SEN. RICK SANTORUM V. SEN. BOB CASEY JR. – NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE ON WOMEN’S ISSUES AT ALL
February 23, 2012
Rather than engaging in ad hominem attacks on Sen. Santorum’s religion or on the Catholic Church, it behooves all of us to instead analyze the politics and electorate of Pennsylvania. Ad hominem attacks are an abusive form of argument; proper arguments should address the merits of an opponent’s position, and refute the merits thereof, rather than attacking either the person, or a straw man, e.g. a caricature of the person. Abusive argumentation has long been recognized, since the time of Aristotle, as a form of FALLACY, not entitled to serious logical consideration by rational minds. Consequently, let us engage in some rational discourse on the merits of the question at hand and cease from ABUSIVE and FALLACIOUS ARGUMENTATION techniques such as ad hominem attacks and attacking a straw man.
Sen. Arlen Specter of PA
Let us turn, then, to the Politics of Pennsylvania (“PA”), and why it produces such conservative politics and politicians, especially conservative male politicians, and particularly conservative male catholic politicians recently. It was for many years a bastion of moderate Republicanism, and indeed, until the 1930s, Philadelphia and the Union League were synonymous with the post-Civil War consensus that the Republican Party was the proper party for all educated persons to vote for in the Northeast. Indeed, the city was so identified with core national Republican values that the Athletics even adopted an elephant as their team logo in the early 1900s, a symbol retained to this day by the Oakland Athletics, though it is dubious they know what Connie Mack was thinking when he adopted the symbol 111 years ago.
This consensus began to break down after the Great Depression and FDR, though it lingered on for many years as the so-called “Rockefeller-Eisenhower-Nixon” wing of the party, which was Northeast and moderate, and bipartisan with the Democrats on foreign policy, social security, fiscal & monetary policy and many other fundamental issues. This consensus of course began to break down with the emergence of the Goldwater faction in 1964, which was opposed by the Scranton faction in 1964 (again led from PA), leading to Nixon re-assuming the reigns in 1968 and 1972. With Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Ford took over and Rockefeller became VP, leading to a bitter fight between the Reagan and Ford wings of the party in 1976, and another bitter fight between the Bush and Reagan wings in 1980, finally emerging in victory both in nomination and election for the conservative wing of the Republican Party in 1980 for Reagan and the conservatives. A new day had dawned in America. But to some degree, the bipartisan consensus which had existed since FDR between the Democrats and the moderate Republicans was now endangered.
Nowhere was this tension more dramatically played out the past forty years than in PA. PA was represented until 1991 by two stalwart moderate Republicans–Sen. Arlen Specter, a bipartisan member of the Warren Commission, and Sen. John Heinz, a moderate Republican loyal to the elderly and to Social Security. These two Senators were cornerstones of what was, up to that point, a still very strong Northeastern moderate wing of the Republican party. Both were solidly dedicated to bipartisanship, courtesy, gentlemanly behavior and getting things done on the Senate floor notwithstanding partisan differences.
This began to unravel slowly with the sudden airplane death in 1991 of Sen. John Heinz.
The Late Sen. John Heinz of PA
A sudden election was called in 1991 and an unknown political consultant was brought in from the South named James Carville to manage the campaign of an enormous
PA Sen. Harris Wofford with President John F. Kennedy in early 1960s
underdog, former University President and JFK kitchen cabinet member Harris Wofford, who was to stand election against former Governor Richard “Dick” Thornburgh. At
Gov. Dick Thornburgh visits Centralia PA to inspect its ongoing Mine Fires in the 1980s
the time, Thornburgh had something like a fifty point lead in the polls, and tons of money.
James Carville - Wofford's 1991 PA Political Consultant
Sen. Heinz’ widow Teresa Heinz, now heiress in part to the Heinz catsup fortune, would then go on to marry Mass. Sen. John Kerry, in effect making him an instant near-billionaire and projecting him to the front rank of presidential contenders for 2004. This nearly changed U.S. history, but Kerry’s bid failed. Looking back, it is all too likely that a John Heinz bid for President would ultimately have succeeded in the long run just where Kerry failed–he had the looks, the charm and the moderate views to win.
Sen & Mrs. John & Teresa Heinz prior to his untimely death in 1991
This might have changed the entire course of the Republican Party and US History.
Sen & Mrs. John Kerry & Teresa Heinz Kerry; Her Money Inherited from John Heinz's Death in 1991 Nearly Made Kerry President in 2004
Returning to the 1991 election, Carville made universal health care an issue, and Wofford shocked the nation by defeating Thornburgh, becoming the first Democratic Senator from PA in decades. At the same time, Carville’s work came to the attention of a bright young Governor from Arkansas with Presidential aspirations–one William Jefferson Clinton. Carville’s conjunction with Clinton, and with George Stephanopoulos, on the 1992 campaign, documented in THE WAR ROOM documentary film, is now legendary, but all of this began in PA with Carville and Wofford.
It was during the Wofford campaign in 1991 that Carville legendarily quipped that “between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was Alabama in between,” referring to the fact that Pennsylvanians in all portions of the state except for Philadelphia & Allegheny county regions were pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, exceptionally elderly (the oldest voting population in the USA outside of Florida) and very church-going, as well as being one of the most demographically Catholic and ethnic voting populations. In addition, PA has the lowest % of college educated persons of any state in the Northeast corridor–it is the prototypical location of high school educated union card carrying labor, and many of those voters were either Nixon Republicans or Reagan Democrats, but definitely not liberal Democrats. Except of course for the two large cities, and even there, most of the male voters care more about football than about politics.
In 2008 Hilary Clinton carried nearly every county of PA v. Obama and won the PA Primary by running to the right of Obama
Fast forward to 1994. The Clinton Administration has badly failed on its health care initiative, and Sen. Wofford has to stand re-election in his own right. This time, he is the heavy favorite to win, but Carville is not working on the campaign. Wofford is facing an unknown challenger–Congressman Rick Santorum. No one, absolutely no one, is giving Santorum a chance of winning. In fact, Santorum is given less chance of winning than Wofford was given in 1991.
What happens next shocks not only the nation, but PA as a whole. Not only does the Republican Party and the Contract with America sweep the midterm elections in 1994, but Santorum runs unexpectedly strongly and defeats Wofford narrowly to win election to the United States Senate.
Part of the problem with Sen. Wofford is that he is intellectual, aloof and takes re-election for granted, whereas Santorum is hard-working, engaged, personable and likeable. The rest of the problem is that Santorum is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and a church-going fellow, whereas Sen. Wofford is a Northeast liberal who is none of these things–consequently it is Santorum who fits the mold of what PA voters want in their candidate (except for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia). However, since Santorum is FROM PITTSBURGH, the Western Part of the State votes for Santorum, especially as Wofford is from the Eastern Part of the State, thus negating any liberal sentiment emanating from Allegheny County.
Sen. Santorum wins re-election in 2000, and actually runs better in PA than does Pres. Bush, who loses the national popular vote as well as the popular vote and electoral vote in PA, while Santorum wins his election in PA, in effect demonstrating that Santorum as of 2000 is more popular than President Bush.
Now we fast forward to 2006, and to the election Santorum lost for Senate by a considerable margin, to Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.
Let’s examine why he lost this election.
First, Bob Casey, Jr. was and is the son of a popular, two term Governor of PA who was known throughout the state. Second, Bob Casey, Jr. was from a prominent Irish-Catholic political family as well-known in PA as the Kennedys’ are known in Massachusetts and nationally. According to wikipedia:
“Casey was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one of eight children of Ellen (née Harding) and Bob Casey, the 42nd governor of Pennsylvania. He is of Irish descent on both his mother’s[citation needed]and father’s side. Casey played basketball and graduated from Scranton Preparatory School in 1978. Following in his father’s footsteps, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1982, and received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in 1988. Between both college and law school, Casey served as a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and spent a year teaching 5th grade and coaching basketball at the Gesu School in inner city Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Casey practiced law in Scranton from 1991 until 1996.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Casey,_Jr.
This is the most perfect Jesuit, Irish-Catholic resume you could possibly have for running for office in PA–Scranton Prep, Holy Cross, Catholic University, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and a year teaching at an inner city catholic mission school in Philadelphia. Sen. Casey is just the most perfect catholic prepster ever.
Next, Casey is pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, and as we see above, a church-going catholic just like Santorum–in fact, he’s Irish-Catholic, as opposed to Italian-Catholic, which in PA, is a real advantage politically, just as it is in Massachusetts and nationally.
Consequently, the same wedge issues that HELPED Santorum win in 1994 and 2000–the issues that appealed to the “Alabama” parts of PA that are pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, and church-going and conservative on social issues–were of no use running against Bob Casey, Jr. because Casey, if anything, ran to the right of Santorum on all those issues. As noted by Casey’s wiki bio:
“In the Democratic primary, Casey faced two Democrats with more liberal viewpoints: college professor Chuck Pennacchio and pension lawyer Alan Sandals. Both argued that Casey’s views on abortion and other social issues were too conservative for most Pennsylvania Democrats. However, Casey easily defeated both challengers in the May 16 primary, receiving 85% of the vote….Abortion….Casey, like his father did, identifies as pro-life. He has publicly stated his support for overturning Roe v. Wade.[29] From Casey’s election until Specter’s party switch in April 2009, Pennsylvania had the distinction of being represented in the Senate by a self-identified pro-life Democrat and a pro-choice Republican (Arlen Specter). He supports the Pregnant Women Support Act,[30] legislation that grew out of Democrats for Life of America‘s 95-10 Initiative. The Initiative and the Pregnant Women Support Act seek to reduce the abortion rate by providing support to women in unplanned pregnancies. He expressed support for the confirmation of both John Roberts[31] and Samuel Alito[32] for seats on the Supreme Court of the United States; these judges are believed to be in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. Casey also opposes the funding of embryonic stem-cell research.[33] However, Casey voted against barring HHS grants to organizations that provide abortion services, though such services may often not be central to the organization’s chief purpose.[34] Casey also supports over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception,[35] and has voted to overturn the Mexico City policy, which bars the issuance of federal funds to overseas organizations that perform or refer for abortions.[36] The authenticity of Casey’s pro-life commitment has been questioned by some prolife sources.[36][37] In January 2010, a writer for CBN wrote, “I wouldn’t want to be Senator Bob Casey right about now. He is coming under enormous pressure from pro-life groups because they say the ‘Pro-life’ Democratic Senator has not stood strong on the abortion issue during the current healthcare debate.” Casey, according to the CBN writer, had recently gotten “an earful and then some from pro-lifers during a press conference held at the Pennsylvania Capitol.”[38] ….”
Id. Clearly, Casey ran to the RIGHT of both of his Democratic primary opponents, and then ran to the RIGHT of Santorum in the general election on the social issues, not to the LEFT as his past opponents had done. Casey was like the Democratic Santorum–only smarter, more conservative, more polished, and a better version, and even more socially conservative and catholic than Santorum was. Casey ran to the RIGHT of Santorum on the social issues, but to the LEFT of Santorum on the bread and butter, economic and labor issues.
This makes Casey’s election to the US Senate in 2006 very unique among all of the elections in 2006, even though it is clear that 2006 generally trended Democratic and it is pretty likely that Santorum faced an uphill battle in any event even if Casey had run as a traditional liberal. But Casey was no traditional liberal. No one on the editorial staff of the Huffington Post or the New York Times would endorse him for national office if they truly understood either his positions, or the positions of the PA electorate. In truth, the PA electorate holds positions at variance with the Northeast liberal elite and the West Coast elite, excepting Philadelphia, State College and Pittsburgh.
The results of Casey’s strategies were very clear; he ran well to the right of Santorum on social issues, but ran as a Democrat on union and bread and butter economic issues, while still remaining pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-life, pro-church, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and pro-adoption.
In short, there isn’t a bucket’s worth of warm spit’s difference between these two candidates on women’s issues at all. In fact, PA has NEVER elected a women to the United States Senate. Ever. Not even close to ever.
Only two women have even been nominated to run for US Senate in PA History and both have lost, one back in 1964, and more recently Lynn Yeakel, who lost a relatively close race to incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter following the Anita Hill hearings in the 1990s, but still she lost and then rapidly faded from sight and power.
PA is clearly not a state conducive either to women’s issues or to women running for office. PA has never had a female governor, a female senator and only rarely has it had female congresspersons. According to the Huffington Post, as of 2009, there were only two women in its entire Congressional Delegation. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/senate-guru/pa-sen-the-potential-demo_b_187357.html. It is astonishing how limited women are in political power in PA.
PA is well to the right of NJ, NY, DE and all the other northeastern states with regards to women’s issues and specifically women’s reproductive health issues. The state legislature is overwhelmingly dominated by men, especially religious and catholic men, and the men who serve there are openly sexist and demeaning towards women who serve in the legislature and create what is in effect a hostile work environment for women who are elected and choose to serve their constituents there. Recently, one of the houses of the PA Legislature voted 2012 “The Year of the Bible” by nearly unanimous resolution, while also simultaneously voting to cut student financial aid and aid to all state universities by more than one-third in the very same session that they also authorized tens of millions of dollars to hire replacement football coaches to take over for Joe Paterno at Penn State. Apparently male legislators have their priorities in PA. And first rate Division I football in Happy Valley is really far higher of a priority than education for the poor or the middle class, apparently.
Sad to say, often the same holds true in many of the rural county courtrooms as well as many of the appellate courts, although there at least in the past few years, some progress has been made. However, in the major law firms of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, men hold by far the reins of power and women simply do not have any share of either the partner proceeds or the political shares of power that lead to business and partner revenues.
In short, it is a boy’s club, and often, a man’s only club in PA, notwithstanding the lip service paid to equality and opportunity. Things in PA are NOTHING like NYC or Boston or DC. They are backwards by at least twenty to forty years. Many of the female partners who do make it in Philly prefer working over in New Jersey or up in NYC whenever possible–they find PA courts and clients to be very stifling and sexist in the extreme, and in any case most of the business is elsewhere.
Perhaps the reader imagines this is exaggeration, or opinion? Let us introduce some evidence!
This is an actual example of tactices used against a female candidate for office in Allentown PA reported in the Huffington Post which occurred in 2006 and again in 2008:
“When she ran for mayor of Allentown, PA in 2001, Siobhan “Sam” Bennett was already well-known in her hometown. A former PTA president, she was a pillar of the community, having founded, led, or served on the boards of various civic organizations. So she was completely taken aback by what happened during her first stump speech as a mayoral candidate. Standing before a room full of men, she began to deliver her remarks when the chair of the meeting interrupted her with a totally bizarre and inappropriate request: “Sam, I want to ask a question all the men in this room have been dying to ask you: Just what are your measurements?”
As Bennett wrote in the Huffington Post:
I was in disbelief. And if this wasn’t bad enough, a reporter who witnessed this unabashed display of sexism wrote an article about that stump speech–and didn’t even mention the incident.Unfortunately, that experience was only a hint of what would come my way….
The Opposition’s Vehemence
What came her way when she ran for Congress in 2008 was far worse. Bennett was facing a possible challenger in Pennsylvania State Senator Lisa Boscola, and Boscola’s chief of staff, Bernie Kieklak, was well known in political circles for posting no-holds-barred commentary in local blogs. The remarks he let fly about Bennett at one online site are indicative of the level of sexism and misogyny many women candidates face.
To convey the intensity of Kieklak’s over-the-top sexism regarding Bennett and his extreme vulgarity, his comments are reproduced in their entirety below with minimal censorship: Sammy Bennett is a phony political w_____e who gives good h_____d and makes cheap, blatant political opportunists look like Mother F***ing Teresa. Even her p___y is made of plastic.” [sic] [offensive language edited].”
Truly shocking, abusive behavior towards a female politician. But run of the mill for PA, sad to say. Welcome to the training grounds of Sens. Santorum, Casey et al.
In short, to be successful in politics as a female in PA, you have to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but about ten times as good as a man, and have a hide made of armor plated kevlar. Morever, many notable male politicians (including a prominent past governor) are well-known for their womanizing and aggrandizing tactics towards females, which can most generously be characterized as “Clintonesque”. Even though these matters have been reported, still they go on.
This is the environment from which both Sens. Santorum and Casey have emerged and from which they ran for office.
Here was the result of Sen. Casey’s running to the right of Sen. Santorum on Social Issues according to Sen. Casey’s wiki bio:
“On election night, Casey won the race with 59% of the vote, compared to 41% for incumbent Senator Rick Santorum. Casey’s margin of victory was the highest ever for a Democrat running for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania.[11]Casey’s 17.4-point victory margin was the largest victory margin for a challenger to an incumbent Senator since James Abdnor unseated George McGovern by 18.8 points in 1980.”
Id. However, the bio goes on to note that as Casey’s re-election approaches this year, he is beginning to distance himself openly from President Obama again in order to appeal to the conservative PA electorate, particularly with his blue-collar base in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton (Luzerne & Lackawanna Counties) who are very upset with the President’s performance on economic issues:
“Casey is up for re-election in 2012, and has stated that he intends to seek a second term in the Senate.[12][13] His re-election prospects are uncertain. Observers have noted that as the election approaches, Casey, an early supporter of Obama, has “started to oppose the president outright or developed more nuanced responses to events that differentiate him from Mr. Obama. Analysts say Mr. Casey wants to put some distance between himself and a president whose job approval ratings in Pennsylvania are poor.”[14] In October 2011, the National Journal noted that “the Scranton area is hugely important for 2012” for both Obama and Casey, but “the city has among the worst unemployment in the state, and it’s filled with the blue-collar Dems who weren’t very enthusiastic about Obama when he first ran for president. How Casey navigates his relationship with the president will speak volumes about his re-election prospects.”[15]“
One cannot get away from one’s positions–a candidate is what a candidate espouses. Sen. Santorum, like Sen. Casey, is a warm, charming and personable fellow. Both are married with a number of kids–Casey has four kids, and Santorum has even more, and both their wives are full time stay at home moms. Because that’s what they believe in, for the most part. That moms and wives should stay at home and take care of the kids, that is. And both of them are pro-gun, pro-second amendment, pro-death penalty, pro-life, pro-catholic, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, pro-adoption, and so on. Indeed, it is very difficult to measure their differences on women’s issues or women’s health issues at all.
This addresses the issues, as opposed to attacking ad hominem or creating a straw man. These candidates have espoused their positions and come to be what they are in large part, it is theorized and shown here, because of the electorate they spent a good deal of time cultivating–the uniquely conservative PA electorate. Whether appealing to that electorate will work nationally in either Republican primaries or a National Presidential Election remains to be seen. There has not been a President elected from PA since James Buchanan in 1856 (though Eisenhower famously took up residence near Gettysburg after he retired, and was considered an honorary PA resident, and his family still live in PA). Perhaps with good reason.
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MIKE DUKAKIS SKIPPED OVER FOR KENNEDY HACK PAUL KIRK TO SERVE AS MASS INTERIM SENATOR
September 18, 2009
according to all available published reports, former Mass. Gov. and 1988 Democratic Presidential Candidate MICHAEL “MIKE” DUKAKIS was the odds on favorite to be the interim appointment to the late sen. ted kennedy’s senate seat in massachusetts to fill the seat from now until a special election can be held in january of 2010.
Instead, Kennedy Hack and former DNC chairm Paul Kirk got the job. A less inspiring choice could not have been imagined. Paul Kirk is basically a Kennedy in all but name. This shows that the Kennedys continue to control Massachusetts Democratic Party Politics to an unhealth degree.
the seat is crucial to pres. obama’s chances at health care reform.
