Well, when you put it like that… yes, I guess it would be for the greater good. But I’m patient and can only hope to see in my lifetime religion eased offstage as phrenology and alchemy and four-humour-theory have been. To be accurate, though, I don’t want to silence anyone - I’d rather they just realize they’ve been wasting their time.
Because religion is destructive, baseless, illogical and by all evidence factually wrong, and in this case caused men of great intellect to waste huge amounts of effort on garbage. It’s no more wrong to wish for religion to be eliminated than it is to wish for racism or sexism to be eliminated. All three are destructive belief systems based on lies.
And yet, Marley, I should point out that a good number do not place a greater emphasis. Most of the polytheistic ones, for example, the Olympian pantheon, merely require they be propriated. Pay off Poseidon before your sea travel, and so on. Of course, some gods get jealous of that behavior. Can’t win for losing.
Since there is a strong personal element to the OP’s post, I don’t think I’m out of line to respond with my personal experience.
The quoted argument was the one that I could never get around when I was trying to convince myself of the existence of a Judeo-Christian god. Once you recognize that faith is it’s own justification - something which even very religious people will seldom disagree with - then the issue becomes deciding which faith to have faith in. You can’t even have a circular argument at this point since that would require at least 2 steps and all you get is one. I wonder if we could call this a pointilistic argument. Hmmmm.
I think the reason that this approach doesn’t cause anywhere near the frustration and despair that it should is that people who have any predisposition to religious believe have almost always acquired a bias towards a particular faith as part of their upbringing. It’s only if you step back from that and try to approach the issue of faith in something resembling an objective fashion that you see how truly unsatisfying and useless it is.
However I think there is one exception and that applies to people who believe that they have had a bona fide religious experience as a result of which they acquired their faith. First hand experience requires no justification. You can argue it is delusion or other mental illness, the result of some toxin or poison, etc., but the fact of the matter is, that for the people who have such experiences, it is no less real.
As I said before, I simply don’t know whether to accept the validity of Pascal’s Wager. Still, the “flaws” presented thusfar are not convincing at all.
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The “many-religions” flaw. This claims that since there are so many religions, even if there is a god, we will probably choose the wrong religion anyway, so it’s not worth taking a guess. I can’t understand how this undermines Pascal’s Wager. He is arguing that we should choose either the religion that has the most proof, and if they are all equal in our eyes, then we should at least flip a coin on the matter.
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The fact that God will punish us for choosing the wrong god. Again, I can’t understand this “flaw.” Why do you assume, based on no proof whatsoever, that God would rather you be an atheist (or secular) rather than an admirer of another god. As far as I know (and I am only knowledgeable about Judaism), the Old Testament’s God is the only god that is vengeful about worshiping other gods. Still, Mamionides rules that as bad as it is to worship false gods, God would rather you worship them than to be an atheist. So, in short, why do you assume god would care if you worship the wrong god. What evidence do you have for that proposition?
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That fact that God does not want fake “believers.” How do you know that God does not want fake believers. What evidence do you have for that proposition?
it’s very simple to find fault in pascal’s wager. you simply deny one of the premises.
in order for us to accept the wager, and to conclude that belief in god is rational, we must accept the following (essentially–i don’t claim that this is the only way it can be stated):
a. if (there is a god) and (i believe in him) (i will receive infinite reward).
b. if (there is no god) and (i don’t believe in him) (i will receive finite reward).
c. if (there is a god) and (i don’t believe in him) (i will receive no reward).
d. if (there is no god) and (i believe in him) (i will receive no reward).
for an atheist, for example, premise (a) is simply not at all compelling. if i don’t believe in god, i have no reason to believe i will receive any reward, let alone an infinite one. the problem with this premise can be seen as well using the “many-religions” flaw, as you called it, or the evil god argument, where we present the premise:
a’. if (there is an evil god) and (i kill as many people as possible) (i will receive an infinite reward).
we have just as much reason to believe (a’) as we do (a), so what makes (a) a compelling premise? if we don’t accept (a) as compelling, the whole argument fails to persuade.
Maybe we have different ideas of what religion is supposed to be, but I can say categorically that flipping a coin would never do it for me. You would quite literally have to pay me in some way and even then I would have to be pretty damned desperate.
The Old Testament God equates believing in other gods to murder, theft, or adultery. The New Testament God (according to some) doesn’t much care what you do as long as you accept Him/His Son as your savior. The Muslim God (according to some) believes that you should be killed if you once believed in him and now don’t.
