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

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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.

To be very specific Pascal said that one cannot know whether god exists or doesnt exist and therefore belief in god requires a conscious leap of faith, in other words a choice to believe or not to believe.

Christians have hijacked Pascals argument for so long that it has become practically ubiquitous in their argumentation. The concept of hell lends itself very easily to Pascals Wager and imbues it with much more fearful options than Pascals version. Pascals says you are missing out by not believing but Christians state that you will suffer eternal torment for not believing and that is their way of forcing the issue.

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That's was one of the things that made me realize there was something wrong with Christianty as my parents took me to church as a child. It just didn't make since that this enlightened deity would be stuck on something so trivial.

Also the demand that we worship him and keep no gods before him and follow every last nonsensical rule and most importantly believe in him above all. Sounds like an insecure imperfect petulant child.