Pascal’s wager: While discussing the efficacy of intercessory pryer in a previous post, one of my good friends said, “If you are right David....I have lost nothing......but if you are wrong...” I assume this was referring to the existence of god, not the question of prayer. This is by far probably one of the mostly widely used arguments that I hear when debating with Christians. Any of you familiar with the classical arguments for the existence of god have no doubt recognized this as a watered-down form of Pascal’s Wager. The wager made famous by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Blaise Pascal, is as follows: “If you erroneously believe in God, you lose nothing (assuming that death is the absolute end), whereas if you correctly believe in God, you gain everything (eternal bliss). But if you correctly disbelieve in God, you gain nothing (death ends all), whereas if you erroneously disbelieve in God, you lose everything (eternal damnation).” This is a simplified version, but for the purpose of this post it will do. I’d like to address what I see as 3 fatal flaws in the wager. 1. The wager seems to pre-suppose that people can will themselves into belief. I cannot do this and have never met someone that can. A person can easily fain belief, but presumably the god in question would know the difference. I, for example, cannot simply choose to believe in god any more than a believer can simply choose not to. Belief is based on accepting claims as true. And at least for me, that involves evidence. 2. The wager claims that there is no cost associated with belief in god. In practice, this is not the case. From time associated with worship, to monetary support, to denial of desires based on dogma – the cost is very real. 3. The wager makes the assumption that there is only one god to believe in. When in fact, there are essentially a never-ending number of deities on offer. The odds of choosing the correct one are minuscule. And while not believing in a god may bring on his wrath (although I can’t imagine why) believing in the wrong one seems much more dangerous to one prospects for a happy after-life. In the end I think that these objections are insurmountable. They are also well known. And yet, Pascal’s Wager is still the most commonly used argument that I run into.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 22:22:15 +0000
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