jckuhl

I do not believe in ghosts or spirits or magic. I see no reason to believe these things exist. And yet I made the dumb decision the other night to watch Supernatural in my dark living room at night.

I have never seen Supernatural before, my first introduction to Jensen Ackles is Soldier Boy in The Boys. But I spent the better part of the last few months working my way through Lucifer and that put me in the mood to check out other more supernatural oriented shows, and what’s more supernatural than Supernatural? It’s in the name after all.

I’m about halfway, maybe more, through S1, freshly introduced to the Winchester boys. The other night I found myself watching an episode about a house haunted by a poltergiest. And I found this more unsettling than any of the other episodes so far.

I am not a horror person, I easily jumpscare. I would not qualify Supernatural as horror, but horror adjacent. But an episode about a wendigo in the woods or a spirit dragging victims to the bottom of a lake isn’t terribly unsettling when sitting in a dark house. After all, I’m not in a forest or near a lake. However, sitting in a dark house while watching an episode about a dark haunted house is a little more close to . . . well . . . home.

And then a motion sensor light in my kitchen randomly turned on. Of course anything could have triggered it I guess. Wind moving a branch past a window in a way that trips the sensor? I don’t know.

But I didn’t like it.

See, here’s the thing, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t want to be proven wrong either. There are no ghosts, my house isn’t haunted, but I turned the light on in my living room all the same.

May as well behave as if the ghost does exist right? Just in case . . .

Kinda like Pascal’s Wager.

Sometime around the 1660s, Pascal came up with the following wager, and it goes like this:

If there is a god and you believe, you get rewarded with eternal life.
If there is no god and you believe, you get nothing.
If there is a god and you don’t believe, you get punished with eternal damnation
If there is no god and you don’t believe, you get nothing.

Of these four scenarios, only one of them has a bad outcome. The other three are at best positive and at worst neutral. If you analyze these four scenarios, the conclusion seems apparent, you’re better off believing in a god.

But there’s a problem, in fact there are numerous problems with Pascal’s Wager, but only one I want to talk about right now. Much like with the ghost in my kitchen, the one that turned the light on, I might feel more comfortable acting as if it is real and turning my living room light on in response. But I don’t actually believe the ghost is real. What happened instead is Supernatural primed my imagination and something perfectly natural and harmless triggered the motion sensor light.

The same with Pascal’s Wager. I could, for the sake of the wager, pretend I believe there’s a god, and go through the motions, even go to church and pray a lot. But that doesn’t mean I actually believe in the god. Belief is not a choice, or at least, it’s not one you can simply turn on and off at will. Belief takes convincing, and that takes time and effort. Behaving as if I believe in a god when I really don’t isn’t believing in God and most Christians would argue that inauthentic belief doesn’t count. So I still end up with eternal damnation anyways, if I am wrong about the non-existence of any gods.

I’ve never found Pascal’s Wager to be a particularly good argument for believing in a god. Not only does it not prove a god exists, it just leads to inauthentic belief, responding in fear and not from any rational basis. There are a lot of bad arguments for the existence of god, and Pascal’s Wager is a particularly bad one and should be tossed in the dustbin.