Pascal's Wager and the Selfishness of a "Good God"

[darkment0r]

This is a variation on Pascal's Wager.

Blaise Pascal was himself not a Christian and believed that the benefits of believing in god far outweighed the benefits of not believing in god. Pascal was an agnostic and thought god's existence was unprovable. His argument in a word, was that someone should choose to believe in god because it significantly enriches one's life despite the fact that it cannot be "known" only "believed".

Christian version (the "what if you're wrong" argument) states if you believe in god, they always mean their god, and you are wrong then you have wasted nothing and gained the comfort and structure of living a religious life. On the other hand, if you don't believe in god and you are wrong you end up going to hell and missing out on the "wonders" of Christianity.

There are two big problems with this argument:

1) Try to force yourself to believe something that you simply know is untrue for the sole purpose of comforting yourself. I would love to believe in Santa but it's simply not a logical belief. Same with god.

2) Christians always assume that their religion is the only and obvious choice. What if you are wrong about Zeus, Odin, Ahura Mazda, Allah, Kali, etc... By believing one religion you necessarily have the potential to be wrong about every other religion and end up in one of their hells. Plus believing just to cover one's own ass is horrifically disingenuine and certainly an all-knowing god would know whether you were believing just to stay out of hell.

I never knew that Pascal was an agnostic. I always just assumed that he was a Christian who was hailed for this argument. Thanks for sharing that.

When it comes to being an agnostic, I never really was one. The whole, "You can't disprove god" argument works on some. But not me. In my eyes, we have either disproved the existence of gods and broken them down to nothing more than explanations for how things work. They provided comfort for the uneducated in prehistoric times and do now as well. In an age where information is readily available to us on these matters and many, many, many more, I cannot believe in a god.

It goes without saying though, that I do still respect religions and agnostics. Just as long as everyone accepts each other's beliefs. When someone butts into my life and tries to change me, that's when things go wrong.