Poker’s Arguments Against God - #1. Pascal’s Pot Odds

[srfitzsimmons]

Originally published at shanefitzsimmons.com. You can comment here or there.

Over the past week or so I’ve made the decision to be more open about my atheism. I don’t intend to be Jehovah’s Witness sort of scary or intrusive, where I’m seeking out Christians or other religious people who keep their faith to themselves and don’t argue or preach or try and get their beliefs passed into public law, as I do believe in religious freedom (to a point, anyway), but I won’t keep my viewpoints to myself when people bring up religion or their beliefs, and I will actively question it when it does come up. I also intend to be more active in seeking out those who push their beliefs on others, either directly or indirectly by trying to get nonsense like Intelligent Design taught in public schools alongside the Theory of Evolution.

Anyway, at some point within the past week or two when I first started getting more righteous about my atheism, I started thinking about poker, and so naturally the two ideas intersected at some point, and I realized that the fundamentals of poker are actually fairly relevant to the concept of atheism and Christianity (or religion in general). At first I only was thinking about this in a very general sense, but the deeper I thought about this the more I found a sort of sense to it all. Specifically, in many ways poker seems to be the antithesis of religious belief. Now, I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that poker disproves God or any religion, but I do think that there are many concepts that are proven to be true in poker that would stand to make a very compelling argument against religion.

So over the next week or so I’m going to go over several arguments I think poker can make on the subject. Now, you might think this is fairly ridiculous: Poker’s just a game, after all; what possible relevance could it have to religion or atheism? Well, poker is a game that takes a great amount of skill to be good at, and requires a broad set of skills, ranging from very left-brained analytical and calculating, not just of money but of odds and probabilities, to very right-brained skills whereby your ability to tell a convincing story is the difference between a failed bluff and a stolen pot, to a mixture of the two in terms of your intuition, which enables you to determine what advantages your opponent has. A good poker player also knows when to push his advantage and when to quit. For people with only a basic knowledge of poker and no real appreciation for the game, I don’t know that there’s anything I can say that will convince you of just how much there is to it, and to people who do know a lot about it, well, no explanation is truly required, so I’ll save us both the trouble and not write anymore on the subject. The point is, beyond just what you bring to the game, there’s a whole lot about poker that is greatly relevant to many things in life. I’m bringing it up in terms of religion and atheism mostly because I think it makes a surprisingly coherent argument against religion.

Nobody’s required to agree with me, and feel free to publicly disagree with me if you do, I don’t mind a debate. Also, I’m not making the claim that every argument I come up with is going to be equally relevant as the one before it, and some might seem like they’re reaching a bit. I’ll try to avoid those cases, but honestly, when trying to make the argument that you should only believe in something when there is sufficient and compelling evidence to do so, well, you either fall in line with that ideal or you don’t (ironically, I think that almost everybody does, many people just choose to make an exception with religion, as it seems to be some magick place where it’s okay to turn your brain off and “open your heart.”), and if you don’t, any argument is going to fall short because you’re already dismissing rationality in favor of believing in something for less than good reasons.

So with that, let’s continue to the first of many subjects. Currently I have seven subjects, but this might grow (or shrink) as time goes on and I refine the ideas and come up with new ones.

Just as a general disclaimer, I’ll probably use the word “Christians” a lot when the words “Religious people” would be more appropriate. I’m not suggesting that it’s only Christians with the problem, or even necessarily that Christians have a bigger problem than other religions. It’s just easier to write cohesively, and as an American, I live in a country where the most vocal and populous religion is Christianity, and as such I have a bit more of a gripe with them than I do, say, theJainists. After all, it’s not the Hindu in America that are getting teachers fired for performing magick tricks for their students only to be accused of Witchcraft, nor is it the Buddhists who are trying to get the idiotic Creationism to be taught alongside the Theory of Evolution in science classes. So yes, I do have a bit more of a bone to pick with Christians than any other religion, but when I say Christians there’s a good chance that if I’m using it in the very general sense I really just mean it as a less accurate substitute for “Religious People.” Please forgive me.
#1. Pascal’s Pot Odds

There is a common argument Christians make against atheists that, whether they realize it or not, is hundreds of years old, and is no more relevant now than it was then. Even so, people who bring up this argument without realizing where it comes from tend to feel very clever. The argument basically goes: “Well, isn’t it safer to just believe in God? If you do believe in God and you’re wrong you don’t really lose anything, but if you don’t believe and God and you’re wrong, you go to Hell and burn forever.”

