Pascal's Wager

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Pascal's wager isn't an argument for the existence of God. It is an argument that is simply in your best interest to do so. Failure to adhere to this tenet could potentially doom you! But we must all consider the ultimate question that besets us all: life comes with no instruction Manuel. It is like playing Half-Life. Purely continuous. No overt story line.

How do we live our lives anyway? Is there a proper way?

Pascal’s Wager only makes sense if there is only one alleged deity that demands faith in order to access the afterlife and only one acceptable version of faith. It also only makes sense if an infinite afterlife is plausible. Both of those assumptions are extremely shaky.

Let’s say there are two religions. In religion A, all followers of A get access to an infinite afterlife. In religion B, everyone gets access to an infinite afterlife except followers of religion A. Which religion should you believe?

In reality things are even worse than that. There are hundreds of religions and sects with their own criteria for accessing the afterlife. It is extremely unlikely that any of them are correct, so it makes most sense to ignore them all and just try to make the most of our lives.

For me, Pascal's Wager has some relevance on moral level but not on the level of religion.
But I found out, when assuming God may not exist, my moral drive feels stronger - if I harm someone, no God would even it out after me.
Anyway, both Christian and Atheist viewpoints lead me to the same general conclusion: do your best to be good and accept you'll never be perfect.

I am an atheist and I don't find Pascal's Wager compelling at all because it presumes monotheism.

Pascal's wager also assumes that an omniscient and omnipotent creator actually cares if people believe in it or not.

A God that doesn’t care doesn’t affect the wager. The wager says that given the possibility that believing in God could have infinite benefit, rationally you should believe in God if you assign it any probability of existence other than 0. It’s entirely possible there is no God, or there is a God but not afterlife, or there is an afterlife but everyone experiences it, but as these possibilities are not affected by your belief in them, they don’t affect the logic of the wager.

The logic of the wager is only affected:

1) when someone assigns zero probability to the idea of an afterlife guarded by faith, or
2) when we consider the possibility that faith may interact with existent infinite reward or existent infinite punishment in ways other than “believe in Christianity to get into Heaven, everyone else goes to Hell”. For example, does cynical faith automatically disqualify you? Or is it belief in Odin that is necessary for salvation?

It’s worse than assuming monotheism. It assumes a very particular Christian theology. It can of course be reworked to assume other particular theologies - for example, perhaps all roads lead up the same mountain - but then you’re assuming that all the “narrow path” theologies are wrong.

The part of Pascal Wager I did was: Assume there's God. What then? Now, assume there's no God. What then?
Obviously, the former depends heavily on assumed properties of the said God.
I can't wrap myself around believing in a narcissistic God who would demand to be praised with lies. If that case happened to be true, we'd be doomed anyway.

What do you mean by demand to be praised with lies?

The simplest example: reciting "I believe in God" and all the following (Credo) when it's not really true.

Pascal's Wager is based on the God of the Christian faith. So it seems non sequitur to bring other gods and other concepts of God into it. And what's really required is believing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that he took all your sins upon himself, so that when you die and stand before God you will have a clean slate, which is the only way you can enter into heaven. But it has to be true belief and true faith in Christ as your only hope of salvation. As I understand how it's supposed to go.

I'll have to look into Pascal's theological views, but as he was a Christian theologian I don't get how he would think an "meh okay I'll believe in God just to be on the safe side" attitude would work, if that's what he was proposing.

Last edited by Tempus Fugit on 16 Dec 2020, 11:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

There's a new version of this that's been spreading around the internet, ie. Roko's Basilisk, which is a God that has yet to be created who will - in the future - resurrect those who did and didn't help it be created and offer eternal reward or eternal torture accordingly, which should then - in theory - scare people into creating just such a super-AI.

Our knowledge about the universe, let alone all of reality, is limited at best. At this point - garbage in, garbage out, Pascal's Wager probably even more so than Roko's Basilisk because at least Roko's is a case where we assure the existence of something whereas with Pascal's wager it's a wager on a specific deity which we're then assuming two things 1) that it's real and 2) that if it's real it's a universal rather than regional deity, we have little evidence of 1) and even less of 2).

Whatever Pascal had in his mind, we're adressing the reasoning he presented, not his beliefs.
The reasoning is full of hidden assumptions that some posters are exposing - and that have been spotted quite long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27 ... #Criticism

Thought expetiments like Roko's Basilisk are the biggest reason that I don't find Pascal's Wager compelling. You can make up anything with the power to infinitely punish, including entities that are mutually exclusive (like the Christian and Muslim versions of God). Even on the assumption that that belief is a choice and that God wouldn't mind if people believed to avoid punishment, you would already have to be leaning towards theism for it to be rational.

I glanced at that before making my last post, and what caught my eye was "Pascal's wager was based on the idea of the Christian God". So it seemed to me anything else wouldn't follow. But I'll go though the whole article later.

Yes, Pascal had Christian-based idea of God in his mind.
He contemplated just two options: some version of Christianity or Libertinism.
Others saw many other possible options.