I believe overlooking Gov. Dukakis was a big mistake. The party should have taken the time to honor him with the appointment. Kirk has never been elected to anything, hardly. Gov. Dukakis not only ran for president, but was a former three time Gov. of Mass.
I know Gov. Dukakis pretty well, as I sat on his national finance committee in 1987-88 and also studied with him at harvard’s kennedy school back in the day, and have kept up with him over the years. he teaches in the fall at northeastern and in the spring at ucla, both schools he teaches political science and public policy.
he’s still the same down the earth, scrupulously ethical man he was 21 years ago. he walks to work, takes the trolley or subway, and is in excellent health. he’ll probably live to be a hundred.
his students adore him and he’s never once become a lobbyist or taken a dime from special interests, or written a book to cash in on his few minutes of fame. instead, he lives a quiet life dedicated to his family and to teaching the young, encouraging them all to public service.
he would have been a good president. he served the people of massachusetts an unprecedented three terms as governor, still the all time record for that state.
if he does get this appointment, it will be a real honor for him. i always thought the party failed to properly support him in 1988 but now they need him badly.
and, lest we forget, in 1988, Dukakis destroyed Al Gore and Jesse Jackson in the democratic primaries, and was up 20 points on George Bush senior in the polls as of the Democratic convention. Al Gore ran so badly against Dukakis he didn’t run for president again until 2000, that’s how bad a whipping Dukakis gave him.
I always thought Dukakis’ main mistake was attaching Bentsen to the ticket–John Glenn, the former astronaut and senator from Ohio would have been a better choice. First, they needed ohio to win, and second, ohio was in play whereas texas was not. third, glenn really, really wanted the job.
i’ll never forgot seeing john glenn speak at the convention in 1988–he really still seemed to have the “right stuff”, just like the movie. i’d of trusted him with the space capsule, rocket and all. i could see why JFK liked hanging out with him. there was nothing phony or fake about john glenn. he was a true american hero.
dukakis-glenn might have been the winning ticket in 1988.
this is probably as good a time as any to point out that “DOUKAS” (which means duke or leader) is the name of at least one and possibly two royal aristocratic byzantine families which served in high positions, and even emperor, in the eastern roman empire. “Doukakis” “dukakis” means literally, “small duke” or “small doukas”, and so the etymology of Dukakis’ name suggests that he is of royal blood; moreover, his family is from Asia Minor, which is of course, the home of the Byzantine royal families.
I believe that Michael Dukakis is descended of the royal blood of the great byzantine families of the Doukas family. His leadership skills evidence this.
here are some details about the DOUKAS family:
Doukas or Ducas (Greek: Δούκας; fem. Doukaina or Ducaena, Δούκαινα; pl. Doukai or Ducae, Δούκαι), from the Latin tile Dux meaning “leader”, is the name of a Byzantine Greek noble family allegedly descended from a cousin of the Roman Emperor Constantine I who had migrated to Constantinople in the 4th century. The family or families using this surname supplied several rulers to the Byzantine Empire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukas
Towards the end of the 10th century there appeared another family of Doukas, which was perhaps connected with the earlier family through the female line and was destined to attain to greater fortune. A member of this family became emperor as Constantine X in 1059, and Constantine’s son Michael VII ruled, nominally in conjunction with his younger brothers, Andronikos and Konstantios, from 1071 to 1078. Michael left a son, Constantine, who reigned nominally alongside his father and then Alexios I Komnenos. The latter married Irene Doukaina, the great-niece of Constantine X and united the Doukai and Komnenoi. Id.
So we see here, that a man named “Michael VII Doukas” ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from 1071 to 1078 AD.
And a man named Michael Dukakis (also spelled Doukakis by some) wanted to rule the American Empire from 1989-1997 AD.
This is really weird stuff. The families have to be related.
But there’s more to the Doukas saga:
In 1204 Alexius Doukas, called Mourtzouphlos, deposed the emperor Isaac II Angelos and his son Alexios IV Angelos, and unsuccessfully tried to defend Constantinople against the attacks of the forces of the Fourth Crusade. Later John III Doukas Vatatzes expanded the Empire of Nicaea into Europe and launched it on the road to recovering Constantinople. Nearly a century later one Michael Doukas took a leading part in the civil war between the emperors John V Palaiologos and John VI Kantakouzenos, and Michael’s grandson was the historian Doukas (see below). Id at website.
whoa, there’s another michael doukas ruling and doing important stuff in byzantine history…but now in the 1300s….
and yet more….
Through the dynastic marriages of the Doukai with other members of the Byzantine nobility, and especially with the Komnenoi, the name Doukas was adopted into several other families, most notably by the relatively low-born Angeloi, Constantine Angelos having married Theodora, the daughter of Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina. One of Constantine’s sons became known as John Doukas and his descendants reigned over Epirus and Thessalonica calling themselves mostly Komnenos Doukas and only rarely Angelos. A branch of this family called itself simply Doukas and reigned in Thessaly. Another Doukas, grandson of Michael, wrote a history on the last decades of the Byzantine Empire and the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Id. at website.
mike’s son is named john dukakis. and here we see that john and michael are the family names of the imperial dukas family. coincidence? you decide.
i bet the kennedys wish they had bloodlines like these.
we’re talking relation to the the ROMAN ARISTOCRATIC RULING FAMILIES OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. and of course, america is the modern roman empire. and mike dukakis came within a hair’s breadth of becoming emperor, president if you will, of this modern roman empire, back in 1988.
what a strange course of events that would have been.
so, we see that the doukas family lasted until the fall of constantinople and beyond….it’s clear that they were intermarried and prolific in producing doukas’ and heirs…so it’s likely that the doukas name continued to the 20th century and that michael dukakis aka doukakis is probably a descendant of one or more members of this royal family. see also http://asiaminor.ehw.gr/Forms/fLemmaBodyExtended.aspx?lemmaID=7855 (article on doukas family name) and in the bryn mawr library, a book by demetrios polemis on the doukai from 1968, http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/search~/?searchtype=X&searcharg=doukai&SORT=D&searchscope=10&search.x=22&search.y=13&search=search, described as
xvi, 228 p. geneal. table. 25 cm
Subject Doukas family
Byzantine Empire — History
Greece — Genealogy
Series University of London historical studies
Note Includes bibliography
ISBN 0485131226
Polemis, Demetrios I
Title The Doukai : a contribution to Byzantine prosopography
Publisher London, Athlone P., 1968
so mike dukakis is more than just a great american or more than just a great greek-american. he may actually be long-lost royalty of a long-lost empire, the eastern roman empire of constantinople, descendant of an emperor who ruled in the same name almost a thousand years ago in the most magnificent city on the earth.
–art kyriazis, philly
home of the world champion phillies
The Christian East
August 4, 2009
The Pope recently took a tour of the Middle East. He might have stopped at Jerusalem and some other holy cities as well. He made a number of speeches about Christians and Muslims and Jews getting along, and then got on his way.
This was all dutifully covered by the news organizations.
Forgotten by all but scholars and bookworms, is the fact that for the most part, Christians in the Middle East and Near East are anything but Catholics. The Assyrian Church or Church of the Near East, which up through the 15th Century used to command millions of followers, continues to have followers in Iran and Iraq; the Coptic Orthodox Church is the dominant Christian Church in Egypt, and its followers are the original Eqyptians, the ones who built the pyramids (the muslim Egyptians are Arabs and Mamluks; Coptic is a version of spoken hieratic ancient Egyptian); the Lebanese are pretty evenly split between the Orthodox (eastern church) and the Maronites (western church); the Armenian Orthodox continue to exist in small but significant numbers in Iran as well as the newly formed Armenian Republic; and in the rest of the near East, notwithstanding the wholesale expulsions of Armenian and Greek Orthodox by the Ottomans in 1923, Orthodox Christians far outnumber Catholics everywhere in the Middle East and Near East.
This is why when scholars and bookworms speak of the East, they speak of the “Christian East.”
Secondly, the catholic presence in the Middle East was first introduced by the several Crusades, beginning in 1096 and thereafter, and after their expiration with the last failed crusade at Varna in 1396 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Jesuits continued missionary activities throughout the Middle East, largely on behalf of the French, mainly to convert Orthodox subjects of the Sublime Porte to Catholicism, since it was forbidden to convert Muslims to Orthodoxy.
During the Crusades and thereafter, the Catholic Church set up a series of parallel bishoprics and patriarchates which essentially duplicate the hiearachical structure of the Eastern Orthodox prelates and Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire’s Church as it then stood in 1096 A.D.; if there was a greek patriarch in Antioch, they replaced him with a latin patriarch, if there was a greek patriarch in Jerusalem, they replaced him with a latin patriarch, if there was a greek patriarch in Edessa, they replaced him with a latin patriarch, and so forth ad nauseam.
Consequently, even though the Crusades are long gone (and the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire as well) the dual Eastern Church/Catholic titles (and dual office holders) in the middle east still co-exist, confusingly so. There are still catholic and greek bishops and patriarchs of many middle eastern cities, and they often have fights and squabbles for control of sacred places and relics, most notably over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was commended to the care of the Eastern Orthodox Church by St. Constantine and his mother St. Helena in the 4th Century A.D., which is built over the tomb of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
That these petty fights and squabbles are often mediated by the Arabs (or Jews) who actually own the land in question demonstrates the practical reality that in the Middle East, everyone must really get along; it’s not a hollow truism merely echoed by the Pope as one more speech, but an actual, living fact of living as an oppressed Christian minority in a Muslim land.
To really appreciate the value of being Christian, or simply the value of freedom of religion which we enjoy here in America, one should live as an oppressed Christian minority for a year in a land which is overwhelmingly muslim or otherwise non-christian for a year or two.
