RE: Pascal's Wager Revisited
April 10, 2015 at 3:20 pm
(This post was last modified: April 10, 2015 at 3:21 pm by Simon Moon.)
(April 10, 2015 at 3:09 pm)datc Wrote: You don't pretend to believe; you already actually believe or disbelief in the very process of living one way or another; your actions on Pascal's wager speak louder than words.
If you aim your actions on attaining eternal life, even if you are not sure there is one, then you end up becoming fit for it and are in the end pleasantly surprised that what you were doing turned out to have been useful.
If you concern yourself with temporal life only, and there is eternal life, then your failure to prepare yourself for it will result in disappointment.
It's up to you personally, of course, to evaluate the costs and benefits; I only point out that there are costs and benefits, and the evaluation (by the agnostic) must be attempted in practice if not speculatively, again within the assumptions of the argument.
Belief is the psychological state of being convinced that a proposition or premise is true.
How can we believe that your afterlife premise is true if we are not convinced? Why would a god, that seems to want people to join him in this afterlife, create some of us that are not convinced of its existence? Why does he fail to provide what is needed to convince us?
But I am still a bit unclear.
If there are 2 people, both lead equally moral lives, yet one believes in an afterlife, and the other does not. Does the moral person that does not believe in an afterlife have a chance of getting there?
Does an immoral person that believes in an afterlife, get one?
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