Ah yes, I am referring of course, to Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher from the 1600’s made the claim that despite the fact that the existence of God cannot be proven (or disproven), you should make the safe bet and live as if though God exists, because in doing so you have potentially everything to gain, while nothing to lose. As I explained before, if there is no God, then whether you’re right or wrong the end result is the same and after you die nothing happens. But if God does exist, and you choose to believe in him, the rewards are infinite as you’ll get to spend all of eternity dancing with Jesus and walking with God up in Heaven, while if you choose not to believe in him, you’re going to be butt-raped by Satan forever in the darkest depths of Hell.

To put it into an equation so that we can quantify it, Pascal’s Wager basically says that the cost for believing or disbelieving in God is Zero (0), and if there is no God, then the rewards or penalties for your belief is also Zero (0). But if there is a God, then concurrently the penalty or reward for your belief is Infinite (?).

Poker is a game where mathmatics, probabilities and risk vs. reward plays an enormous part. I’m not going to go into the entire theorem of the betting structure and the importance of various strategies, as many a poker book has been written on the subject and the subject is still rather incomplete. However, to give you non-poker guru’s a clue as to what I’ll be talking about later, let me give you a brief overview of the concept of Pot Odds.

Pot Odds, in a nutshell, is basically the way you calculate the amount of money you have to risk against how much you stand to win, and measure it alongside the odds of you making your hand that will enable you to win the pot. For instance, let’s say there’s 90 dollars in the pot already, and your opponent has just placed a 10 dollar bet. In order for you to call his bet and continue playing the hand, you’ll need to risk 10 dollars of your own money. Thus, your Pot Odds are 10-to-1. What you do then, is look at your incomplete hand and calculate the odds that you’ll draw the right card to help make your optimal hand that will enable you to win the pot. The idea is that if the odds of you making your hand is better than your Pot Odds, then you should make the bet.

So for instance, using the same figure as above, if your Pot Odds are 10-to-1, you’re going to want odds of 9-to-1 or less in order to go ahead with the bet.

Why is this? Even if the odds of winning the hand are 50-to-1 you could still draw the right card and make your hand, right? This is true, but this is what separates the fish from the sharks in the game of poker. Poker is a long-term game. In the short-term, luck has an enormous influence. Maybe the odds of you winning the pot after the flop are a hundred-to-one, and maybe you’ve got an enormous chance of winning the pot, to the point that there’s only one card your opponent can draw to win. And maybe lady luck will smile down on you once and you’ll beat those hundred-to-one odds, and maybe luck will fuck you over and that one card your opponent needed will be drawn and he’ll beat you. It’s definitely possible.

But over the long term, luck’s influence is diminished by a lot. In fact, in the very long term, luck isn’t even a factor. This is why so many players are so pissed off that the government considers poker to be gambling, as it’s clearly a game of skill, and not a game of chance, even though chance has some elements to it. The reason is all about probabilities.

Casino’s make millions of dollars every year off of sometimes minuscule odds shaved in their favor. Look at it like this, let’s say that there was a coin that was slightly weighted in some fashion so that it had a slightly better chance of landing on heads than tails. Let’s say that the chances of it landing on Heads was 51% and the chances of it landing on Tails was 49%. Now let’s say you and I were going to flip this coin, and every time we flipped it we wagered a dollar, and every time I chose Heads. Essentially, because of the odds being shifted slightly in my favor, we can expect that on average, after every 100 flips I’m going to have earned One Dollar in profit. Not necessarily a lot of money, but now let’s assume that we managed to flip this coin 100 times per minute, and we flipped this coin all day. That’s 60 dollars in profit I can expect to make every hour, and $1,440 every day. Now let’s say I have a thousand of these coins, and a thousand players wagering the same bets. Now I’m making nearly 1.5 million dollars every day.

The point that I’m trying to get across is that while luck can change wildly in the short term, and a 1% difference might not be very reassuring whatsoever in an immediate sense, if you made the same choice a million times, that 1% difference is going to reveal itself as quite significant. This is what poker is all about.

So the idea is that if you’re getting better odds on drawing the cards to make your winning hand than you’re risking to win the pot, then you should always make the bet. Because whether you win this hand or not, if you play all your hands exactly like this one, then over time those percentages in your favor are going to be very profitable to you.

Now that you understand the very basics of Pot Odds, let’s look at Pascal’s Wager in terms of Pot Odds.

The glory of Pascal’s Wager is that, according to the wager, there is either an infinite amount of money in the pot, or there’s no money in the pot (you don’t know which), and your opponent isn’t betting anything. He’s simply checking to you. So, sure, you could choose to fold, but the idea is that you’d be insane to do anything but check back at him, because it doesn’t cost you anything to do so, and thusly, it doesn’t matter what your odds are, even if they’re a billion-to-one. Ultimately if you fail to make your hand, well, it’s cost you nothing. But if you do make your hand and win, well, you’re either going to get an infinite amount of money or no money at all, but in either case it doesn’t truly matter to the wager because you haven’t actually wagered anything.

