Arguably it is shameful to give over what are likely the finest minds to have evolved in billions of years of life on Earth to such malarkey. As such, it frequently involves the acceptance of taboos and fears that have nothing to do with the rational or the physical world, and that are liable to crush any hope that many people may have for happiness it what may well be the only life they will ever know. Belief in God seldom comes on its own, but as part of the package offered by a formal religion. what do you have to lose? Leaving aside the pettiness the argument ascribes to a supposedly all-loving and all-powerful God who has supposedly gifted us with some of the finest intellects on the planet, the problem with the argument is that it ignores the fact that a life lived in the firm belief in a supernatural entity is likely to be different from one lived in the acceptance that there is no such being. Therefore you might as well believe in him. If you don't believe in him, then if you are right it is irrelevant to your metaphysical fate and if you are wrong you will go to Hell. If you believe in him, it is irrelevant if he doesn't exist (and by extension there is no afterlife), while if he does you are offered a place in the light eternal. The argument goes as follows: you may either believe in God or not, and he may or may not actually exist. Regardless of what assumptions you use, Pascal's Wager and the counterarguments against it are a wonderful example of using mathematical thinking - considering probabilities and outcomes - to wrestle with deep philosophical questions.Fallacious argument trotted out by religious believers, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in favour of belief in divinity. Instead, we just have to consider the possibility that God does not exist, in which case the benefits of atheism may well make it worthwhile to disbelieve. This means that the case in which God exists can't affect our calculations. If God exists, we cannot have any idea of what His criteria are for going to heaven. This line of thought has lead some thinkers to construct an atheist version of the wager. Or perhaps a religion different from your own is right, and by believing in the wrong God, you are still in a lot of trouble. It's entirely conceivable that there could be a God who doesn't care about personal belief, and instead decides on who gets to go to heaven based on people's actions in life. One of the biggest issues is that Pascal starts out with the enormous assumption that, if God exists, His system for deciding on who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is based entirely on personal belief. This is, naturally, a very controversial argument. Pascal states that, as to the question of the existence or non-existence of God, "Reason can decide nothing here." Instead, it's an argument for why, regardless of existence, one should believe in God.Īs University of Wisconsin mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg describes it in his new book " How Not To Be Wrong", "Pascal is not trying to convince you God exists he is trying to convince you that it would be to your benefit to believe so." This is not an argument for the actual existence of God. This Is Not About Proving God's Existence Even if there's only a one in a trillion chance for the existence of God, one in a trillion times infinity is still infinity. Similarly, however large the benefits of atheism are, if God does exist, those benefits are massively countered by the infinite cost of going to hell.įurther, since the benefits of belief and the costs of disbelief are infinite in the case God exists, we don't need any actual estimate for the probability that God exists, so long as that probability is not zero. No matter what the costs in this life are of believing in God, they are always outweighed by the benefits, if God exists. The argument is based on the infinite nature of the afterlife.
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