It will shed great light on our great freedom of worship here.
art k philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
KOSOVO FIELD OF BLACKBIRDS
June 30, 2009
Kosovo is a land of myth and memory. It was here in the 1300s that three separate battles were fought between the Serbian and Ottoman Empires that would decide whether the Balkan Peninsula would be Christian or Muslim.
This was the heart and glory of medieval orthodox byzantine serbia. all of the famous icons and churches, monasteries and art, that you see in books, are all located in Kosovo.
Now the US wants to give this holy land, holy to the Orthodox Christians, to Muslim Albanians.
I need not remind any of you of what evils have been perpetrated in the name of islam in the past few years, including 9/11.
practically every TV show you see nowadays shows you muslim albanian gangsters up to no good either here in or europe.
yet smart people call for the independence of kosovo;
YIELDING TO BALKAN REALITY
Amid the unraveling of Yugoslavia that began in the early 1990s, the United States and its European allies have staunchly defended multiethnic society in the Balkans. The military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, the ongoing peacekeeping missions there, the hundreds of millions of dollars given annually in economic aid — these sacrifices have been made to preserve the individual states that once constituted a federal Yugoslavia and to prevent bloodshed among the numerous ethnic groups that populate them. Now, however, the time has come to let pragmatism triumph over principle — and move decisively toward independence for Kosovo.
The most important piece of unfinished business in the Balkans is the final status of Kosovo, the southern province of Serbia, which has been under international trusteeship since NATO’s intervention in 1999. Anxious to scale back its obligations in the region and confronted with growing impatience among Kosovo’s population, the international community is finally gearing up for negotiations over Kosovo’s political future, as provided for under UN Security Council Resolution 1244.
Serbs, for whom Kosovo is an ancestral homeland and the site of many important Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries, insist that the area remain under Serbian sovereignty. Broader opposition to separating Kosovo from Serbia stems from concern about the potential precedent that would be set by redrawing boundaries along ethnic lines and the likely impact this move would have on the integrity of the borders of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia.
Nevertheless, harsh realities on the ground make independence for Kosovo the only viable option. In the current state of limbo, relations between the Albanian majority, which is mostly Muslim, and the Serbian minority, which is mostly Orthodox Christian, have reached the boiling point. The Albanian leadership in Pristina, which governs Kosovo in an uneasy partnership with UN authorities, wants nothing to do with Belgrade. Kosovo has already left Serbia’s orbit. And throughout the area, walls of hostility divide ordinary Albanians and Serbs. In spirit as well as fact, multiethnic society is nowhere to be found.
THIS VIEW OF PROF. KUPCHAN’S, THAT KOSOVO SHOULD BE INDEPENDENT, IGNORES 1000 YEARS OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN HISTORY, AND ALSO IGNORES PRESENT MUSLIM JIHADIST AND EXTREMIST REALITIES AND THE POST 9/11 WORLD.
If we create ANOTHER muslim state in the balkans (we already have Albania, and sizeable muslim populations in Bosnian and FYROM, there will be FOUR European states with Muslim minorities.
Wow. Just what we need sandwiched between the Nato states of Greece and Germany–four states where bin Laden can train muslim jihadist terrorists to blow up european terror targets, perhaps starting with the Orthodox shrines to Christianity of Pec and other holy cities of the Serbs, and working their way across Europe to France and Spain.
The Albanians were once a catholic, christian, people but under the Turks they became mercenaries for the muslims.
The albanians have one state already; they don’t need another.
keep kosovo for serbia. autonomy yes, independence no.
–art kyriazis
philly/south jersey
REPLY TO BLOG BY PROF. KARLAN ON BRIAN LEITER’S BLOG
April 10, 2009
I read with interest the following post by Prof. Pamela Karlan to Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports Blog at
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2006/04/high_gpas_at_to.html:
April 19, 2006
High Undergraduate GPAs at Top Law Schools: What Do They Mean and What Are Their Consequences for Legal Education?
Pamela Karlan, a distinguished expert on voting rights and civil procedure at Stanford Law School, writes:
I read, with both interest and a fair amount of distress, the 75th percentile LSAT rankings. The distress came from seeing the staggering 75th percentile GPAs.
These could reflect at least three states of the world, two of them unfortunate. First, and most optimistically, the 40 schools on your list could all be admitting kids with amazing undergraduate academic achievements. (A 3.96 means, for example a student with 34A’s and 2 B+’s as an undergraduate; a 3.85 could mean half A’s and half A-’s.)
Second, the GPA’s could reflect rampant grade inflation at undergraduate institutions. Leave aside the abstract debate over whether the current generation of students is so much abler than its predecessors that good students should never see a grade below A- or B+. Most law schools have mandatory means or curves, and I’m aware of none where that mean is over around 3.4. (Even at the schools that don’t have official means, I would guess the actual mean is no higher than that.) Thus, virtually all law students will have lower, substantially lower, GPA’s in law school than they had in college. (E.g., at my own institution, 25% of the students had GPAs equivalent to what the number 1 student in the normal graduating class is likely to have.) This drop has a number of unfortunate consequences. Many of us are familiar with a huge demoralization effect the day first-semester grades come out and people who’ve been told all their lives that they are “A’s” at everything that’s measured hear for the first time that they’re “B’s.” They give up, and simply float through the remaining five semesters. Many have a self-protective defensive reaction: if the law doesn’t love them, then they distance themselves from it. In addition, at law schools where there are course-selection strategies that allow students to manipulate their GPA’s, students are then drawn not to taking what’s good or useful for them, but rather what’s most likely to boost their GPAs back toward the range they’ve internalized as normal. The high UGPAs mean that many of our students have never really learned to bounce back from academic disappointment (the “C” I got my first semester of college is one of the best things that ever happened to me) and like learning to ride a bicycle, it’s harder to learn that the older you get.
Third, to get those astronomical UGPA’s, students necessarily had to be either (a) extraordinary across the board for their entire undergraduate career (the student who bombs the first year of college because she wasn’t yet ready for the work or who was planning to be a physicist before he realized he didn’t have the mathematical ability can’t get one of these sky-high GPAs) or (b) strategic and risk-averse, taking only the kinds of courses in which they’d get A’s, from the time they were 17 or 18 years old. I’d bet it’s more the latter than the former. One of the things I always though the U.S. had over many other advanced countries was that we didn’t expect students to specialize in only what they were good at when they were still teenagers. But in order to get a 3.9 UGPA, students really can’t take things well outside their comparative advantages. Many of us see the consequences of this in what our students do: they’re passive and non-entrepreneurial in their job choices, going to large firms not because that practice particularly attracts them, but because it seems less “risky” right out of law school than going to smaller firms or government jobs. Many of them haven’t exercised their intellectual imaginations in years. Many are in fact not particularly well educated, since the science majors took few writing courses, the humanities people took perhaps one semester of economics and flee any quantitative subject, and the social and hard scientists know no American (let alone world) history at all.
Now, of course, we’re talking here only about the 75th percentile. Perhaps we could find the students who are comfortable with risk, entrepreneurial, academically and intellectually adventurous, and resilient among the other three-quarters of the class. But even the 25th percentile at top 20 schools have staggering UGPAs. And that sets the tone for the student body.
I’m not sure, as long as US News drives so much of the world, that there’s anything to be done. But it’s frustrating if what we’re trying to do is to train imaginative, entrepreneurial, courageous, resilient lawyers with broad perspectives that one of the central criteria for admitting students undermines our chances of doing that.
(end of Prof. Karlan’s comments).
Now I actually knew Pam growing up–she was one of a circle of debaters I knew who grew up debating in connecticut (she went to Hopkins Grammar School and then to Yale) and she’s enjoyed a great deal of success as a law school academic, although she’s way too liberal for my tastes (what law school academic isn’t liberal?).
On the plus side, I don’t think she’s a communist, but if she is, i’m not down with that at all.
My father fought those jerks in the greek civil war, and they were rat bastards, the communists. I can’t believe the democrats are actually meeting with castro in cuba right now.
Anyway, here were my comments in reply to her post:
An addendum to the comment above on grade inflation and test scores.
1) it is well-known that the ETS re-normed the SATS, LSATs, GREs and MCATs at least one standard deviation approximately sixteen years ago. Consequently, our generation of the 1970s and 1980s had a mean on the SAT and other standardized tests that was one standardized deviation higher than the current generation of students–our IQ in short, averaged around 100, while theirs literally averages 85. If you pin the bell curve tail on the donkey, that makes the top 1/2 % of the current generation dumber than the top five % of the previous generation.
So the students aren’t getting smarter, they’re getting dumber. That’s what renorming the test means.
I worked teaching all of the standardized tests for more than twenty years and wrote the pilot materials for the LSAT for Princeton Review in the early 1990s.
2) Grade inflation ain’t so except in the courses where professors are giving easy grades. At colleges that are conservative like Drexel, William and Mary, Hamilton, and so forth, grades are given out fairly and with rigor. It’s at some of the humanities departments that standards have fallen, and as certain classics and history professors have noted, along with scholarship–you can hardly find an actual greek, latin or byzantine professor today in a major ivy league university. When I visited Harvard, Prof. Finley was lecturing on Ancient Athens. Today, you’re more likely to hear some humanities teacher deconstructing gender based issues in some unknown text from last week, or worse still, deconstructing something from the internet.
3) TV, the internet, cellphones and laptops have definitively made current law students stupider. They don’t know how to write, they don’t know how to read books, and their research skills are shallow and poor. Most important, they lack the skill of memorization. I used to know where every single book was in certain law libraries, just as I knew where they were in huge undergrad libraries for years. That was a lot more useful skill than Boolean searches, which are not a thorough method of seeking out facts unless you already know the subject matter at hand.
4) Westlaw and Lexis led us to the horror that is Google.
5) Google is driving the book and newspaper out of existence, leading us to a famous Asimov short story of science fiction in which (in the near future) everyone forgets how to read and do math because computers do it for us–until a nuclear war destroys the machines and we become helpless, until one day a boy re-discovers how to do math by hand, and is proclaimed a genius.
This is the orwellian place we are all headed.
In addition to the foregoing comments, I would have also pointed out that Prof. Karlan’s basic point is wrong.
She assumes that students get high grades in college, and then come to Stanford Law and get lower grades because the competition is tougher.
This is actually ass backwards. I know Pam from when she was 18 and kicking back beers at college debate tournaments, so I know she likes to pontificate without factual basis from time to time, so here are some facts;
1) except for the top ten law schools, most law school applicants don’t have a 3.90 GPA or a very high LSAT. The vast majority of law students and lawyers are trained at 2d, 3d and 4th quartile schools as rated by US News and World Report rankings, or at local state law schools. Those students make up the vast majority of the bar.
2) students who go to Stanford, Yale, Harvard law schools only rarely practice law in the “real”world. They usually become law professors, judges, politicians etc. or work for rarified law firms. It’s unusual to see these folks work with actual clients or appear in actual courtrooms. Pam is a perfect example of this. She’s spent her life in the classroom, not in the real world.
3) Pam admits to getting a C or two at Yale, and I admit to that with Harvard. Because those schools were hard, back in the day. They were not easy, there was no grade inflation and the competition was brutal in most of the classes. Plus I was a premed on the side. So my GPA in college was nothing pretty, although it was definitely higher than a B average and i was recommended for honors, had a cum laude on my thesis and a summa on my general exam.
4) When I went to law school, after working a while, I thought it was MUCH EASIER than college. To be honest, I barely cracked a book open, worked forty hours a week at law firms collecting cold hard cash, and found the work at law school to be trivial. It was in law school that i got racks of As and only a couple of Bs. It was funny how many As I got. I won Am Jur Awards and Best Paper Awards (best grade in my class) every single semester I was in law school. It became like a joke how smart I was in law school, and yet, I really wasn’t working 1/8th as hard as I did in college.
Consequently, I don’t really know what Pam is talking about, not at all. My grades were disappointing to me in college but I worked my ass off to get them; but my grades in law school were terrific, and I hardly broke a sweat.
Next, as far as training law students to be imaginative, entrepreneurial or creative, I think that’s a deeply flawed and dangerous thing to do.
The last thing I as a businessman want my lawyer to be is creative, imaginative or entrepreneurial. I want my lawyer to be a lawyer, that is, an unimaginative little nebbish who grinds out papers and hands them to my enemy at 5pm on friday afternoon, or gets deals done by smiling and being at peace and harmony with everyone in the bar.
Creativity, imagination and entrepreneurship, I’m afraid, is reserved for the Schumpeterians of the world, that is to say, the guys at Business School, and that’s why Wharton has a Center for Entrepreneurship, and why I and my colleagues at various Business Schools teach Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity at Business Schools around the North east directly, rather than teaching the stultifying subject of law. Law by its nature cannot be innovative, because it is precedential and must be followed to the letter of the law; whereas an inventor or entrepreneur is not bound by precedent and can be innovative.
I actually find Pam’s notion of what a good lawyer is to be incomprehensible. A good lawyer should be boring, ethical and should be able to repeat a statute from front to back thirty times in a row. Not creative, not innovative, not entrepreneurial, but efficient like a swiss army knife or a swiss watch. Efficiency and practice make for good lawyering. Also long hours spent learning how to write briefs exactly like everyone else writes them. The last thing you want to do in a brief is to introduce anything new, creative or innovative. Judges hate that. They just want you to follow the 8,000 appellate rules they’ve set forth for how to write the brief.
Good lawyers, then, are basically automatons. Clever and hard working automatons, but robots, essentially. In another century, they will in fact be replaced by AI possessing machines for many of their tasks, I predict. They’re already being outsourced to India for much of their robotic work such as document discovery, which was once thought to require intelligence and training. See my point?
Whereas good businessmen are creative, innovative and entrepreneurial.
5) A logic, rhetoric, oratory, philosophy background gets you through law school very easily; math and science make it trivial. All law problems are basically logic puzzles, and all law essays are basically debate/oratory speeches made in a philsophy manner of analyzing each question from both sides. This was perfectly normal to me. Undergrad teachers kept trying to make a marxist out of me, so they didn’t like my impartiality. Law professors loved it.
6) Law exams are graded without your name on the paper. No favoritism can creep into the grading. Undergrad is rife with favoritism and bias towards certain undergrads that the professors play favorites towards.
7) My friend NS who went to school with Pam at Yale thought Stanford Law was a joke after Yale undergrad; he thought it was a vacation. We used to get together frequently in Cali and hang out. He never seemed to work too hard.
8) My friend DB who went to harvard with me and then to Stanford Med thought Stanford Law was a joke after harvard undergrad and stanford med. He worked 40 hours at a top patent firm and saved all his money. Again, he had plenty of free time, he hardly worked at law school.
9) Law Schools should require all incoming students to study the following;
semester of logic, semster of intro to western philosophy
semester of oratory/rhetoric/speech
do two semesters of competitive speech/rhetoric/debate/parli
do two semesters of mock trial
spend a summer working at a law firm
spend a summer working at legal aid
spend a summer working for a judge
spend two years minimum working in business or somewhere between college and law school. The armed forces would be the best of all.
give preferential admission to army veterans, ROTC and reservists and end their anti-military culture.
sharply curtail the number of attorneys taking the bar nationally. End all state bars and apply one national bar, and only pass around 5,000 persons into it annually, and make them travel to one of three reginal centers nationally to take the exam, such as SF, CA, Chicago and New York, and only give the exam once a year.
Require proficiency in Spanish for ALL attorneys, since Spanish is required to speak to most clients on both coasts.
10) Science and business grad school were much more challenging and interesting than law school or undergrad. I would NEVER recommend to my own children to attend law school, maybe take a law class in business school, but not attend law school. The best combination out there today is the MD-MBA combined program, which I think is ideal in today’s economy.
These are some of the practical changes I would make to the legal eduction process.
I would probably close all but a handful of the existing law schools in the united states. Or, perhaps, people could obtain law degrees for reasons other than being a lawyer–for academic or scholarly purposes, as in europe, but not to be a lawyer or to make money. I’d convert a lot of the programs to MBA programs, actually.
we have way too many lawyers in this country and we need to reform the legal profession, reform tort law, and sharply regulate the profession before it drives all of the doctors, drug makers and other competent businessmen out of this country for good.
One final note, and this is about Pam’s constitutional law book, which she authored with Cass Sunstein, Mark & Rebecca Tushnet, Louis Seidman & Geoffrey Stone. This casebook has been ranked one out of five stars by nearly everyone who ranked it on Amazon dot com. I happen to be a fan of Pam, of Cass Sunstein (except for his dumping Martha Nussbaum, who I’m a bigger fan of, for that stupid Irish younger woman professor at Harvard who’s the big Obama fan) and I really am a big fan of Mark and Rebecca Tushnet–Rebecca was one of Harvard’s best debaters ever in the 1990s–and Mark is a very smart guy–but apparently brains doesn’t mean you can write a casebook as good as Larry Tribe’s.
Here’s a sample comment from Amazon dot com;
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Casebook, December 13, 2008
By kiki (Baltimore, MD) – See all my reviews
It’s a casebook, so it’s not supposed to be great reading, but this one is by far the worst casebook I’ve ever had. The only thing a casebook needs to do to achieve mediocrity is contain cases. This doesn’t, not really. It gives you the cliff’s notes of important cases. One sentence blurbs about others. And pages and pages of rambling, aimless, academic debate. It may be a good book for Con Law professors and others who have already read all of the cases discussed. For someone trying to learn con law, it is useless. It is also organized very poorly. Any class organized around this book is doomed from the start. If your professor uses this book, take another class. If you can’t take another class, buy the Chemerinsky treatise and rely on that instead. Professors: DO NOT USE THIS BOOK.
the website address is above, if you want to check out the remarks and the book yourself. Perhaps there will be a revised edition. I realize that Pam writes and talks a lot. As I said, part of her strength, and her weakness, is that she talks and writes too much, and perhaps she spreads herself a little thin.
When I was a litigator, I litigated civil rights matters in the trenches, and won them. It’s not as hard as it seems. You need to have a firm grasp of the history of the United States from 1776 through about 1900 to understand the reconstruction and civil war era, in order to make some sense of what the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments mean.
I actually think Justice Scalia had some pertinent remarks on US v. Cruikshank in the recent gun rights case. He noted that the US Supreme Court in that 1874 case took the right of bearing arms away from african american militia men under the second amendment, because of white supremacist views which were going on at the time. the dispute was that armed militias of african americans and republicans were fighting ku klux klansmen in Mississippi and elsewhere in the south, and the african american plaintiffs claimed a second amendment right to bear arms as a militia.
The US Supreme Court said no, that’s only a federal right against the federal government, not against the states, ignoring incorporation under the 14th amendment.
Scalia basically says now that Cruikshank was wrong, and that african americans had the right to arm themselves as a militia in 1874 and defend themselves against the Klan in the 1870s.
I think that’s an interesting point of view. Of course, an armchair liberal like Karlan would never consider that Scalia would have anything interesting to say.
But here at the Sophist, we think there are two sides to every question.
–art kyriazis
philly/nj home of the world champion phillies
–art kyriazis
HAPPY EASTER AND PASSOVER TO ALL
April 7, 2009
I wanted to wish a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover to all.
There’s an old joke, that goes something like this. A liberal is arguing with a conservative about the death penalty. Finally, exasperated, the conservative says to the liberal, “of course I’m in favor of the death penalty–without the death penalty, there’d be no Easter and no Easter Bunny!”
While this is an awful joke, it does remain true that in the two major capital punishment trials that we know about in history, Socrates and Jesus, as best we know, both were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. I won’t even get to the OJ trial, although as we all know, the glove didn’t fit and they had to acquit.
