This is a summary of a paper written by Dr. Eric Sampson of Purdue University. The summary itself is also written by Eric Sampson. The full paper, with more thorough objections and rebuttals is linked here.
3 Goals in the Paper:
1. Identify a “new” catastrophic risk EAs have entirely neglected.
- Religious Catastrophe: Trillions of people (or more) go to hell (or something hell-like) for all eternity for rejecting the one true God or religion.
2. Argue that, even by secular EA lights, religious catastrophe is at least as bad, at least as probable, and therefore at least as important as the standard EA catastrophic risks.
3. Argue that EAs (who want to live consistent with their beliefs and values) face a dilemma.
- The Dilemma: Either adopt religious catastrophe as an EA cause or ignore religious catastrophe but also ignore catastrophic risks whose mitigation has a similar or lower expected value (i.e., most or all of them). Business as usual—ignoring religious catastrophe while championing the usual EA causes—is inconsistent with secular longtermist principles.
The Threat: Religious Catastrophe
Here’s Jesus:
“When the Son of Man comes into his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food…
Then he will say to those on his left [the goats], Depart from me you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food…Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matt 25:31-46)
Here’s the Quran:
“And if you are in doubt about what We have revealed to Our servant, then produce a chapter like these, and call your witnesses apart from Allah, if you are truthful. But if you do not—and you will not—then beware the Fire whose fuel is people and stones, prepared for the disbelievers.” (2:23-24).
“Those who reject Our revelations—We will scorch them in a Fire. Every time their skins are cooked, We will replace them with other skins, so they will experience the suffering. Allah is Most Powerful, Most Wise. As for those who believe and do good deeds, We will admit them into Gardens beneath which rivers flow, abiding therein forever…” (4:56-57).
“As for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be tailored for them, and scalding water will be poured over their heads, melting their insides and their skins. And they will have maces of iron. Whenever they try to escape the gloom, they will be driven back to it: ‘Taste the suffering of burning.’ But Allah will admit those who believe and do good deeds into Gardens beneath which rivers flow” (22:19-23).
Religious Catastrophe’s Evaluative and Probabilistic Similarity to Standard Longermist Causes Badness: Religious catastrophe is at least as bad as the worst catastrophic risks
- One-Shot Argument: Finite vs. Infinite
- Each catastrophic risk is finitely bad since a finite number of people will die and be prevented from enjoying a valuable life. (The universe must die a “heat death” eventually.)
- Religious catastrophe’s disvalue is either infinite or finite but ever-increasing (because it lasts for eternity). So, its disvalue far exceeds the disvalue of any catastrophic threat.
- Piecemeal Argument: Which is worse?
- Eternal hell for trillions (or more) or catastrophic climate change and extinction? o Eternal hell for trillions (or more) or nuclear war and extinction?
- Eternal hell for trillions (or more) or killer AI and extinction?
- And so on…
Probability: Religious catastrophe’s probability is at least comparable to standard EA causes’ probability. _________________________________________________________________
Existential Catastrophe via Chance within next 100 years
Asteroid or comet impact ~ 1 in 1,000,000
Supervolcanic eruption ~ 1 in 10,000
Stellar explosion ~ 1 in 1,000,000,000
Total natural Risk ~ 1 in 10,000
Nuclear war ~ 1 in 1,000
Climate Change ~ 1 in 1,000
Other environmental damage ~ 1 in 1,000
“Naturally” arising pandemics ~ 1 in 10,000
Engineered pandemics ~ 1 in 30
Unaligned artificial intelligence ~ 1 in 10
Unforeseen anthropogenic risks ~ 1 in 30
Other anthropogenic risks ~ 1 in 50
Total anthropogenic risks ~ 1 in 6
Total existential risk ~ 1 in 6
_________________________________________________________________
Considerations Bearing on Religious Catastrophe’s Evidential Probability
1. Standard arguments from natural theology (e.g., Fine-tuning, Kalam, Contingency, Ontological, Resurrection, Moral Knowledge, Psychophysical Harmony).
2. At least 57% of humans on this planet believe in a heaven-and-hell-type-stakes religion (33% Christianity, 24.1% Islam).
3. Literally millions of people, over the ages, have claimed to have religious experiences associated with these religions.
4. Professional philosophers are among the most educated and skeptical people on the planet. Yet, according to the 2020 PhilPapers survey, 18.83% of them accept or lean toward theism (too low due to selection effects?). 7.21% were agnostic. If we play it safe and suppose that only a third of the theist philosophers believe in hell, that’s about 6%. Thus, (on a very conservative estimate) about 6% of the most skeptical people on the planet believe in hell.
5. 77.77% of respondents specializing in Philosophy of Religion were theists. So, among the population most acquainted with the arguments for and against God’s existence, 3 out of 4 believe in God.
6. What could justify assigning a zero (or near-zero) probability to every heaven-and-hell -stakes religion?
- Philosophical arguments (e.g., Evil, Hiddenness, Evil God challenge, Religious diversity)? Are these atheological arguments that much better than the theistic ones? Are they evidently decisive? o Commitment to metaphysical naturalism?
