Month: November 2008

The Daily Telegraph has a very confused story about Paddy Power Sportsbetting making book on whether or not god exists — odds are currently 4-1 against which, if there were any possibility one could meet the criteria put forth, would be easy money.

The Telegraph seems greatly confused about the Large Hadron Collider’s search for the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, frequently nicknamed “the God particle,”

It began taking bets on the question that has plagued thinkers for centuries in September, to coincide with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider that physicists hope may lead to the discovery of an elusive sub-atomic object called the “God particle”.

Initially the odds that proof would be found of God’s existence were 20-1, and they lengthened to 33-1 when the multi-billion pound atom smasher was shut down temporarily because of a magnetic failure.

But the “God particle” nickname doesn’t have any real religious significance. Physicist Leon Lederman gave it that nickname in a book titled “The God Particle.” But as he explains in the book, he chose that nickname largely because experimental evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson would resolve a number of important but unresolved issues in physics. Calling it the “God particle” is just like calling it the Holy Grail of physics or some other moniker — it’s just a figure of speech, not a point of theology.

At the end of the Telegraph article, the writer brings up a philosopher who believed one should wager on God’s existence rather than against,

Paddy Power’s book on the theological topic was only opened this year, but the notion that it is a good idea to gamble on God’s existence was first put forward in the 17th Century.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that although God’s existence cannot be proven through reason, it makes sense to have religious faith since a person has everything to gain – an “infinitely happy life” – and nothing to lose by doing so.

Pascal’s wager has numerous problems but above and beyond that there is evidence that people who throw themselves into religious faith specifically for Pascal’s reasons (that they want the possibility of the rewards even if they don’t believe in their hearts) are more likely to suffer from depression and more likely to find it harder to emerge from such depression than either secular people or true believers.

And we shouldn’t find it surprising that saying things you don’t really believe just to gain rewards is probably not the most pyschologically healthy thing to do.