by contrast, is unreasonable and unjust, then there’s no reason to suppose He would give any kind of fair and reasonable reward to believers. Any way you look at it, the odds are stacked in favor of skepticism and against blind gullibility.

A blogger at passionateamerica.com has a bit of Monday Morning “humor” that (perhaps without meaning to) gives us a good hard look at how God really “works”:

A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who was a vowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God. I’m still waiting.” It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform.

The professor was out cold. The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting America ’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid stuff and act like an a$$. So, He sent me.”

Funny stuff, eh? I mean, what’s not to love? The assault victim was not only a college professor (i.e. educated and thus automatically evil), he was also a “vowed atheist” (gasp!) and if that weren’t bad enough, he was even a member of the ACLU (swoon!). The author left out “Darwinist,” but that was probably just an oversight. Wouldn’t every passionate American just love to go around punching out liberals, atheists, and educated people? This isn’t just a joke, it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Like all good fantasy, this one draws its power from making the setting seem as realistic as possible. What makes the joke really work, especially on the wish-fulfillment level, is the faithfulness with which it reproduces the way God behaves in the real world. Notice, for example, that at no point does God ever actually show up anywhere in the real world. He does not show up in response to the professor’s challenge, nor does He show up to tell the Marine, in the sight and hearing of the other students, to go up and punch out the professor.

Nor, in fact, does He show up in the war zone to genuinely protect the soldiers. If God did show up in Iraq, for example, to point out where the insurgents were hiding and where the IED’s were planted, not only would our troops be in a lot less danger, but the Marine would be able to point to God’s visible and verifiable activity in Iraq as a satisfactory answer to the professor’s challenge.

But God does not, in fact, show up in the real world, an absence that the Marine finds frustrating and infuriating. He seethes with inner rage and helplessness, because God consistently fails to behave as though He believed the same things the Marine does, and yet the Marine cannot confront God about this nor can he admit, even to himself, that there’s anything wrong with God’s behavior. To do so would be to cast doubts on his own faith and his own personal sense of salvation.

This frustrated and impotent inner tension is what drives the joke, of course. The author, and his intended readers, all know first-hand how the Marine feels. God’s behavior is clearly inconsistent with what they believe about Him, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. They can’t even complain about it, because to complain about it, they’d first have to admit that it’s true, and that would be a denial of their faith. So they’ve got all this anger and frustration building up, and nowhere for it to go. What are they to do?

The Marine, in the story, takes the only available outlet: he makes the poor professor the scapegoat for his own inner turmoil, and lashes out violently against him. Many Christians feel the same way, though most of them (fortunately) are more self-restrained than the Marine in this story, contenting themselves with name-calling and nasty jokes (like this one) directed against whoever they decide should be the scapegoat this week. Ironically, after violently assaulting the professor for what he said, the Marine then self-righteously admits that the professor has a legitimate right to free speech, which his fellow troops are fighting to protect even as he, the Marine, is busy violating it.

But I digress. The main point is that the professor gets knocked off his platform–but notice, it took a real person do actually do it. Had the Marine not acted, the “work” (knocking off the professor) would not have gotten done. The real person did the work, and then tried to claim that God deserved credit for what was done.

This is the secret. This is how God really “works” in the real world: somebody thinks they know what God ought to be doing, then they sit there stewing about it because God’s obviously not taking care of the matter, then they jump up and do it themselves, then they claim that God ought to be given credit for having gotten the job done. A classic case of sock-puppet deity. Rather pitiful, really, but so long as God persists in failing to show up in the real world it’s the best Christians have to offer.

Mr. Anonymous And Probably Fictitious Marine, I salute you. You may have acted violently, ignorantly, and unjustly, but you at least gave us a clear demonstration of how Christians perpetuate the delusion that God actually does things in the real world.

A commenter writes:

Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

Yes, and I’ll take it a step further: belief in reality requires a stronger and better faith than belief in superstition. And those who embrace the truth have a stronger and better faith than Christians do, because Christian faith is mere gullibility, whereas genuine faith is based on real-world truth.

The commenter is writing from a perspective of Universal Agnosticism (see? I told you it would come up):

The term ‘reality’ is relative…

Again, truth is not really known. You cannot prove that God isn’t there. If you could, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because there would be nothing to discuss. Therefore, truth is not defined. I do love truth and BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that the God that I call on IS TRUTH. You apparently BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that TRUTH is something else. I’m not disputing the fact that you believe something. But, neither of us will be able to truly claim that we know until we’re both dead.

His viewpoint, of course, is suffering from a serious defect, which is that according to his definitions, the truth about God is not humanly knowable. In order for that to be true, however, it would necessarily have to be equally true that none of the things he believes about God, and none of the things the Bible says about God, are actually based on any knowledge of the truth. By his own definitions, the meaningful content of his faith cannot be anything more than pure, unfounded fantasy. He manages to escape from the inevitable conflict between his faith and the real world, but he does so at the expense of abandoning reality and thus rendering his own believes irrelevant to the truth.

Hence the quick change of subject:

Rather than just participating in pointless tit-for-tat…lets get back to the idea that I originally posted: Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

I suppose he would be a bit surprised to find that I agree, and I also agree with the title of the book by Geisler and Turek which is the current subject of XFiles Friday: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. What’s interesting is that both the commenter and the authors are trying to prove the same point: they are trying to weaken the case for a reality-based view by implying that it is a matter of faith rather than a matter of fact and knowledge. In making this appeal, they reveal the weaknesses of their own concept of faith, and their lack of familiarity with reality-based faith.

