A quick summary of how Pascal’s Wager fails
This isn’t necessarily original — there are other people and places that do it better — but I’ve long been annoyed by “Pascal’s Wager” as a philosophical approach to religion. If you don’t know it, PW is simply:
Pascal’s Wager (or Pascal’s Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose. (Wikipedia)
The wager fails for several reasons, as detailed in the Wikipedia article and elsewhere. Here are the four that make the most sense to me:
- Assumes a false dichotomy — that the choice is God (Christian, Catholic God, presumably) and “no God.” Instead, the choice would be between no Gods, God, Allah, Yahweh, Odin, Zeus, etc etc etc.
- Assumes no harm — the decision is predicated on the huge risk if there is a God (terrible torment in Hell) versus no loss if there is not. But it doesn’t take into account the energy, resources, and other intangibles used up in worship.
- Assumes a gullible God — It assumes a God who would be happy with belief out of self interest rather than true devotion.
- Assumes one can control belief — I’m of the opinion that we can’t choose what we believe. We can strive to learn more, and we can become convinced in ways that change what we believe, but at the core I don’t think we can choose to believe something.
This is not to say that any of this addresses the central question of faith, but it does bring into question the idea of believing for expediency’s sake.















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