Prisoner's Dilemma/Prescriptive Analysis and God

Following is the famous prisoner's dilemma as applied to existence of god and whether you believe in God's existence or not. I made some assumptions and here they are.

Since God dominates over a universe which is billions of light years across and contains a quadrillion stars and at least a quintillion of planets and other bodies, and perhaps several billions life forms with billions of each kind, s/he is perhaps to busy to worry about you. S/he will not take time out of her/his busy schedule to look into your sorry life and see how it can be improved.
  1. In general s/he (assuming s/he is compassionate, kind, omniscient, omnipotent etc and all that our religious texts would like us to believe) has nice designs and schemes for the universe. These schemes and designs are generally made keeping everyone in mind and with the intention of benefiting everyone, with usual given adjustments for balancing bad/evil etc stuff.
  2. When you believe in her/his existence, there is a certain input cost that you incur. The cost of ceremonies, rituals, donations, customs, celebrations, etc. This is not restricted to just monetary, but there are emotional and physical inputs (fast, self service etc) that are required as well.
  3. In case you get good returns, without any input that will be a better off position than the condition in which .a) You have some input and get good returns .b) No input and get no returns.
  4. Worst condition would be the case in which there is a significant amount of input costs incurred and there is no return.
Now I can fully justify why the table is constructed in this manner. The best condition is when you do not believe in God, and yet benefit as a free rider from her/his grand schemes/designs for the universe. The worst condition is when there is no God (no return therefore) and you still continue to invest your precious and hard earned resources (physical, emotional, monetary) into her/him.

So as you can very well see from the table the best option is to be an atheist. While being a thiest or a fundamentalist (over investment of emotional, physical, mental and monetary resources) is perhaps worst.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts