I am continually told that I should not engage in philosophy without professional credentials in that area, even though I am now co-author with a Credentialed Philosopher™, Maarten Boudry, on a peer-reviewed philosophy paper. But this credential mongering loses force when I see real professors of philosophy engaged in lucubrations that are so transparently dreadful that even a biologist can recognize them as tripe. Even worse—these lucubrations often appear in places like the New York Times.

I refer in particular to “The Stone” column, which for reasons unaccountable continues to publish the philosophical musings of Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a frequent subject of criticism on this site. Besides teaching introductory philosophy at Notre Dome, Gutting is even rumored to get paid for his NYt contributions. It is a crime against philosophy then, that he has earned not only column space but money for his latest “advance” in the philosophy of religion, “Pascal’s Wager 2.0.”

I needn’t refresh readers here on Pascal’s Wager or the many reasons why it’s bogus (go here for a comprehensive introduction). Among its problems are the diverse array of gods on which one must wager, forcing you to choose one (if you guess wrong, you could fry); the notion that any reasonably smart god could see that your belief is based purely on expediency and self-interest; and the indubitable fact that it’s nearly impossible to force yourself to believe in something you find improbable.

Gutting apparently realizes all this, and proffers his own version of Pascal’s Wager. But in the end it’s no better than the original version. Pascal’s Wager 2.0 differs by taking God out of the picture completely, asking nonbelievers simply to accept something Bigger than Themselves instead of just being atheists who rejects anything supernatural.

The trouble with the piece involves what Gutting considers “Bigger than Oneself”. Throughout the essay, it wavers between simply accepting a philosophical or ethical worldview, which many atheists have done anyway, to belief in an unspecified Beneficent Power (clearly supernatural), to accepting religion itself. Gutting can’t even keep his argument straight. In the end, though, Gutting seems to settle on Pascal’s Wager as asking atheists to accept the possibility of the supernatural, even though he touts no heavenly reward for such belief. Instead, the reward is simply more satisfaction with one’s life on Earth.

But before we get to Gutting’s New Clothes Wager, I present the only good bit of the article: the author’s tacit admission that doubt about religious truths is growing:

I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument.

Yes, it avoid the standard objections to the usual interpretations of Pascal’s Wager, many of which turn on the assumption of an afterlife. But it replaces them with other objections: namely, that Gutting can’t decide what we’re supposed to wager on.

First, he says that we doubters should embrace a “doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference.” In other words, he challenges atheists to believe something that we want to believe, which in Gutting’s case is a Beneficent Power:

I propose to reformulate Pascal’s wager as urging those who doubt God’s existence to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference. This means, first, that they should hope — and therefore desire — that they might find a higher meaning and value to their existence by making contact with a beneficent power beyond the natural world. There’s no need to further specify the nature of this power in terms, say, of the teachings of a particular religion.

Well, this may not be the teachings of a particular religion, but it’s certain belief in something supernatural, and that’s clear. This Power is not only a “power”, but a “good power”, and is “beyond the natural world.” In other words, it’s supernatural. That makes it religious. And the benefit is more happiness in this world (granted, a goal to be desired):

The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power.

But wait—maybe the power isn’t supernatural or religious after all!:

Unlike the traditional versions, this wager does not require believing that there is a God. So the standard drawbacks of self-deception or insincerity don’t arise. The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually.

Well, if it doesn’t require believing in a God, what is this Beneficent Supernatural Power? It sounds suspiciously like a God to me. But Gutting says that other stuff can also be Beneficent Powers. It is here that he goes off the rails by touting philosophy, meditation, and ethics as manifestations of that supernatural Power. Note the waffling here (my emphasis below), in which “religion” suddenly expands to encompass philosophy, ethics, and meditation. These, despite Gutting’s claim, are not “things beyond the natural world”, though some are not “knowable” (I presume he means “derivable”) via science:

The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually. The commitment is, rather, to what I have called religious agnosticism: serious involvement with religious teachings and practices, in hope for a truth that I do not have and may never attain. Further, religious agnosticism does not mean that I renounce all claims to other knowledge. I may well have strong commitments to scientific, philosophical and ethical truths that place significant constraints on the religious approaches I find appropriate. Religious agnosticism demands only that I reject atheism, which excludes the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science. [JAC: atheism doesn’t totally exclude the acceptance of something beyond the natural world knowable by science; it claims merely that we lack evidence for that.] . . . But we can decide for ourselves how much worldly satisfaction is worth giving up for the sake of possible greater spiritual happiness. And, it may well turn out that religious activities such as meditation and charitable works have their own significant measure of worldly satisfaction. Given all this, what basis is there for refusing the wager?

In what world must we suddenly construe meditation, charitable works, ethics, and philosophy as “religious activities”, or accept some Power to practice them? I accept Gutting’s proposition that one may find greater happiness by establishing a connection with something greater than oneself, even if that thing be the physical universe in all its splendor. Indeed, that is Sam Harris’s message in his book Waking Up. But that is not the same thing as establishing a connection with a supernatural Beneficent Power.

One interpretation of Gutting’s garbled message is that he thinks that even if we nonbelievers establish connection with nonreligious stuff like philosophy and ethics, we will be rewarded by the Big Power for making that connection, and that’s why we should believe in the Big Power. Alternatively, he may feel that we can’t achieve spiritual satisfaction without believing in the supernatural. But these interpretations are belied by Gutting’s own words (my emphasis below):

I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument. It does not require belief and isn’t an attempt to trick God into sending us to heaven. It merely calls us to follow a path that has some chance of leading us to an immensely important truth.

We can argue (but I won’t here) whether particular philosophical and ethical paths, or charitable work, constitute “truths”. It may be true in the scientific sense that such connections make us happier, and that charity will make its recipients happier, But the nature of Gutting’s “immensely important truth” remains elusive. Nevertheless, in the paragraph above Gutting clearly says that his argument does’t require “belief”. This is in strong contrast to his earlier claim that to get these spiritual benefits we must make contact with a supernatural beneficent power. In other words, we must make a James-ian leap of faith. But it takes no leap of faith to, say, try meditating or working in a soup kitchen as a way of establishing a greater connection with something.

In the end, Gutting founders on his own belief in God, unable to fully replace it with the kind of secular humanism that he also construes as “religious.” His equivocation leads him to produce a muddled and confusing essay. And he got PAID for something that would probably get the grade of C in an introductory philosophy course.

I’ll close with something that Maarten Boudry, my Belgian philosopher co-author on our paper, said about Gutting’s essay:

I wonder if Gary Gutting, rather than signing a contract with the NYT, would accept the remote possibility of receiving a handsome monetary reward, to paid by an invisible Editor whom he has never met and never heard of, and who may or may not exist.