Someone who offers Pascal's Wager is arguing that to believe in God is a better bet than not believing in God. If you believe and God exists, you'll go to heaven and avoid hell; if you believe and are wrong, you lose nothing. If you don't believe in God and God does exist, you'll lose heaven and go to hell; if you're right, then you gain nothing. There are a lot of problems with this argument.
Read Article: Pascal's Wager
Pascal’s Wager is a terrible reason to believe in God, but an excellent reason to reject atheism. As pointed out in the ethics article, we need be ethical not just because the rules say so, but because we actually want to be good. So, Pascal’s Wager is a weak argument for believing in God and doing good. Failing to acknowledge God could result in a terrible end, while believing in a nonexistent God produces the same result as atheism. Thus the wager is the perfect place from which to begin (not end) one’s exploration of the truth about theism.
Pascal’s Wager is a terrible reason to believe in God, but an excellent reason to reject atheism.
So, Pascal’s Wager is a bad reason to be a theist, but it’s a good reason to not be an atheist. Of course, if you are not an atheist you are a theist – so you just contradict yourself.
Pascal’s wager is a CliffsNotes version of the bible. Believe and obey and God will reward you, don’t and God will smite you, blah blah blah.
I’ve never met a person who used Pascal’s Wager to decide on a belief which they didn’t already hold.
Thus, Pascal’s Wager is more akin to a Buyer’s Reassurance program to soothe buyer’s remorse.
Isnt this true God(tm) smart enough to see through someones cheap mummery?
It also appears that theists thinks one can just choose to all of a sudden believe. I can no more choose to believe in god than I can choose to believe in fairies, gnomes, lime green skies or pink elephants.
And if I decide to hedge my bets by pretending to believe on the off-chance that god actually exists, I would certainly hope he’s bright enough to see through me.
stevedoetsch,
I explored the truth of theism. I found there wasn’t any.
Tommy Holland:
Excellent point. In my experience this applies to the vast majority of arguments put forward by theists in support of their respective faiths.
Apologetics exists to make people who already believe feel better about their beliefs, not to convince anyone who doesn’t already believe.
in addition to all the logical arguments in this article about Pascal’s wager:
if you choose belief in god (and there turns out to be no god), you can say you’ve “wasted” all that time you had on Earth. you prayed to no one, learned all these untrue doctrines and gained very little comparatively.
perhaps you shut certain people out, because they were not proper association. perhaps you denied ideas because they did not follow what your extremely aged book said. probably you denied yourself of your own interests because you didn’t have time for them or they didn’t fit with the teachings of an ancient civilization.
@Tamar. if you choose belief in god (and there turns out to be no god), you can say you’ve “wasted” all that time you had on Earth……….You can’t say that, because you have ceased to exist. Bottom line
Some historical notes are relevant here. Pascal did not invent his wager. It quites possibly pre-dates Christianity. This was something he had in his notes, which were posthumously edited and published as “Thoughts,” so I am not accusing him of plagiarism.
I’m too lazy to type in all the relevant quotes, but basically, Thomas More made the same argument in his “The Answer to a Poisoned Book” (1533) book 4.12.
Arnobius of Sicca (3rd century) argues at one point in “The Case Against the Pagans” that as we cannot fortell the future, it’s better to “believe the {alternative} which affords some hopes rather than the one which offers none at all?” The former option offers no danger if wrong, the latter can cost you your salvation, if salvation is real. (book 2.4)
The pagan essay “On Superstition,” attributed to Plutarch, criticizes the “superstitious man” as “afraid not to believe,” vs. the atheist, who was too skeptical of superstition. (Educated Greeks and Romans of that era tended to see true religion as a moderate intermediary between superstition and atheism.) The idea of being afraid not to believe is at the heart of “Pascal’s Wager,” so I think some form of the wager existed at least as early as the 1st century.
What if you believed in the wrong god?