I’m not dissing you, but why are deists monotheistic? Due to this, I see your post as agnostic and not deist.
I think the premise is false. You’re not being asked to wager nothing - you’re being asked to wager your life. Or at least you’re being asked to change your behavior in this life in a manner you wouldn’t do otherwise.
The wager is based on the argument that the afterlife might exist and might be infinite. And the infinite size of the afterlife makes it worth more than any possible benefit you could derive in a finite lifetime.
But this life, unlike the afterlife, indisputably exists. So you’re being asked to wager a small amount of something against what may turn out to be an infinite amount of nothing.
There is a common contemporary equivalent to Pascal’s Wager - the lottery. Slogans like “you gotta be in it to win it” are based on the same logic as Pascal’s Wager. The idea is that you might as well play, however bad the odds are, because you’ll have no chance of ever having a hundred million dollars if you don’t play. But like Pascal’s Wager, the cost of playing is ignored - you still need the dollar.
The only way Pascal’s Wager would be logically sound is if it included the equivalent of free lottery tickets - the possibility of playing and having a chance at the reward at no cost. Pascal’s Wager would make sense if you could practice a religious belief that in no way interfered with the way you lived your life - a religion that allowed you to do whatever you wanted just the same as if you didn’t have the faith.
Deists are theists. Therefore all their claims are false by definition.
So a religion in which God is a hippy?
“I’d like you guys to believe in me, but if you don’t, that’s cool too! I’ll leave the gate open, so if you change your mind after you die, just let yourself in - no hard feelings, okay?”
There are elements of this in Christianity and Islam. Belief in God is held up as the primary act of faith which outranks all others. But these religions have secondary requirements as well.
But it shows it would be possible to have a religion in which the only article of faith is faith itself - the only action required by God is to believe in him. No commandments on issues like who you can have sex with or what you can eat or drink or when you can kill somebody - these are all secular issues to be decided by mankind. All God is concerned about is that people believe in him (with no rules on how they express that belief). If you do that one thing, you get to enter paradise when you die.
That’s a pretty low-maintenance religion that most people could follow.
I’m not averse to the concept of multiple Gods. I mean, why build a terrarium if you can’t show it off to someone? Perhaps this terrarium universe was built as a sort of 4-H club project as a team effort. Maybe we’re up for a ribbon at a supernatural county fair or something.
I’m just saying as a Deist, I think there’s something larger than us out there. Maybe whoever started all this is dead by now. Who knows?
My personal problem with the wager, aside from the logical issues that have been discussed at length in this thread, is that it’s annoyingly similar to the “No atheists in foxholes” trope. That is to say, whenever people throw Pascal’s wager at me, I get the sense that what they’re really saying is, “We all know that deep down you really do believe in God. It’s impossible not to, because I can’t conceive of anyone not believing in God. So stop your silly shenanigans and take this one simple step to save your soul.”
I know this isn’t the fault of the wager itself, but I find its delivery is almost always condescending. I wouldn’t even know where to begin “believing” again. It’s not like I could just flip a switch. It’s just not a part of me anymore.
But it is. That’s the whole point: both say that if you raise the stakes high enough, an atheist will/should fold like a house of cards and believe whatever nonsensical claptrap you can come up with.
Which definition are you using and which dictionary did you get it from?
Even I think that’s extreme. If we shoot them as soon as we identify them, looting their bank accounts becomes that much harder.
Are you aware of occam’s razor?
I think it’s more like the religion of sleeping in on Sunday and then maybe watching some football. If there’s a belief system that preaches that I will be rewarded for the actions I already am taking, hey, sign me up. I really am wagering nothing in that case. I haven’t changed my life an iota.
What? Not simple enough for you?