Kant's Three Questions

The three most important questions, per Immanuel Kant, are as follows(1)(2)(3):

Does God exist?

Does the afterlife exist?

Do we have free will?

The optimistic answers to these are yes, yes, and yes. The pessimistic answers are no, no, and no.

While I wish for optimism to succeed, sadly I find pessimism to be winning the debate. Here are some quick arguments on behalf of pessimism:

God does not exist

    1) If God exists, then no one experiences unbearable suffering.

    2) Some people do experience unbearable suffering.

    3) Therefore, God does not exist. (modus tollens)

I take premise 2 to be obviously true. The phenomena of suicide proves that suffering becomes unbearable for some people.

But you don’t even need suicide to show this. The suffering experienced at death could very well be unbearable, but because the person is preoccupied with dying they lack the freedom to do anything about it.

Turning to drugs, alcohol, escapist entertainment, etc., is an indication of unbearable suffering, at least when escape from suffering is the motivation (and not, say, fitting in with a certain crowd). “Deaths of despair” include not only deaths from suicide, but deaths from drugs and alcohol too. These inclusions are appropriate because when suffering is unbearable, the thought of suicide can be even worse, which is when folks turn to coping mechanisms. While death is better than unbearable suffering (hence "unbearable"), facing death is itself unbearable. Some people, perhaps most, would rather die than be forced to face death.

Premise 1 is true if a number of assumptions are true.

    1) If God exists, then God is a perfect being.

    2) A perfect being is perfectly loving and powerful.

    3) To be perfectly loving includes desiring all persons to be free from unbearable suffering.

    4) There are no overriding reasons to allow unbearable suffering.

Assumption 1 is supported if you think perfect being theism is our best model for God. I think this is plausible; the best arguments for God I've seen are from Josh Rasmussen, who uses perfect being theism. God is usually characterized as worthy of worship, which arguably requires perfection. Certainly, on a Christian conception, God is aware of our suffering, has the power to prevent it, and loves us.

Assumption 2 follows if love and power are good things to have; then of course a maximal being will have these to a maximal degree.

We can motivate assumption 3 by investigating what it means to be loving. To be loving includes being empathetic and compassionate. If someone is maximally empathetic and compassionate, then they will be maximally unable to stand the unbearable suffering of others, and will thus be maximally motivated to prevent or cure that suffering.

Assumption 4 is motivated by placing emphasis on "unbearable". It can make sense for God to desire some suffering on our part, enough to capture theodical goods like soul making. But once suffering becomes unbearable, theodical goods either no longer apply at all, or are outweighed by the suffering. A loving parent might desire for their children to suffer a little to, say, learn the lessons of life, but a loving parent would not want their children to despair of life itself, which is what unbearable suffering entails. The loving parent analogy is especially appropriate for Christianity, where God insists on being called “Father”.

The afterlife does not exist

    1) If something is too good to be true, it probably is.

    2) A good afterlife is too good to be true.

    3) So, there probably is no good afterlife.

    4) If there is an afterlife at all, there is a good one.

    5) So, there probably is no afterlife.

Premise 4 can be supported by appealing to two intuitions: a) there can only be an afterlife if there is a God to create it; b) God, being perfectly merciful and loving, would create a good afterlife for everyone.

This good afterlife needn't be good for everyone all the time. There could be a sanctification process that requires a great deal of suffering. But the light at the end of the tunnel would prevent this suffering from becoming unbearable; on the other side of sanctification there is paradise, so even this fate is ultimately good.

We can give an abductive version of this where we compare theories to see which one is better. The "no afterlife" theory perfectly predicts the data that no one has yet (unambiguously) come back to life, and the "afterlife" theory can be constructed such that it equally predicts this data. But the explanation given by "No afterlife" is very simple: no one has (unambiguously) come back to life because there is no afterlife; no one survives death. Whatever explanation "afterlife" gives for why no one has (unambiguously) come back to life will be more complex. This complexity will introduce opportunities for this theory to be disproven, making it less likely to be true. Or, on another interpretation of complexity, this complexity increases the mystery of the theory, lowering its explanatory power. Either way, the "no afterlife" theory is the better theory.

There is no free will

     1) If God doesn’t have free will, then neither do we.

     2) God doesn’t have free will.

     3) Neither do we. (modus ponens)

This is a bit of a cheeky argument. The idea is that God can't have free will because God exists necessarily. God has no choice but to exist, and God has no freedom to change his nature. So, God is forced to be what he is and thus God is forced to do what he does. But if anyone has free will, surely a maximally powerful being would. But God doesn't. So, free will must be impossible. We can put it this way:

     1) God has no control over his nature.

     2) God's nature entails God's actions.

     3) By transitivity, God has no control over his actions. (If x entails y, and you have no control over x, then you have no control over y.)

     4) If God has no control over his actions, then he isn't free.

     5) Therefore, God isn't free.

     6) If God, a maximally powerful being, isn't free, then no one is.

     7) Therefore, no one is free.