Obviously Socrates and Jesus could have used Johnny Cochran as their lawyer.
Socrates on dying, was reputed to have said something like, I die, you live, god knows who is going to the better place. Those of us who are religious of course believe that death brings us closer to a better place indeed, but Socrates provides a flash of insight that this short life is not the only one, that there is a spiritual and inner life that transcends death. Religion ministers to the soul, or at least to our conception of the soul, and consequently it is a vital part of our lives.
The Passover story about Moses leading the chosen people out of bondage and out of Egypt is a great story, as well as being an integral part of the old testament. “Exodus” is actually ancient greek for “Exothos” or “Exit” or “Leaving”. It’s the title of the book from the Ancient Greek Septuagint. The entire point of Exodus is the story of the Chosen People Leaving, “Exothos”, from Egypt and their bondage. God frees them from slavery and bondage through Moses and a series of miracles, each one greater than the last, which are celebrated each and every Passover.
It is such an important story because it gives hope to every oppressed peoples that God will redeem every one in bondage, free them and lead them to their own Promised Land. When Martin Luther King spoke of reaching the Promised Land, it was the Passover Story he was referring to. He didn’t need to explain that to his listeners, many of whom were careful Bible readers. The African-Americans of this country understood about bondage, redemption, and being led out of bondage and to the Promised Land.
On this Passover, we should think about these matters in considering President Obama, a man who has the potential to unite many different elements of society, and perhaps finally lead a people to the Promised Land. All oppressed peoples the world over hearken to the story of Exodus.
I’ve always had a strong faith in God and I don’t doubt God’s existence. Recently there’s been a spate of books and articles by respected scholars advocating atheism and the non-existence of God. I find this to be an awful waste of scholarly time, and especially of taxpayer and endowment money. Isn’t there something important these guys should be doing on our nickel?
Richard Dawkins, who once wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene,” is one of these. He used to teach at Harvard, now teaches in England, and appears to enjoy bashing God and religion in his books. Dawkins used to be a capable biologist. In his old age, he’s turned into a menacing crank who hates old ladies who go to church and pray to the saints and God for the memories of their dead husbands.
How mean can you possible get?
You might call him “The Selfish Dean” because he really seems only to care about himself. Is this what tenure breeds? Idiotic books about atheism? Pushed on us by editors and publishing houses?
Belief in God is a personal matter, but it also means a commitment to others, and to doing things for others, without considering the personal benefit to yourself. Sitting around the table at Easter, at Seder, at any family gathering, we give thanks to our creator and Lord for family, for health, for happiness. I can’t imagine a life without God or without prayer, a life without church or without friends from church or the church community.
I’ve looked at Dawkins’ books on atheism. They are poorly written, poorly argued, and basically are rants.
It’s not a careful argument.
A careful argument, for example, would be Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles, or Martin Luther’s 95 Theses against the Catholic Church, or John Calvin’s immense work of theology criticizing the Roman Catholic Church and setting forth the tenets of Calvinism.
Those are careful and thoughtful books, which make their cases carefully, point by point.
Dawkins’ books by contrast are awful and poorly researched and poorly written. It’s embarassing to see a professor publish such awful work. Especially when he was able while younger to write such a good book on biology as “The Selfish Gene.” It’s readily apparent Dawkins’ writing and intellectual skills have sharply declined with age.
But assuming that Dawkins (and any of these other atheists) has/have any rational or reasonable points to make, I’d like to refute them with Pascal’s Wager, for one. I think Dawkins is already refuted by the Transcendental a priori arguments of Kant for God’s existence, but Blaise Pascal made a classic probability argument which is, in fact, irrefutable on mathematical and utility grounds, for God’s existence.
Pascal said you should believe in God, because if you did, even if there was only a 1 in a million chance of his existence, the benefits would be eternal salvation, whereas if you denied Him, the possible harm would be eternal damnation.
Consequently, it’s a lot like the nuclear calculus–the benefits are so great, that even if there’s only a slight chance of God existing, it’s worth going all in on God. If you win, you get eternal salvation forever. (the nukes argument goes like, if there’s a one in a million chance of starting World War III, the harm is so great, you have to avoid it, because it’s nuclear winter and the death of mankind, so the policy can’t be adopted).
If you lose the wager, you burn in hell forever. I kind of envision Dawkins burning in a really hot part of hell, by the way. The part where they keep Bernie Madoff, child molesters, child molesting catholic priests and every single convicted defendant whose story was the real basis for the plot line of a LAW AND ORDER:SVU episode. Those stories are really pretty awful. This is a digression, but it’s hard to believe that’s Jayne Mansfield’s daughter in that show, by the way. Mariska Hargitay, emmy winning actress, now approximately in her mid-40s, and still very beautiful, is the daughter of Mickey Hargitay (a former Mr. Universe) and Jayne Mansfield, the 1950s starlet/sex bomb. I think you’d have to say that Mariska Hargitay has really had a solid acting career.
As for all of those who doubt God’s existence or lack faith in God, I give you an extended discusion of Pascal’s Wager from the Stanford Encylopaedia of Philosophy.
Pascal’s Wager
By Alan Hajek, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Pascal’s Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as “Pascal’s Wager”. We find in it the extraordinary confluence of several strands in intellectual thought: the justification of theism; probability theory and decision theory, used here for almost the first time in history; pragmatism; voluntarism (the thesis that belief is a matter of the will); and the use of the concept of infinity.
We will begin with some brief stage-setting: some historical background, some of the basics of decision theory, and some of the exegetical problems that the Pensées pose. Then we will follow the text to extract three main arguments. The bulk of the literature addresses the third of these arguments, as will the bulk of our discussion here. Some of the more technical and scholarly aspects of our discussion will be relegated to lengthy footnotes, to which there are links for the interested reader. All quotations are from §233 of Pensées (1910, Trotter translation), the ‘thought’ whose heading is “Infinite—nothing”.
• 1. Background
• 2. The Argument from Superdominance
• 3. The Argument from Expectation
• 4. The Argument from Generalized Expectations: “Pascal’s Wager”
• 5. Objections to Pascal’s Wager
• Bibliography
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
1. Background
It is important to contrast Pascal’s argument with various putative ‘proofs’ of the existence of God that had come before it. Anselm’s ontological argument, Aquinas’ ‘five ways’, Descartes’ ontological and cosmological arguments, and so on, purport to give a priori demonstrations that God exists. Pascal is apparently unimpressed by such attempted justifications of theism: “Endeavour … to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God…” Indeed, he concedes that “we do not know if He is …”. Pascal’s project, then, is radically different: he seeks to provide prudential reasons for believing in God. To put it crudely, we should wager that God exists because it is the best bet. Ryan 1994 finds precursors to this line of reasoning in the writings of Plato, Arnobius, Lactantius, and others; we might add Ghazali to his list — see Palacios 1920. But what is distinctive is Pascal’s explicitly decision theoretic formulation of the reasoning. In fact, Hacking 1975 describes the Wager as “the first well-understood contribution to decision theory” (viii). Thus, we should pause briefly to review some of the basics of that theory.
In any decision problem, the way the world is, and what an agent does, together determine an outcome for the agent. We may assign utilities to such outcomes, numbers that represent the degree to which the agent values them. It is typical to present these numbers in a decision matrix, with the columns corresponding to the various relevant states of the world, and the rows corresponding to the various possible actions that the agent can perform.
In decisions under uncertainty, nothing more is given — in particular, the agent does not assign subjective probabilities to the states of the world. Still, sometimes rationality dictates a unique decision nonetheless. Consider, for example, a case that will be particularly relevant here. Suppose that you have two possible actions, A1 and A2, and the worst outcome associated with A1 is at least as good as the best outcome associated with A2; suppose also that in at least one state of the world, A1′s outcome is strictly better than A2′s. Let us say in that case that A1 superdominates A2. Then rationality surely requires you to perform A1.
In decisions under risk, the agent assigns subjective probabilities to the various states of the world. Assume that the states of the world are independent of what the agent does. A figure of merit called the expected utility, or the expectation of a given action can be calculated by a simple formula: for each state, multiply the utility that the action produces in that state by the state’s probability; then, add these numbers. According to decision theory, rationality requires you to perform the action of maximum expected utility (if there is one).
Example. Suppose that the utility of money is linear in number of dollars: you value money at exactly its face value. Suppose that you have the option of paying a dollar to play a game in which there is an equal chance of returning nothing, and returning three dollars. The expectation of the game itself is
0*(1/2) + 3*(1/2) = 1.5,
so the expectation of paying a dollar for certain, then playing, is
-1 + 1.5 = 0.5.
This exceeds the expectation of not playing (namely 0), so you should play. On the other hand, if the game gave an equal chance of returning nothing, and returning two dollars, then its expectation would be:
0*(1/2) + 2*(1/2) = 1.
Then consistent with decision theory, you could either pay the dollar to play, or refuse to
play, for either way your overall expectation would be 0.
Considerations such as these will play a crucial role in Pascal’s arguments. It should be admitted that there are certain exegetical problems in presenting these arguments. Pascal never finished the Pensées, but rather left them in the form of notes of various sizes pinned together. Hacking 1972 describes the “Infinite—nothing” as consisting of “two pieces of paper covered on both sides by handwriting going in all directions, full of erasures, corrections, insertions, and afterthoughts” (24).[1] This may explain why certain passages are notoriously difficult to interpret, as we will see. Furthermore, our formulation of the arguments in the parlance of modern Bayesian decision theory might appear somewhat anachronistic. For example, Pascal did not distinguish between what we would now call objective and subjective probability, although it is clear that it is the latter that is relevant to his arguments. To some extent, “Pascal’s Wager” now has a life of its own, and our presentation of it here is perfectly standard. Still, we will closely follow Pascal’s text, supporting our reading of his arguments as much as possible.
