Pascal's wager?

Question

What are Pascal's wager's strengths and weaknesses?

Answer 1

Strengths: if you play the 'come' line, you're safe either way. the best bet is to believe, if there is a god, heaven and afterlife....you're safe. And if there is no god and afterlife, then no harm, no foul.

Weakness: the big guy can see through your scam and no ticket in the pearly gates.

My option, live life and be good for 'goods' sake.

Answer 2

Can't speak to its strengths, but it has at least one weakness - it is not possible to do what it proposes. You can't arbitrate or mandate a belief in something just be cause you decide it would be prudent to do so. You either do or do not believe a thing to be true, based on your examination of all the evidence you can find. If you believe, you believe. If you don't then you don't. You can't will that to change. So Pascal's Wager is a non-starter. It can't happen.

Answer 3

The exact nature of the wager is a little uncertain since Pascal died before his book (really just rough notes) was published.

There are two major criticisms of the wager as pronounced by atheists.
1) Which god do you bet on? Lots of possible gods.
2) Can one, and should one, really believe in God on the basis of hedging ones bets?

Incidentally, both of these objections are voiced in the Answer directly below me.

The answer to the two criticisms are:
1) We needn't decide on the specific name of God at first. Just call Him Your Creator, the One who knows you and can hear your prayers to Him. It makes sense that a good God will forgive honest mistakes so I think He will forgive us if we don't use His correct name.

2) While the wager may not justify a blind belief, it does justify our search for our Creator. The wager says that God is important enough that we ought to seek Him. I think that's reasonable.

Answer 4

This wager holds that it is safer to "believe" in god than not to "believe"(aka it's safer to slap a label on yourself than not to). Because Christian god might exist, and if he does, then he will save the "believers" (ones with proper label) and send the non-believers (wrongly labeled ones) to hell after death.

This is an appeal to pure cowardice. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for truth. Instead, it's an appeal to abandon honesty and intellectual integrity, and to pretend that LIP SERVICE, mere lip service, is the same thing as actual BELIEF.

And who's to say a god would care whether someone believed in him? Why is that criteria for admission to Heaven? I don't care if anyone believes in me. Go ahead and don't believe in me, all that matters is that I know I exist. Should be the same for a god.

Answer 5

Epistemologically, that it's completely irrelevent to the truth of the proposition that there's a god.

Practically, that I can't believe someone I find absurd. I don't believe. So how am I expected to change that? Pretend to believe? That can't be right.

Also, I could make the same case for the universe having been created by the giant purple unicorn, who will also punish all believers.

The GPU and God have jealousy in common: you can't believe in both, or you'll burn.

So you have to simultaneously believe in God AND the GPU, but you can't believe in both, or you'll burn.

Impossible.

Answer 6

it doesn't tell you what god it is talking about to believe in. People assume he's talking about the christian god, but he's not. At the time he wrote the wager, he didn't wager in all the different god's we would create later on down the road.

Answer 7

i love jay and silent bob strike back!