Marilyn Vos Savant and Pascal Revisited

Earlier I posted a video of Richard Dawkins dealing with Pascal's wager, but while researching another idea for an article I came across Marilyn Vos Savant's approach to Pascal's Wager. You may recognize Vos Savant's name because she has gained some notoriety as the person with the highest IQ, coming in at well over 200. I then started to research Vos Savant more in depth and what I found was pretty interesting. First, people really don't like this woman, for very little good reason. It seems that her unasked-for title has placed her on a pedestal that everyone seems incredibly eager to chop down.

Anyway here is her answer to Pascal's problem. Note: this is off of a website because it was featured in Parade Magazine in the 1990s, a time period they do not have archived on their website. "Pascal's argument implies that the best bet is to join whatever religion makes the most promises." According to the site that I got this from, she also challenged Pascal's assumption that if God does not exist, the skeptic loses nothing by believing in Him, she instead claims that Pascal "lost the remainder of a truly luminous life, and all Earthly lives are short." Since the first quote might not make immediate sense, I will try to explore it. She is asserting that Pascal was saying, "According to Christianity if you believe, you go to a really great place, so why not just believe, then you get to go to a really great place if you're right, and if you're wrong and there really is nothing what was the harm?" Whereas Dawkins states that the problem with Pascal's wager is, "Ok but which do we believe?" Vos Savant is stating that Pascal's argument is just the equivalent of saying, "Look we're giving the best prize for belief, so you should believe."

Imagine different religions having different ideas of heaven. For example, what if religion A said, "if you believe, you live in heaven for 100 years, then you really die," and religion B said, "you live in heaven for 1000 years, then you really die." You can imagine someone from religion B saying, "well you should believe in our God because if you don't you lose the 1000 years in heaven. Even if you might be right, yours is a foolish bet because you'll still only 'win' 100 years in heaven. So you should believe in us because at least you have a chance at 1000 years in heaven." Vos Savant's point (I think) is that neither of those arguments go to the truth of the religion, they are merely engaging in an imaginary arms race. The wonderful thing about imaginary races, however, is that you can just skip to the end, you don't actually have to build anything. This is what Christianity has done - they've simply said, "let's skip to the end and say they go to greatest place you can imagine for eternity, and to make it better let's make the price of not betting on us eternity in the worst place you can imagine. That oughtta tip the odds in our favor." One can see this concept reflected in the different religions, most controversially in the "72 virgins" concept in Islam. It's like they're trying to up the ante. "Not only do you get eternity in heaven, but we're going to give you a signing bonus of 72 virgins." Admittedly, the supposed "virgin" concept probably did come from a mistranslation of "white raisins" but the fact that the religion seized on the virgin concept so completely, I believe is quite telling.

In summary, I think what Vos Savant was saying (much like Dawkins actually) is that religion, like any other theory, is about truth, and Pascal's wager isn't about truth, it's about who has made up the biggest prize for belief. She's saying, "if that's how you want to play it, fine, the Earth Goddess Akka came to me in a vision and said, if you believe in me, you get to go to heaven for eternity, and heaven is a place that's more beautiful than you can imagine... times two." Should we now believe in Akka because her heaven is twice as good as a heaven that is merely more beautiful than you can imagine? I mean if we don't believe in Akka, we risk missing out on a truly mind blowing experience, in exchange for a chance to win a merely awesome experience.

But the real reason I was researching Vos Savant, was with respect to the issue of religion and intelligence. The general argument seems to be over whether non-religious people tend to be more intelligent than religious people. But I find these studies uninteresting, even when they find that non-religious people are a little smarter than religious people. The problem is that scoring an average of 6 points better on an IQ test, doesn't really mean anything. What, the person knows a couple more countries? They were able to put a puzzle together a couple seconds faster? Who cares? What I think might be somewhat more enlightening is looking at the absolute end of the spectrum. What do the absolute smartest people think about religion?

What I found was somewhat disappointing. For one, apparently once you get into genius territory, the tests seem to be less reliable, especially when the genius in question has never taken an IQ test or released the results, which seems to be a common feature of super-geniuses. My main research subjects were Steven Hawking and Albert Einstein, both of whom are widely recognized as two of the smartest people to have ever lived. The disappointing thing was that no one really knows what their IQs is/were. But most people place Einstein's at between 160 and 180, and similar numbers were given for Hawking.

An IQ score of 90-109 is normal, and an IQ of under 70 is mentally retarded. A score over 140 means genius or near-genius. 30 points is the difference between normalcy and retardation. It fascinates me that there are, or have been people, who are so advanced that they are 30 points above the smartest among us. Compared to Einstein, Hawking, Vos Savant, William James Sidis (200), and David Hume (180), not only are we severely mentally handicapped, but even geniuses are bordering on mental retardation. I think that we should look at these people in this way. At the risk of offending people, we all know that a mentally retarded person should listen to, and believe, what a person of normal intelligence is saying to them, assuming they are being truthful. A mentally retarded person may not grasp why the Earth is round, but they should trust us when we tell them that it is. So too should we give great deference to what these super-geniuses have to say. And when it comes to religion, these people tend to have remarkably little to say. Some of them never talk about it (Vos Savant), and some of them hated it (Sidis), but it is/was clearly not of great (or even minimal) importance to them. That being said, my investigation was admittedly cursory, and I only looked at modern geniuses. It is important to note that there was a time when most of the very brightest people were religious people, however, that was a very different time and place. It was a time when the only viable avenue for the pursuit of knowledge was through the church (something for which the church must admittedly be given great credit) as well as a time when religious belief was rarely questioned and scientific knowledge was barely existent.

Finally, one cannot bring up Vos Savant in a discussion of religion without discussing her controversial comment: “Americans prefer to elect Presidents whose value systems grow from their religious beliefs. (That’s why an atheist — whose values are chosen, not established — has never been elected.) We expect the President to act on his values. So this is not the same as mixing church and state.” Many atheists were upset at this comment, but I think that is more a reflection of the oversensitivity of our age, and less a reflection of the statement. Though she might not have said it exactly as she should have, I think she is right. Atheist's do make up their own values (which is a good thing!) and Christians (the voting majority) don't like that! She's not saying they're right and she's not saying Atheists are bad. She's saying people elect people with similar values to themselves, and Christianity makes that easy. I think that reading the comment any other way requires a distortion of her words. I don't think her statement is anti-Atheist, and from the hour I spent researching her on the web, I don't think she is remotely religious, which kind of deflates the argument that she is anti-Atheist. Considering her strong emphasis on reason (she wrote the book The Power of Logical Thinking: Easy Lessons in the Art of Reasoning…and Hard Facts about Its Absence in Our Lives), her objection to Pascal's Wager and the absence of any religion-related remarks by her, I would bet a lot of money that she is not religious.

In short, my point is that if you look at the truly massive intellects from the modern age - whether it's those I mentioned or John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Edison, etc. - you find a remarkable absence of religious belief. Many of these last few were Deists, but really what is a deist? They do not believe in any kind of personal God like Jesus, their God is merely the God of the unknown. It was the name they gave to that which they could not understand. For all intents and purposes, they were non-religious. We need to remind people that compared to the greats, we are mentally handicapped and so should follow their lead instead of using our stunted minds to wonder off on our own.