- In what other context do philosophers think that philosophical arguments provide justified certainty (or near-certainty) that a widely believed philosophical thesis is false?
Objections to Pascal’s Wager I can Easily Sidestep:
- Impossible: I can’t voluntarily believe in God—it’s literally impossible!
- Morally Bad: It’s morally wrong to believe in God just for heavenly goodies!
- Ineffective: Believing in God for the goodies won’t work. He doesn’t accept for-profit belief!
- Reply-to-All: I’m not suggesting that anyone ought to believe, or get themselves to believe, in God.
Objections Meriting a Response:
“I’m an annihilationist. I don’t believe in eternal hell.”
- Doesn’t matter.
- If you’re not justifiably certain there’s no eternal hell, you face this problem.
- Even on annihilationism, an infinite (or indefinitely large) amount of value is lost for each person who experiences religious catastrophe.
“A good God wouldn’t send people to eternal hell, so we don’t have to worry about it.”
- Again: If you’re not justifiably certain there’s no eternal hell, you face this problem.
- The argument doesn’t depend on an Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) conception of hell
- Could be: ECT, C.S. Lewis-like view, Eastern Orthodox view, eternal disappointment, etc.
- For each conception of hell, you can’t be justifiably certain God wouldn’t “send” people there.
Many-Gods Objection: Each religion has infinite stakes, so the expected (dis)value of each is equal.
- Suppose I offer you one of two lottery tickets with the same payoff:
Ticket 1: Provides a 1/10,000 probability of infinite bliss, or
Ticket 2: Provides a 1/3 probability of infinite bliss.
- The expected value of selecting each ticket is infinite (therefore, equal). Are you indifferent? No.
- Lesson: When payoffs are equal, choose the most probable option.
- EAs already do this with catastrophic risks. They prioritize based on probabilities.
- Practical Upshot: Devote resources to religions in proportion to probabilities. Most resources to most probably religion, second-most resources to second-most probable religion, etc.
Pascal’s Mugger: I’m being held hostage to infinite (dis)utilities!
- Bostrom’s Lesson: You can rationally ignore threats with vanishingly small probabilities.
- Lesson doesn’t apply to Religious Catastrophe. The probability isn’t vanishingly small.
- If you ignore Religious Catastrophe, you must ignore all EA causes whose mitigation has a similar or lower probability (e.g., nuclear war, runaway climate change, pandemics, killer AI).
- Greaves’s Lesson: You should pay the mugger.
- Upshot for us: You should devote resources to mitigating the risk of Religious Catastrophe.
- General Lesson: Whatever you say about Pascal’s Mugger is what you’ll need to say about Religious Catastrophe and the standard EA catastrophic risks. You can’t rationally treat them differently.
The Dilemma: Either adopt Religious Catastrophe as an EA cause or ignore Religious Catastrophe but also ignore catastrophic risks whose mitigation has a similar or lower expected value (i.e., most or all of them). Business as usual—ignoring religious catastrophe while championing the usual EA causes—is inconsistent with secular longtermist principles.
Conclusion: By secular EA’s own lights, they ought to devote resources to mitigating the risk of Religious Catastrophe (e.g., giving money to missionaries to convert people to some religion). Again, the full paper, with more thorough objections and rebuttals is linked here.
Thanks for sharing this fun paper!
I think I disagree with several key parts of the argument.
I think this makes a pretty important error in reasoning. Grant that philosophers in general are among the most skeptical people on the planet. Then you select a 6% segment of them. The generalization that these are still among the most skeptical people on the planet is erroneous. This 6% could have of (e.g.) average levels of skepticism, and it's the rest of the group that brings up the average level of skepticism of the group.
This is among the passages commonly interpreted as Jesus discussing hell. However, note that it doesn't actually show Jesus discussing hell as we've been thought to think of it. First, he's clearly speaking in metaphor — he's not talking about literal sheep and goats. It's not clear what the "eternal punishment" he's referring to is. Some people interpret this as more of a "final" punishment, e.g. death, rather than eternal suffering. And indeed, if Jesus were referring to hell as traditionally conceived, I'd expect him to be clearer about this.
Many scholars on the topic have written extensively about this. My understanding is that there's little solid basis for getting the traditionally understood concept of hell out of the core ancient sources. And I'd expect, if it were true, and Jesus really were communicating about something as important as hell with divine knowledge, there would be no ambiguity about it. (Since the Quran comes after and is influenced by Christian sources, I don't think we should read it as a separate source of evidence.)
I think this is a very strong reason to doubt the plausibility of hell. And there are many other such reasons:
The weight of these considerations drives the plausibility of hell extremely low, much lower in my view than the possibility of x-risk from risks like nuclear weapons, pandemics, AI, or even natural sources like asteroids (which, unlike hell, we know exist and have previously impacted the lives of species).