This isn’t scientific evidence, of course, but within the terms of the religions in question, is plenty of evidence that God cares if you worship other gods. In other words, millions of people believe that to be evidence and part of their shared national history (or whatever it was that you consider evidence).
Another refutation of Pascal’s wager (similar to Homer Simpson’s):
God’s rules may work like this:
- Believe in the right god, substantial reward (may be infinite, but call it +x).
- Believe in no god, no reward/no punishment, oblivion, indifference from god (call it zero)
- Believe in the wrong god, follow the wrong rules, whatever, infinite punishment (may be infinite, but call it -x).
Given hundreds or thousands of available gods (n gods) to believe in, assuming there is one correct, wager-winning god, the weighted average belief return is:
-x*(n-1) + 00 + 1x
That weighted average will be negative as long as there are more than two flavors of god to believe in.
Irrelevant. It’s named Pascal’s Wager but is never used as an appeal to authority. Who cares what he really intended?
I’m not at all sure about that. What are Maimonides’s grounds for saying so?
The Bible is very clear about not having “other gods before me” and about not worshipping idols. It doesn’t say much at all about atheism. Granted, this may be because few people in Biblical times considered it an option. But to me it is far from obvious, on Biblical or practical grounds, that “God would rather you worship false gods than be an atheist.”
Though I am a Christian myself, I am convinced that some atheists are nearer the truth, and more pleasing to God, than are some religious people, and that turning away from one’s religion can be a step in the right direction. Believing in/worshipping/serving false gods isn’t just better than nothing; it can be much worse (whether those gods are called God, as in the case of Fred Phelps’s “God” or the “Allah” who inspired the 9/11 terrorists, or not, as in the case of those who serve an oppressive Communist regime, or Mammon.)
Well, it’s relevant if you want to cast aspersions on Pascal himself for advancing it, as in Post #11.
Believing in one of an infinite number of supreme beings is statistically no different than believing in none of an infinite number of them.
Pascal wrote at a time when there was really only one god to choose from. The number of adherents to non-Abrahamic religions in Europe was probably in the dozens, and even those people would largely have been of the sort brought back from the Americas, Africa, or India by force.
Again, I don’t think Pascal made this argument. My familiarity with the wager is only from online discussions like this one, but I am pretty sure was not talking about comparing the “evidence” for one religion or another. He was talking about only the existence or nonexistence of gods, and what one should do if you couldn’t come to a decision about whether or not a god exists. I think you want him to have made this argument.
I think the flaw with Pascal’s Wager is simple. Any entity that has the power to create everything and to send us to hell or heaven based on what we did it gonna notice we are faking.
I would rather be honest and me.
Pascal’s Wager contains multiple fallacies. It’s actually a great example for teaching others how to spot fallacies. Pretty much all of its premises are bogus. Aside from the fact that it thinks belief can be chosen, it also presumes that the only two choices are to believe in one God or not believe in any gods, when there are an infinite number of other posibilities (an infinite number of possible other gods, multiple gods, precise combinations of gods, animism, ancestor worship, tree worship – the list goes on literally forever – all with the exact same evidence as Bible God).
It also presumes that this one God cares if you believe in it and will punish you if you don’t. It could very well be the opposite. God might want you to be an atheist, or even a polytheist. There is an equal amount of evidence for every possibility. The bottom line is that there is no safe choice and the Wager should not be convinving to anyone who even gives it 30 seconds worth of actual thought.
It’s not as bad as Lewis’ Trilemma, though, which I think is the worst popular apologia ever devised.
Are you seriously asking this? What evidence do we have? Oh, the irony.
Just for the record, the Bible is irrelevant to the conversation since it contains no evidentiary value or information about gods. The appeal to Mamionides is, likewise, of no value at all since Mamionides didn’t know any more than anyone else and was only expressing personal beliefs.
I took the assumption that Pascal advanced it at face value.
JJ’s wager: “In case Pascal is reading this from his mansion/shack/condo in heaven/hell/purgatory, I apologize to him in advance, to protect myself from the extremely improbable scenario in which I bump into him.”
Really? Why? Other than a few outcomes not mentioned by Lewis (biblical mistranslation, whole fabricated myth, misinterpretation of teachings) why is it logically worse than Pascal’s Wager?