God and the Girl
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God and the Girl Benoit Gaultier 1 Received: 11 August 2020 / Revised: 4 November 2020 / Accepted: 11 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Imagine you are an agnostic who wants to maximise your chances of getting the right answer to the question whether God exists. I show that theism and atheism are not on an epistemic par with one another because, under certain possible epistemically neutral conditions, the rational thing for you to do from a purely epistemic point of view would be to bet on the atheist’s judgement that God doesn’t exist rather than on the theist’s judgement that God does exist. Keywords Agnosticism . Atheism . Theism . Wishful thinking
1 The Girl Let’s imagine three students, Mary, Tom and Peter. Tom and Peter are inseparable friends who both know Mary but never spent any one-on-one time with her, and who both know exactly the same facts about her. (We can suppose that when one of them learns a new fact about Mary, he quickly communicates it to the other.) Tom believes that Mary is in love with him while Peter believes that this is not the case.1 (This often leads them to have exchanges of this type: ‘Peter, don’t you see what happens when Mary and I meet? – Well, what I see is that nothing’s happening on her side.’) Let’s now introduce a fourth individual, Diane, who learns all these facts about Mary, Tom and Peter. Before learning these facts, Diane neither believed that Mary is in love with Tom, nor that she is not in love with him, nor that one of these two options is more likely than the other. Let’s imagine that there is another fact that she learns: Tom desires that Mary is in love with him and Peter also desires that she is in love with Tom, or at least does not desire that this is not the case. Suppose now that Diane has to bet on whether Mary is in love with Tom. If her goal is to bet on the right answer, we clearly have the intuition that it would be rational for her to 1
Since it has been stipulated that they both know the same facts about Mary, it follows that neither Tom’s nor Peter’s opposing beliefs on whether Mary loves Tom amounts to knowledge—i.e. that neither of them knows the truth regarding this issue.
* Benoit Gaultier [email protected]
1
Philosophisches Seminar, University of Zurich, Zürichbergstrasse 43, 8044 Zürich, Switzerland
Philosophia
rely on Peter’s judgement rather than on Tom’s on the grounds that the latter is more likely to be biased than the former. More precisely, if Diane knows the human tendency to engage in wishful thinking (in particular, to engage in it in cases where the evidence does not obviously indicate that what is desired is not the case) and learns that Tom desires that Mary is in love with him and that Peter does not desire the opposite, then Diane’s belief that Peter’s judgement on the issue in question is less likely to be biased than Tom’s clearly is correct if based on the following reasoning: when, on a given matter, what a subject believes to obtain is also what she desires to obtain, while, on that matter, this is not
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