I think this does make the odds of a religious catastrophe pascalian, and worth rejecting on that basis.
Even if the risk weren't pascalian, I think there's another problem with this argument, with reference to this part of the argument:
The problem here is that if you advocate for the wrong religion, you might increase the chance people go to hell, because some religions think believing in another religion would make you go to hell. So actions on this basis have to grapple with the possibilities of infinite bliss and infinite suffering, and we often might have just as much reason to think we're increasing one or decreasing the other. And since there's no reliable method for coming to consensus on these kinds of religious questions, we should think a problem like "reduce the probability people will go to hell" — even if the risk level wasn't pascalian — is entirely intractable.
One issue I have with Pascal's wager is that it seems easy to come up with much more extreme religions.
I believe that in many Christian faiths, when one person is judged as being sent to hell, then afterwards, one person is sent to hell, and experiences the pain that one person can. This might as well last for infinity, but it's still one person's pain.
In comparison, it's easy to imagine a religion that goes much further. Whenever one person is judged as being bad, an infinite number of people will go to hell in their stead (these people might be just like them, if that's important), and these people will be enhanced to experience a greater amount of pain.
Obviously, heaven goes the same way. 1 person experiencing 1-person-unit of heaven-bliss per year, vs. a religion that has infinity people experiencing infinity-person-units of heaven-bliss per year.
So I'd argue that most religions aren't "Pascal Optimal".
You might say, "Well, there's almost no chance of these pascal optimal religions being true, as no one yet believes in them. We only have the regular religions."
To which the obvious reply is,
"Well, there might be almost no chance, but there is some chance. And when you do the math, doesn't this then check out?"
(If it's not clear, I personally don't believe in either a regularly known religion or a Pascal Optimal religion.)
"Well, there might be almost no chance, but there is some chance. And when you do the math, doesn't this then check out?"
What is your response to this? Do you ignore the Pascal Optimal religion? If so, what rule do you apply to decide what to ignore or not?
My personal response is to be pretty suspicious of this line of reasoning. The outcomes are pretty bizarre, and while I appreciate math, at this point I assume that something went seriously wrong.
But if someone does argue that the line of reasoning makes sense, I'd find it more convincing if they went (what seems like) all the way, and at least chose a Pascal Optimal religion.
If they just go one step and wind up with a religion that was already convenient to themselves for other reasons, I get suspicious.
Fun stuff!
The key question to assess is just: what credence should we give to Religious Catastrophe?
I think the right answer, as in Pascal's Mugging, is: vanishingly small. Do the arguments of the paper show that I'm wrong? I don't think so. There is no philosophical argument that favors believing in Hell. There are philosophical arguments for the existence of God. But from there, the argument relies purely on sociological evidence: many of the apes on our planet happen to accept a religious creed according to which there is Hell.
Here's a question to consider: is it conceivable that a bunch of apes might believe something that a rational being ought to give vanishingly low credence to?
I think it's very obvious that the answer to this question is yes. Ape beliefs aren't evidence of anything much beyond ape psychology.
So to really show that it's unreasonable to give a vanishingly low credence to Religious Catastrophe, it isn't enough to just point to some apes. One has to say more about the actual proposition in question to make it credible.
It probably depends who you ask, but fwiw, I think that many philosophical theses warrant extremely low credence. (And again, the mere fact of being "widely held" is not evidence of philosophical truth.)
Taking this on as a cause area and talking about it can easily (and I would predict) backfire (IE increase probability of said event occurring).
If Alice is not thinking about whether to do X (say creating hell), then Bob actively trying to prevent Alice from doing X can increase the total risk of X. Bob will both bring X to consideration for Alice when it wasn't before, but also increase Alice's likelihood of endorsing X, due to ingroup-outgroup dynamics where beliefs are often flipped/inverted.
In order to justify active opposition to X, you would need X to be not only possible, but a likely or default outcome. Something which has a very strong causal factor of occurrence, such that activism does not become the main causal factor. Such considerations should be taken more seriously before adopting tail-risks as an EA-cause-area.
Pascal's Wager is an antique. If you want to consider long-term existential risk from the perspective of obtaining possibilities for infinite bliss, you'd better turn to old Fyodorov. Fyodorov proposed eternal bliss as an altruistic action—effective altruism—by our descendants toward their ancestors (us, for example) thanks to the development of futuristic technology.
It's especially noteworthy because Fyodorov died before Einstein postulated that time is a dimension. Today, already very accustomed to science fiction (as in the movie "Interstellar" or the TV series "Devs"), we can consider that iseveral unknown dimensions exist, all of which raises the expectation that a future altruistic humanity will rescue all of humanity from the past and grant them "infinite bliss" (physicist Frank Tipler also proposes something similar).
Furthermore, this Fyodorov thing has the advantage of being adaptable to present altruistic action. By participating in an altruistic movement, such as EA or any other past or future, we could add the incentive that we are enabling a future high-tech altruistic civilization.