So that’s Pascal’s Wager put into poker terms.

The trouble here, is that Pascal would have been a very shitty poker player. More specifically, the trouble here is that Pascal’s Wager is completely fallacious and doesn’t hold any water whatsoever. Pascal’s Wager, by itself, isn’t actually compatible with Pot Odds because it forms itself as a coin flip with only two choices, and it assumes that you’re not actually wagering anything.

So let’s look at the new version, or as I’ve coined it, Pascal’s Pot Odds.

First of all, let’s take a look at the ridiculousness of the coin flip. The Wager naively assumes that there’s only two beliefs, either a belief in God, or a lack of belief in God. But this isn’t actually the case. There are thousands of Gods people worship to, and tons of different denominations between similar faiths. Some faiths believe in the same God but maybe one doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as the son of God, while the other does. Some worship many gods, some worship only one. Some believe in a Heaven and Hell while others believe there’s only a Heaven. Some have complicated things with stories of purgatory and limbo and boatmen and devils and angels, talking snakes and giants. Some believe in a strict literal interpretation of the bible while others pick and choose what to follow based on modern times. Some follow a completely different bible and some others don’t follow any bible at all. Some require you to actively preach to others and try to convert them, some require you to dress in full pirate regalia while you do so. Some people believe that God doesn’t really give a shit if you believe in him or not while others seem to think that as long as you believe in a God you’ll go to Heaven while others say you have to accept Jesus Christ into your heart and let him be your savior and believe he died for your sins or you’re going to Hell. Some don’t want you to eat pork. Some allow slavery. Some want you to kill the infidels while others preach acceptance despite the fact that the infidels will be judged unworthy and go to hell anyway.

I could go on, but as I clearly have demonstrated, the idea that this can be compared to a coinflip is completely retarded. In actuality, the wager actually has a lot more in common with poker than with a Yes or No answer. Ultimately, the odds of you choosing the right God and denomination and tenants to believe in and follow and worship are astronomically small. Poker doesn’t even have the kind of crazy odds that would draw a precise comparison, but just for simplicity’s sake, it’s akin to some kind of poker game with 10,000 cards instead of just 52, and you’ve only got one out (that is, one card that will make your hand to win you the pot). In other words, the odds of you choosing correctly which God to believe in is, even by this simplistic scale, far less than 0.1%. Even if we go by majority’s sake and throw all the denominations together and throw out all the lesser-followed faiths your odds are still less than 1-in-6; less than 17%.

Now let’s move on, and explore this idea that it actually costs nothing to believe. First of all, this seems to suggest that belief itself is enough. That, as long as you simply have it in your head that you believe in God, that God will be more than okay with that. But the fact of the matter is, almost all religious faiths require you to actively participate in your own indoctrination. You have to go to church, you have to read the bible, you have to tithe, donating 10-15% of your earnings to the church. You have to worship actively, you have to be prepared to defend your religious beliefs to anyone who questions you (sometimes you have to stone them to death). You have to look at everyone who doesn’t believe exactly as you do as if they’re immoral idiots who’re going to burn in hell. There’s a hell of a lot of stuff you have to do. And you can’t just believe for the sake of covering your own ass. It’s logical to assume that if God knows everything, he’ll be able to see through your little ruse and know if you’re only believing to get into Heaven. I can’t imagine all of the Gods would be accepting of something like that. I imagine that any God who would send someone to hell purely on the basis of not believing in him would also send people who only believe “just in case” to hell as well. And many of these gods would send you to hell for not following their tenants precisely, or for not praying every day, or whatever. Eat pork and die, bitches.

The point is, belief does cost something. It costs time, energy, money, brainpower and spirit. That’s right, religion (or at least, most religions) kill your spirit. Why? Well, there’s many reasons, but to name just one: By following a God who would send people to Hell for not believing in him when he hasn’t given them a shred of evidence as to his existence, and by believing that this is a Just God, you believe in Mob Justice. You believe that simply because God has the power, that he gets to choose what’s moral, and you agree with his decisions - or at the very least, don’t question them in any meaningful way. This makes your standards of morality weak and pitiful. And even if we ignore this, it still kills your spirit because you are able to compromise rationality in favor of believing that something is true without any evidence to support it, and perhaps to even ignore evidence that actually conflicts with your beliefs, in order to hold to them. This, in a word, sucks. And to say this isn’t a price to pay, to say that there’s no cost in believing is God, well, that’s crazy.