There is the further problem of dividing the Infinite-nothing into separate arguments. We will locate three arguments that each conclude that rationality requires you to wager for God, although they interleave in the text.[2] Finally, there is some disagreement over just what “wagering for God” involves — is it believing in God, or merely trying to? We will conclude with a discussion of what Pascal meant by this.
2. The Argument from Superdominance
Pascal maintains that we are incapable of knowing whether God exists or not, yet we must “wager” one way or the other. Reason cannot settle which way we should incline, but a consideration of the relevant outcomes supposedly can. Here is the first key passage:
“God is, or He is not.”
But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up… Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, you knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
There are exegetical problems already here, partly because Pascal appears to contradict himself. He speaks of “the true” as something that you can “lose”, and “error” as something “to shun”. Yet he goes on to claim that if you lose the wager that God is, then “you lose nothing”. Surely in that case you “lose the true”, which is just to say that you have made an error. Pascal believes, of course, that the existence of God is “the true” — but that is not something that he can appeal to in this argument. Moreover, it is not because “you must of necessity choose” that “your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other”. Rather, by Pascal’s own account, it is because “[r]eason can decide nothing here”. (If it could, then it might well be shocked — namely, if you chose in a way contrary to it.)
Following McClennen 1994, Pascal’s argument seems to be best captured as presenting the following decision matrix:
God exists God does not exist
Wager for God Gain all Status quo
Wager against God Misery Status quo
Wagering for God superdominates wagering against God: the worst outcome associated with wagering for God (status quo) is at least as good as the best outcome associated with wagering against God (status quo); and if God exists, the result of wagering for God is strictly better that the result of wagering against God.
(The fact that the result is much better does not matter yet.) Pascal draws the conclusion at this point that rationality requires you to wager for God.
Without any assumption about your probability assignment to God’s existence, the argument is invalid. Rationality does not require you to wager for God if you assign probability 0 to God existing. And Pascal does not explicitly rule this possibility out until a later passage, when he assumes that you assign positive probability to God’s existence; yet this argument is presented as if it is self-contained. His claim that “[r]eason can decide nothing here” may suggest that Pascal regards this as a decision under uncertainty, which is to assume that you do not assign probability at all to God’s existence. If that is a further premise, then the argument is valid; but that premise contradicts his subsequent assumption that you assign positive probability. See McClennen for a reading of this argument as a decision under uncertainty.
Pascal appears to be aware of a further objection to this argument, for he immediately imagines an opponent replying:
“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.”
The thought seems to be that if I wager for God, and God does not exist, then I really do lose something. In fact, Pascal himself speaks of staking something when one wagers for God, which presumably one loses if God does not exist. (We have already mentioned ‘the true’ as one such thing; Pascal also seems to regard one’s worldly life as another.) In other words, the matrix is mistaken in presenting the two outcomes under ‘God does not exist’ as if they were the same, and we do not have a case of superdominance after all.
Pascal addresses this at once in his second argument, which we will discuss only briefly, as it can be thought of as just a prelude to the main argument.
3. The Argument From Expectation
He continues:
Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness.
His hypothetically speaking of “two lives” and “three lives” may strike one as odd. It is helpful to bear in mind Pascal’s interest in gambling (which after all provided the initial motivation for his study of probability) and to take the gambling model quite seriously here. Recall our calculation of the expectations of the two dollar and three dollar gambles. Pascal apparently assumes now that utility is linear in number of lives, that wagering for God costs “one life”, and then reasons analogously to the way we did! This is, as it were, a warm-up. Since wagering for God is rationally required even in the hypothetical case in which one of the prizes is three lives, then all the more it is rationally required in the actual case, in which one of the prizes is eternal life (salvation).
So Pascal has now made two striking assumptions:
(1) The probability of God’s existence is 1/2.
(2) Wagering for God brings infinite reward if God exists.
Morris 1994 is sympathetic to (1), while Hacking 1972 finds it “a monstrous premiss”. It apparently derives from the classical interpretation of probability, according to which all possibilities are given equal weight. Of course, unless more is said, the interpretation yields implausible, and even contradictory results. (You have a one-in-a-million chance of winning the lottery; but either you win the lottery or you don’t, so each of these possibilities has probability 1/2?!) Pascal’s best argument for (1) is presumably that “[r]eason can decide nothing here”. (In the lottery ticket case, reason can decide something.) But it is not clear that complete ignorance should be modeled as sharp indifference. In any case, it is clear that there are people in Pascal’s audience who do not assign probability 1/2 to God’s existence. This argument, then, does not speak to them.
However, Pascal realizes that the value of 1/2 actually plays no real role in the argument, thanks to (2). This brings us to the third, and by far the most important, of his arguments.
4. The Argument From Generalized Expectations: “Pascal’s Wager”
We continue the quotation.
But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all…
Again this passage is difficult to understand completely. Pascal’s talk of winning two, or three, lives is at best misleading. By his own decision theoretic lights, you would not act stupidly “by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you”—in fact, you should not stake more than an infinitesimal amount in that case (an amount that is bigger than 0, but smaller than every positive real number). The point, rather, is that the prospective prize is “an infinity of an infinitely happy life”.
In short, if God exists, then wagering for God results in infinite utility.
What about the utilities for the other possible outcomes? There is some dispute over the utility of “misery”. Hacking interprets this as “damnation”, and Pascal does later speak of “hell” as the outcome in this case. Martin 1983 among others assigns this a value of negative infinity. Sobel 1996, on the other hand, is one author who takes this value to be finite. There is some textual support for this reading: “The justice of God must be vast like His compassion. Now justice to the outcast is less vast … than mercy towards the elect”.
As for the utilities of the outcomes associated with God’s non-existence, Pascal tells us that “what you stake is finite”. This suggests that whatever these values are, they are finite.
Pascal’s guiding insight is that the argument from expectation goes through equally well whatever your probability for God’s existence is, provided that it is non-zero and finite (non-infinitesimal) — “a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss”.[3]
With Pascal’s assumptions about utilities and probabilities in place, he is now in a position to calculate the relevant expectations. He explains how the calculations should proceed:
… the uncertainty of the gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss… [4]
Let us now gather together all of these points into a single argument. We can think of Pascal’s Wager as having three premises: the first concerns the decision matrix of rewards, the second concerns the probability that you should give to God’s existence, and the third is a maxim about rational decision-making. Specifically:
1. Either God exists or God does not exist, and you can either wager for God or wager against God. The utilities of the relevant possible outcomes are as follows, where f1, f2, and f3 are numbers whose values are not specified beyond the requirement that they be finite:
God exists God does not exist
Wager for God ∞ f1
Wager against God f2 f3
2. Rationality requires the probability that you assign to God existing to be positive, and not infinitesimal.
3. Rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility (when there is one).
4. Conclusion 1. Rationality requires you to wager for God.
5. Conclusion 2. You should wager for God.
We have a decision under risk, with probabilities assigned to the relevant ways the world could be, and utilities assigned to the relevant outcomes. The conclusion seems straightforwardly to follow from the usual calculations of expected utility (where p is your positive, non-infinitesimal probability for God’s existence):
E(wager for God) = ∞*p + f1*(1 − p) = ∞
That is, your expected utility of belief in God is infinite as Pascal puts it, “our proposition is of infinite force”. On the other hand, your expected utility of wagering against God is
E(wager against God) = f2*p + f3*(1 − p)
This is finite.[5] By premise 3, rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility.
Therefore, rationality requires you to wager for God.
We now survey some of the main objections to the argument.
5. Objections to Pascal’s Wager
Premise 1: The Decision Matrix
Here the objections are manifold. Most of them can be stated quickly, but we will give special attention to what has generally been regarded as the most important of them, ‘the many Gods objection’ (see also the link to footnote 7).
1. Different matrices for different people.
The argument assumes that the same decision matrix applies to everybody. However, perhaps the relevant rewards are different for different people. Perhaps, for example, there is a predestined infinite reward for the Chosen, whatever they do, and finite utility for the rest, as Mackie 1982 suggests. Or maybe the prospect of salvation appeals more to some people than to others, as Swinburne 1969 has noted.
Even granting that a single 2 x 2 matrix applies to everybody, one might dispute the values that enter into it. This brings us to the next two objections.
2. The utility of salvation could not be infinite.
One might argue that the very notion of infinite utility is suspect — see for example Jeffrey 1983 and McClennen 1994.[6] Hence, the objection continues, whatever the utility of salvation might be, it must be finite. Strict finitists, who are chary of the notion of infinity in general, will agree — see Dummett 1978 and Wright 1987. Or perhaps the notion of infinite utility makes sense, but an infinite reward could only be finitely appreciated by a human being.
3. There should be more than one infinity in the matrix.
There are also critics of the Wager who, far from objecting to infinite utilities, want to see more of them in the matrix. For example, it might be thought that a forgiving God would bestow infinite utility upon wagerers-for and wagerers-against alike — Rescher 1985 is one author who entertains this possibility. Or it might be thought that, on the contrary, wagering against an existent God results in negative infinite utility. (As we have noted, some authors read Pascal himself as saying as much.) Either way, f2 is not really finite at all, but ∞ or -∞ as the case may be. And perhaps f1 and f3 could be ∞ or -∞. Suppose, for instance, that God does not exist, but that we are reincarnated ad infinitum, and that the total utility we receive is an infinite sum that does not converge.
4. The matrix should have more rows.
Perhaps there is more than one way to wager for God, and the rewards that God bestows vary accordingly. For instance, God might not reward infinitely those who strive to believe in Him only for the very mercenary reasons that Pascal gives, as James 1956 has observed. One could also imagine distinguishing belief based on faith from belief based on evidential reasons, and posit different rewards in each case.
