Pascal's wager (revisited)

There's a new video circulating the web via YouTube, arguing that we should really start preparing for the possibility of Global Warming.

The jist of it is: "Well, the worst that can happen if we cut CO2 emissions and man-induced global warming is not real is that we cause a global recession, whereas the worst that can happen if we don't cut CO2 emissions and global warming is real is that we have a huge catastrophe".

In my opinion, it's nothing more than a re-hash of "Pascal's wager".

Pascal argued along the lines of "If you're a determined Atheist, and there is a God, then you're doomed to eternal damnation, whereas if you're a determined Theist and there is no God, then you're not really that worse off than the atheist"...

So! A question to all of the people who were convinced by that YouTube clip: "Are all of you convinced to become Born-Again Christians too?"

I didn't think so.

What's wrong with the argument?

It comes down to the fact that stating "possibilities" is never enough.

It's "possible" that there's some Christian God who exists who will damn to hell anyone who does not believe in him.

It's also possible that there's some "Devil God" who will particularly go out of his way to torment those irritating "Christians" who believed in "God" instead of the "Devil".

It's also possible that there's actually a God, and his name is "JungoJunga", and he will damn to eternal damnation anyone who does not ritually give obeisance to a strand of knotted rope every day.

How is a "Theist"-fearing person to behave?

I can almost understand the poor Romans who even had a place in their ritual ceremonies for any Gods that they might not know about!

Almost.

Possibilities, without probabilities, are meaningless.

It's possible that our actions are causing global warming, and that unchecked, this will cause untold damages to human kind.

But it's also possible that what we are doing has virtually no impact on global warming, and that doing otherwise will cause even more significant starvation, poverty and hardship to billions of people in the world who might otherwise have been better off.

The guy begins his argument with "What's the worst that can happen?" The fallacy is in believing that somehow we can actually imagine this. What's the worst that can happen? By imposing his own version of "Pascal's wager" he presumes to know.

But maybe, the worst that can happen is that in 10,000 years an asteroid will hit the earth and wipe out all life as we know it, regardless of what we've done. Maybe, our only chance of survival, as a society, is to colonize Mars, or the Moon, but only if we don't spend time and resources on reducing our CO2 emissions?

That's a simplistic argument of course: But I'm just trying to make the point that there's no such thing as a "safe course of action", and justifying a course of action based on no other reason than: "we're ruling out a possibility that someone thought was possible"... well, that's really stupid thinking. If that sort of argument works for you, then Pascals' wager ought to work for you too.

I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening, and I'm not saying that mankind is not the cause of global warming, and I'm not even saying that it's not something that needs to be thought about.

I'm just saying that arguments of this nature - arguments without evidence, only based on possibilites - are fundamentally meaningless.