Now, let’s look at the potential rewards and/or penalties. It’s not actually zero or ? as Pascal would have you believe. If God is real and as a result Heaven and Hell are real, then yes, the potential for infinite penalties or rewards exists. But we need to modify the Zero. Because it’s not just Zero in the sense that if God doesn’t exist then there’s nothing in the pot. It’s also Zero in that, if you choose to believe in God and worship and tithe and yadda yadda, then you are actually putting money into a pot that will ultimately not pay out. So in this sense, you have four possible outcomes. Choosing the wrong thing to believe and having infinite penalties in the form of going to Hell for eternity. Choosing the right God to worship and have it pay off by infinite bliss in Heaven. Choosing atheism, not putting any money into the pot and as such not losing anything. Or choosing a faith to believe in, putting a lot of money into the pot, and wind up being wrong, there is no God, and all the money you put into the pot was wasted.

There’s an even scarier thought than the last example though. The first one is probably the worst if you’re not an atheist. If you believe in God, and devote time and energy into it, but you wind up picking the wrong one and are punished for eternity as a result, I mean, that’s just adding insult to injury.

Let’s plug all of this into the new concept: Pascal’s Pot Odds….

If you choose atheism, then you are a slight favorite to win because you’ve got actual evidence backed up by the scientific and historical communities of the world. But win or lose, the point is, you’re not putting any money into the pot, you’re just checking. So if you’re right, then you get nothing out of the pot, but you didn’t put anything into the pot. If you’re wrong however, and there is a God, well, you still have the chance that the God who exists will be okay with you not believing in him, and you’ll still get to go to Heaven. Or he might send you to Hell.

If you choose theism, then you’ve got enormous odds to defeat, as there are so many religions to choose from that the odds that you’ll have chosen the right one (especially as they all have about equal evidence to support them [read: none]) are very minuscule. So, to be generous, your odds are about 10,000-to-one. The amount of money you have to wager differs from faith to faith, so it could range from very little money (”believing is enough!”) to an enormous cost (”my religion is my life, I tithe 15%, I stone the infidels and believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago and try to get my religion pushed on public schools! And I preach to everybody!”). In either case, whether the cost equates to 1 dollar or a billion dollars, you’re only getting the right Pot Odds if you’re right, which would mean that the pot has infinite wealth in it. If you’re wrong though, then there are literally no odds to justify this bet at all, as we’re talking about either losing infinite or gaining literally nothing for a cost that far exceeds nothing.

Now, there are a few things to consider. First of all, I’m not actually saying that you shouldn’t make this bet. I think it’s up to you whether you choose to make the wager or not. I just think that it is a far more accurate representation of Pascal’s Wager than the original, and in the more accurate form, no longer supports theism at all but instead supports atheism. Why? Because the Odds don’t justify making a bet. The Odds of being correct are so astronomically slim that putting time, energy, brain matter and money into something that has almost no chance of succeeding is retarded.

However, if there is one argument in favor of Pascal’s Pot Odds, it’s the luck factor. Earlier I talked about how in the long term, luck almost completely fades away. Well, in a sense, you could consider Pascal’s Wager a single bet, in which case there is no actual long-term, as you’re only making one bet, in which case the luck factor is still enormous. As a result of this, we’re essentially talking about a craps shoot. If you have no issue with wagering your entire existence on a craps shoot, then feel free.

The final thing to consider is general poker philosophy. A Donkey, in poker, is someone who plays like an idiot. They throw their money away. There are more specific terms to use, such as a Calling Station, who will continue to call all your bets to the end, relying an enormous amount on luck. These guys can sometimes do okay, but only in the short term. In the long term, these guys fail miserably. One of the biggest things that separates the good players from the great players is being able to fold a good hand when you know you’re beat. As the philosophy goes, any money you don’t put in the pot is money you should consider won. An atheist, in Pascal’s Pot Odds, puts literally no money in the pot. Money, in this case, being a metaphor for your life, the idea is essentially that the atheist doesn’t throw any portion of his life away chasing after a foolish lie. That means that, whether there’s an infinite amount of money in the pot that you win or lose, or if there’s no money in the pot at all, you ultimately haven’t thrown any money away. You haven’t thrown any second of your life away believing something that has no evidence to support it. So this is a very good thing.

Further, there’s still a chance that, even as an atheist, because there are so many different potential Gods, you still might get into Heaven without your belief. God might not care. So ultimately, when your odds are so incredibly shitty no matter what choice you make, but all of the choices might pay off in infinity, not at all, or you might lose infinity through torment in Hell, the best choice is the one in which you risk the least. Just as important as the idea of considering money saved money earned, a major concept of good poker play is risking as little as possible for as big of a gain. There’s really no arguing that, at least when we talk about how many chips you have to put in to play, atheism wins by an enormous margin. This doesn’t mean the atheist doesn’t have the potential to be damned, but with a (relatively) equal chance to be damned regardless of what you believe, the smartest choice would be the one in which you risk the least amount of your chips. In this case, there’s a clear winner.