6. The matrix should have more columns: the many Gods objection.
If Pascal is really right that reason can decide nothing here, then it would seem that various other theistic hypotheses are also live options. Pascal presumably had in mind the Catholic conception of God — let us suppose that this is the God who either ‘exists’ or ‘does not exist’. By excluded middle, this is a partition. The objection, then, is that the partition is not sufficiently fine-grained, and the ‘(Catholic) God does not exist’ column really subdivides into various other theistic hypotheses. The objection could equally run that Pascal’s argument ‘proves too much’: by parallel reasoning we can ‘show’ that rationality requires believing in various incompatible theistic hypotheses. As Diderot 1875-77 puts the point: “An Imam could reason just as well this way”.[7]
Since then, the point has been represented and refined in various ways. Mackie 1982 writes, “the church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the Anabaptists or the Mormons or the Muslim Sunnis or the worshippers of Kali or of Odin” (203). Cargile 1966 shows just how easy it is to multiply theistic hypotheses: for each real number x, consider the God who prefers contemplating x more than any other activity. It seems, then, that such ‘alternative gods’ are a dime a dozen — or aleph one, for that matter.
Premise 2: The Probability Assigned to God’s Existence
There are four sorts of problem for this premise. The first two are straightforward; the second two are more technical, and can be found by following the link to footnote 8.
1. Undefined probability for God’s existence. Premise 1 presupposes that you should have a probability for God’s existence in the first place. However, perhaps you could rationally fail to assign it a probability — your probability that God exists could remain undefined. We cannot enter here into the thorny issues concerning the attribution of probabilities to agents. But there is some support for this response even in Pascal’s own text, again at the pivotal claim that “[r]eason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up…” The thought could be that any probability assignment is inconsistent with a state of “epistemic nullity” (in Morris’ 1986 phrase): to assign a probability at all — even 1/2 — to God’s existence is to feign having evidence that one in fact totally lacks. For unlike a coin that we know to be fair, this metaphorical ‘coin’ is ‘infinitely far’ from us, hence apparently completely unknown to us. Perhaps, then, rationality actually requires us to refrain from assigning a probability to God’s existence (in which case at least the Argument from Superdominance would be valid). Or perhaps rationality does not require it, but at least permits it. Either way, the Wager would not even get off the ground.
2. Zero probability for God’s existence. Strict atheists may insist on the rationality of a probability assignment of 0, as Oppy 1990 among others points out. For example, they may contend that reason alone can settle that God does not exist, perhaps by arguing that the very notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being is contradictory. Or a Bayesian might hold that rationality places no constraint on probabilistic judgments beyond coherence (or conformity to the probability calculus). Then as long as the strict atheist assigns probability 1 to God’s non-existence alongside his or her assignment of 0 to God’s existence, no norm of rationality has been violated.
Furthermore, an assignment of p = 0 would clearly block the route to Pascal’s conclusion. For then the expectation calculations become:
E(wager for God) = ∞*0 + f1*(1 − 0) = f1
E(wager against God) = f2*0 + f3*(1 − 0) = f3
And nothing in the argument implies that f1 > f3. (Indeed, this inequality is questionable, as even Pascal seems to allow.) In short, Pascal’s wager has no pull on strict atheists.[8]
Premise 3: Rationality Requires Maximizing Expected Etility
Finally, one could question Pascal’s decision theoretic assumption that rationality requires one to perform the act of maximum expected utility (when there is one). Now perhaps this is an analytic truth, in which case we could grant it to Pascal without further discussion — perhaps it is constitutive of rationality to maximize expectation, as some might say. But this premise has met serious objections. The Allais 1953 and Ellsberg 1961 paradoxes, for example, are said to show that maximizing expectation can lead one to perform intuitively sub-optimal actions. So too the St. Petersburg paradox, in which it is supposedly absurd that one should be prepared to pay any finite amount to play a game with infinite expectation. (That paradox is particularly apposite here.)[9]
Finally, one might distinguish between practical rationality and theoretical rationality. One could then concede that practical rationality requires you to maximize expected utility, while insisting that theoretical rationality might require something else of you — say, proportioning belief to the amount of evidence available. This objection is especially relevant, since Pascal admits that perhaps you “must renounce reason” in order to follow his advice. But when these two sides of rationality pull in opposite directions, as they apparently can here, it is not obvious that practical rationality should take precedence. (For a discussion of pragmatic, as opposed to theoretical, reasons for belief, see Foley 1994.)
Is the Argument Valid?
A number of authors who have been otherwise critical of the Wager have explicitly conceded that the Wager is valid — e.g. Mackie 1982, Rescher 1985, Mougin and Sober 1994, and most emphatically, Hacking 1972. That is, these authors agree with Pascal that wagering for God really is rationally mandated by Pascal’s decision matrix in tandem with positive probability for God’s existence, and the decision theoretic account of rational action.
However, Duff 1986 and Hájek 2001 argue that the argument is in fact invalid. Their point is that there are strategies besides wagering for God that also have infinite expectation — namely, mixed strategies, whereby you do not wager for or against God outright, but rather choose which of these actions to perform on the basis of the outcome of some chance device. Consider the mixed strategy: “Toss a fair coin: heads, you wager for God; tails, you wager against God”. By Pascal’s lights, with probability 1/2 your expectation will be infinite, and with probability 1/2 it will be finite. The expectation of the entire strategy is:
1/2*∞ + 1/2[f2*p + f3*(1 − p)] = ∞
That is, the coin toss strategy has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. But the probability 1/2 was incidental to the result. Any mixed strategy that gives positive and finite probability to wagering for God will likewise have infinite expectation: “wager for God iff a fair die lands 6″, “wager for God iff your lottery ticket wins”, “wager for God iff a meteor quantum tunnels its way through the side of your house”, and so on.
The problem is still worse than this, though, for there is a sense in which anything that you do might be regarded as a mixed strategy between wagering for God, and wagering against God, with suitable probability weights given to each. Suppose that you choose to ignore the Wager, and to go and have a hamburger instead. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your winding up wagering for God nonetheless; and this probability multiplied by infinity again gives infinity. So ignoring the Wager and having a hamburger has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. Even worse, suppose that you focus all your energy into avoiding belief in God. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your efforts failing, with the result that you wager for God nonetheless. In that case again, your expectation is infinite again. So even if rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility when there is one, here there isn’t one. Rather, there is a many-way tie for first place, as it were.[10]
Moral Objections to Wagering for God
Let us grant Pascal’s conclusion for the sake of the argument: rationality requires you to wager for God. It still does not obviously follow that you should wager for God. All that we have granted is that one norm — the norm of rationality — prescribes wagering for God. For all that has been said, some other norm might prescribe wagering against God. And unless we can show that the rationality norm trumps the others, we have not settled what we should actually do.
There are several arguments to the effect that morality requires you to wager against God. Pascal himself appears to be aware of one such argument. He admits that if you do not believe in God, his recommended course of action will “deaden your acuteness.” One way of putting the argument is that wagering for God may require you to corrupt yourself, thus violating a Kantian duty to yourself. Clifford 1986 argues that an individual’s believing something on insufficient evidence harms society by promoting credulity. Penelhum 1971 contends that the putative divine plan is itself immoral, condemning as it does honest non-believers to loss of eternal happiness, when such unbelief is in no way culpable; and that to adopt the relevant belief is to be complicit to this immoral plan. See Quinn 1994 for replies to these arguments. For example, against Penelhum he argues that as long as God treats non-believers justly, there is nothing immoral about him bestowing special favor on believers, more perhaps than they deserve. (Note, however, that Pascal leaves open in the Wager whether the payoff for non-believers is just, even though as far as his argument goes, it may be extremely poor.)
Finally, Voltaire protests that there is something unseemly about the whole Wager. He suggests that Pascal’s calculations, and his appeal to self-interest, are unworthy of the gravity of the subject of theistic belief. This does not so much support wagering against God, as dismissing all talk of ‘wagerings’ altogether.
What Does It Mean to “Wager for God”?
Let us now grant Pascal that, all things considered (rationality and morality included), you should wager for God. What exactly does this involve?
A number of authors read Pascal as arguing that you should believe in God — see e.g. Quinn 1994, and Jordan 1994a. But perhaps one cannot simply believe in God at will; and rationality cannot require the impossible. Pascal is well aware of this objection: “[I] am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?”, says his imaginary interlocutor. However, he contends that one can take steps to cultivate such belief:
You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc…
But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.
We find two main pieces of advice to the non-believer here: act like a believer, and suppress those passions that are obstacles to becoming a believer. And these are actions that one can perform at will.
Believing in God is presumably one way to wager for God. This passage suggests that even the non-believer can wager for God, by striving to become a believer. Critics may question the psychology of belief formation that Pascal presupposes, pointing out that one could strive to believe (perhaps by following exactly Pascal’s prescription), yet fail. To this, a follower of Pascal might reply that the act of genuine striving already displays a pureness of heart that God would fully reward; or even that genuine striving in this case is itself a form of believing.
Pascal’s Wager vies with Anselm’s Ontological Argument for being the most famous argument in the philosophy of religion. As we have seen, it is also a great deal more besides.
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Copyright © 1998, 2001
Alan Hájek
ahajek@hss.caltech.edu
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
See also, Stephen R. Welch’s page on Pascal’s Wager
old
The Cult Of Relics Denise Levertov
March 3, 2009
My father’s serviette ring,
silver incised with a design
of Scotch thistles, the central medallion
uninitialed, a blank oval.
The two massive
German kitchen knives, pre-1914, not-stainless steel,
which my mother carefully scoured with Vim
after each use.
My daily use
of these and other such things
links me to hands long gone.
Medieval con-men disgust and amuse us;
we think we’d never have fallen
for such crude deceptions-unholy
animal bones, nails from any old barn,
splinters enough from the Cross to fill
a whole lumber-yard.
But can we
with decency mock the gullible
for desiring these things?
Who doesn’t want
to hold what hands belov’d or venerated
were accustomed to hold?-You? I?
Who wouldn’t want
to put their lips to the true chalice?
