Pascal's Wager Pt.4
355 views · Published 24 September 2007 · 3:12 · Indexed 28 October 2026
Channel: Jackies1979 · 2007 · People & Blogs
There is news: jonthebaptist666 significantly shortened the argument: by adding the premise that there is an infinite number of possible Gods, my EV calculations become inadequate: then you have (see comments) an EV of 1 life both for believing and for disbelieving, and since the cost for the latter is much lower you should disbelief, that makes it really short... BUT: my criticism still stands: I mean: the many religions objection as not valid, of course many does not exclude infinitely many, but many as such does not suffice: there is a valid objection to the Pascal wager (again without possibility of hell), but this is not the *many*-religions objection but the *infinitely many*-religions objection!! You are all wrong.... Here I refute the validity of the argument that, because believing in god promises good payoffs, you should (at least: pretend to) believe in God, and I show that the popular counterarguments against Pascal's Wager (as the argument is called) are flawed... There are four parts... ok, I should make my reservations as for the regular counterarguments a bit clearer as I fear they are rather obscurely formulated orally in the vid...: doxastic voluntarism/only an argument for pretending to believe: what if that suffices and God is keen on having hypocritical followers -- this is after all a logical possibility supported also by how god is presented in the Abrahamic religions as cruel, jealous etc... religious hucksterism: again, if god likes that, what would you like to do given you cannot change that? many religions/why not believe instead in Zeus or...: the argument still runs through: for "if God exists" simply put "if *your* god exists (as the only true, rewarding God he's supposed to be in your religion)", then if all alleged Gods are also alleged to reward you with an eternal afterlife, then the argument is still standing in the way it would if there were only one religion apart from disbelief!!! Grant (as you should even as an atheist) that any God's existence has a probability of non-zero and grant ex hypothesi that any God will, if he exists, reward you with an infinite afterlife, then pretending to believe in any God will -- given his cruelty, jealousy, wickedness etc... -- promise a better payoff than not (at least pretend to) believe.