Reality-based faith has three elements. First and foremost, reality-based faith is based on a broad experience of reality. Our experiences in the real world give us a solid foundation on which to base our faith. For example, we have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow because we have a broad, solid experience of seeing the sun rise every morning (or for some of us, at least seeing that the sun has managed to make it up above the horizon again while we were sleeping). The “confidence quotient” of our faith is based on having seen and experienced that which we are putting our trust in.

Secondly, reality-based faith is built on embracing the real-world truth. Experiencing reality is not always enough. We must also embrace it, which means that, in the negative sense, we must not try to deny reality, and in the positive sense, we must accept it and understand it as best we can. We want a solid, well-founded faith, and that means that the intellectual content of our faith needs to match the reality that it is based on. Otherwise, our faith will be out of step with reality, and thus ill-founded and unlikely to bring us the benefits that come from having a well-founded faith.

Lastly, reality-based faith must positively affirm that which we believe. This is perhaps the most obvious aspect of faith, but it is not the sole aspect of genuine faith. Genuine faith means you experience the real-world truth, then you embrace the real-world truth, and lastly you affirm the real-world truth. This is a strong, well-founded, and reliable faith.

Superstitious faiths, like Christianity for instance, have a much weaker faith that’s built upside down. In Christianity, someone first affirms a dogma. Then the believer embraces the dogma. Then lastly, the believer tries to get his real-world experience to match the content of his beliefs. It’s a lot of work, and the results are often frustrating and confusing. When the believer is intelligent and intellectually honest, like the commenter, very often the result is that they clearly see the need to make a choice between denying reality and denying Christianity–the conflicts between the two are simply too pervasive and too irreconcilable to embrace them both. And far too often, the believer will choose to deny reality, as the commenter does, rather than give up their superstitious and ill-founded “faith.”

Before we get into a detailed analysis of I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, I wanted to take a minute and look at the most fundamental and important principle for effective refutation of Christian apologetics. Debating apologetics can be a tricky matter: Christians have 2,000 years of experience in rationalizing their beliefs, and generally know better than to allow themselves to be pinned down to anything that would settle the matter fairly and objectively. There is, however, one inescapable fact, with one inevitable consequence, which can be used to force Christians to face reality no matter how much they would like to twist away from it.

The inescapable fact is this: God does not show up in the real world, not visibly, not audibly, not tangibly, not for you, not for me, not for saint or for sinner or for seeker. Many people, of course, have already pointed out this fact, and tried to use it against Christianity, with little or no effect. For 2,000 years, believers have been rationalizing their way around that one. That’s why, for maximum effectiveness, we need to combine the inescapable fact with the inevitable consequence.

If God does not show up outside the stories, superstitions and subjective feelings of men, the inevitable consequence is that we have no alternative but to put our faith in men rather than in God. If I promise you that God will put ten solid gold coins under your pillow tomorrow morning, and you believe that this is true, who are you believing, me or God? If those coins are not there tomorrow morning, who lied, me or God? When men say things on God’s behalf, and make promises that God is supposed to keep, you can either believe them or disbelieve them, but the word is the word of men, even if men attribute it to God. You can believe in what men tell you about God, but if you do, you are putting your faith in men. There is no alternative, since God does not show up to give you anything else to believe in.

This is an important point, because Christians tend to believe that they are doing something noble and spiritual when they believe Christian teachings. Because they believe that the Bible is the word of God and that Christian teachings in general are the teachings of God, they count their belief in these teachings as a mark of loyalty towards God. God does not show up in the real world, however, which means that when they put their faith in these teachings, they are not putting their faith in God, they are putting their faith in the fallible men who brought them these teachings and told them they were from God.

Psychologically, it makes a big difference to the Christian whether he is defending faith in God, or only defending faith in men. The most effective approach to unapologetics, therefore, is to keep directing the believer’s attention to the inescapable fact that God does not show up in the real world, and that the inevitable consequence of God’s universal absence is that all these apologetics for God are the words of men. Believe in them and defend them if you want, but you’ll be defending men, and not God, if you do.

PZ Myers has another go at those who claim that it’s wrong to criticize someone else’s belief in God. In so doing, he voices a frequently-expressed opinion that, in my view, does a bad job of (should I say it?) “framing” the debate.

I am saying precisely that belief in god is wrong because there is no empirical or theoretical support for it; there is a concatenation of myths leavened with post-hoc justifications for them, which is not the same thing.

There’s something unsatisfactory about saying that there is no evidence for God. After all, we learn new things all the time. Just because we say “there is no evidence for God” doesn’t mean that evidence might not exist somewhere. It just means we haven’t seen any (yet).

To me, that argument comes up short. Science is based on truth, and if there’s one thing we know about truth, it’s that truth is self-consistent. More than that, the self-consistency of truth is the way–the only way–we tell the difference between what’s correct and what’s false. To be consistent with the truth is to be true. To be inconsistent with the truth is to be false.

The problem with God, as conceived of by Christians, is not just that there’s no evidence for Him, it’s that He’s inconsistent with the evidence we do have. If there were an all-loving, all-knowing, all-wise and all-powerful God who wanted a personal relationship with each of us, badly enough to literally die for it, then the most fundamental and obvious consequence would be God showing up, on a regular basis, in the real world, to actually participate in that relationship. What we see in real life, believer or not, is that this does not happen. The things we see in the real world are blatantly inconsistent with the consequences which would result if the Gospel were telling the truth about God.

The godlessness that believers so often complain about is just that: “God-less-ness.” Hairlessness is the absence of hair, purposelessness is the absence of purpose, and godlessness is the absence of God. The Gospel says that God ought to be present, but the world is, as everyone admits, essentially godless. That’s not just an absence of evidence, that’s evidence which is inconsistent with the Gospel being true.