The weakest premise looks like 2. God's nature can entail a range of actions God could take, and God could be free to choose an option from that range. The obvious response to this is that God's choosing is determined by God's nature such that he will always make the choice that he does.

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(1) Cf. Antony Flew, There is a God (2007), pg 64

(2) The closest quote of Kant’s to this effect I can find is: “Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.” (The Critique of Pure Reason, B 395; https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant).

(3) Despite the quote in (2), perhaps it's better to categorize these not as important questions on Kant's view but as important postulates. Kant saw God, freedom, and immortality as necessary postulates for morality, and saw morality as the basis for justifying our belief in them. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/.

Why Pascal's Wager Cannot Be Salvaged

To wager is to follow God’s commands not because you are fully convinced in God, but because you believe there is some chance you will go to hell if you don’t and/or go to heaven if you do. This applies to believers and non-believers alike: You might begin to follow God’s commands or remain following God’s commands not because you’re certain it’s true, but because it would be far better for you to be on the winning side come judgment day. Given how high the stakes are, wouldn’t it be crazy not to follow God? You have little if anything to lose and eternity to gain. So, why not wager?

Questions abound. Who is this God? What, exactly, are God’s commands? Do non-believers really go to hell? How has this God communicated all of this to us? 

These questions make it impossible to wager on just any report of salvation. So for a wager-style argument to get off the ground, the following conditions must be met:

1. There must be a report of a God capable of granting us heaven or hell after death. If the promise of heaven or threat of hell is from a being incapable of making good on such promises or threats, then we have no reason to wager.

2. This report must include God communicating to us the conditions of salvation. If there is no promise of heaven or threat of hell, then we have no reason to wager.

3. The conditions of salvation must be possible for us to fulfill. If we must follow God’s commands to be saved, but cannot find, understand, or perform God’s commands, then we cannot wager.

4. The conditions of salvation must specify that only those who live according to God’s commands receive heaven and/or avoid hell. If everyone immediately goes to heaven regardless of what they did in life, then we have no reason to wager.

5. This report must come from a major religion. Fulfillment of the above criteria implies a religion, and it’s unbelievable that a tiny religion would turn out to be the right one such that a thousand people end up in heaven while over a hundred billion end up in hell. So for this report to reach a bare minimum of credibility, it must be fairly widespread. (How widespread a religion should be to be considered credible is a question for another time.)

There are two reports of salvation that, at first glance, meet all five criteria: those contained in Christianity and Islam. Therefore the question isn’t should we wager on God, but should we wager on Christianity or Islam. So, again, why not wager?

Let’s take Christianity. Christianity clearly fulfills criteria 1, 2, and 5. For 4, there are questions about universalism, postmortem salvation, and whether converting guarantees salvation. Without getting into the details, the most credible form of Christian universalism is one where hell is real but temporary. So converting to Christianity would still maximize your chances of avoiding a temporary hell, which, while not infinitely good, is still good enough to enable a wager-style argument. And while postmortem salvation may be possible, it plausibly would only apply in extreme cases. So relying on a postmortem chance for your salvation would be foolish. And while converting to Christianity may not guarantee salvation, it would still maximize your chances. So all in all we can say Christianity firmly fulfills criterion 4.

The question then comes down to criterion 3: Is it possible for you to fulfill the conditions for salvation under Christianity? I won’t get into the thorny question of what it means to be a Christian or what it means to be saved on Christianity. My central point is that criterion 3 is the ultimate weak point for any wager-style argument. After giving a serious effort in evaluating the truth claims of Christianity, you either will or will not end up a Christian. If you do, then you believe not on the basis of the wager, but on the basis of the arguments and religious experiences you encountered in your investigation. If you don’t, then the challenges to Christian belief made it impossible for you to believe.

And that’s it. The non-believer can always ultimately say that a report of salvation violates criterion 3, because the report was investigated and the challenges discovered therein made it psychologically impossible to obey the conditions of salvation.

To show this in slightly more technical terms, here is an expected value equation:

E = -C + P(V)

Where C is the cost of playing, P is the probability of winning, and V is the value you receive if you win. In the case of Pascal’s Wager, that expected value calculation might look like: 

-1,000 + .01(∞) = ∞.

Where -1,000 is an arbitrary number showing how the finite cost of wagering is dwarfed by the expected value. Now consider: 

-1,000 + (1/∞)(∞) = -999.

This shows you would have to give Christianity a zero or next to zero probability of being true to nullify the wager. However, the objections to Christianity need not be so strong as to justify such a low credence in Christianity as long as they are strong enough to render wagering impossible. If you can’t bring yourself to fulfill God’s commands and satisfy criterion 3, then effectively the cost of wagering is -∞. In this we see how the pragmatic question is not independent from the epistemic question, which means the wager fails as a tiebreaker in epistemic ties.

The only sense in which the wager is successful is that it points to the fact that when there are prima facie credible reports of salvation, it’s irrational to not put in a serious effort in evaluating the truth of those reports. But given the irrationality of ignoring worldview issues, we knew that already. The wager therefore also points to the fact that the philosophy of religion, the means by which we evaluate religions, is indispensable. But we knew that already too.